The Center For Countering Digital Hate
The assembling of a compelling and fair response to an infectious viral outbreak is an immense challenge. Ideally, unbiased experts without conflicts of interest develop a survey of potentially effective remedies. The team includes seasoned pathologists, broad-thinking social psychologists, experienced epidemiologists, holistic dieticians, and veteran practitioners of complementary and indigenous medicine.
Imagine a broadly trusted, well-meaning group gathering knowledge, and through consensus, generating recommendations and medical guidelines designed to have the greatest impact towards minimizing suffering. In making the best efforts to evaluate solutions and means of relief, they never lose sight of weighing risks versus benefits.
This did not happen. During the recent pandemic, all of those who considered or attempted to approach the crisis without the blessings of authorities were summarily belittled, repressed, and disgraced.
Many voices of reason were confounded by the enigmatic organization, the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Their duplicitous activities were neither creative nor supportive, and simply aimed at destroying those who refused to agree with dogmatic mandates and protocols generated by the pharmaceutical industry.
At the peak of CCDH’s influence, they released a malicious piece of propaganda, called The Disinformation Dozen. The document was a frontal, full-scale attack on those who questioned the viability and motives of the mainstream response to the pandemic. This manifesto was conceived as a distractive and deceptive instrument — disseminated among the willing world press corps. Not only was the news media compromised by their funders, but they were also hungry for a scapegoat and eager to enthusiastically repeat easily drawn, though suspect conclusions.
The CCDH’s overt purpose was to stop any alternative thinking about how to respond to a viral outbreak. Their offense against those who failed to accept vaccines as a panacea presents a telling window into the boldness of authoritarian bullying over the last three years.
The Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleges that the White House pressured social media to close accounts of pandemic policy dissenters. During discovery, Eric Waldo, the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General admitted CCDH briefed their office before they pressured Facebook for more censorship.
Most recently CCDH has come under increased scrutiny with a lawsuit by Twitter claiming they are masquerading as a legitimate research firm and that they illegally obtained data to use it in a scare campaign to deter advertisers from the platform.
Concurrently, the publications and damage done by Imran Ahmed, the chief executive officer of CCDH, and his collaborators, are being examined by the House Judiciary Committee. The ongoing investigation into government censorship of alternative viewpoints during the pandemic has determined that CCDH’s activities are of interest. Ahmed was notified that he must supply all documents related to CCDH and its relationship with the federal government and social media companies.
CCDH purports to be a non-profit organization without political affiliation or funding, protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. As they face increasing scrutiny and pressure, a thorough examination of their origins and tactics reveals the mechanics of an organization whose mission is to censor enemies of the state and the pharmaceutical industry.
On The Attack
As the COVID crisis escalated, Ahmed assembled a primary list of competitors to Big Pharma; disparaging those who simply questioned a single prescribed solution. Without presenting evidence, The Disinformation Dozen claimed twelve individuals held the primary responsibility for vaccine hesitancy and thousands of deaths. While leaping to these conclusions, Ahmed also surmised that the motivation of anyone who expressed opinions that did not conform with industry and government — was financial. The report insists that sources of alternative information must be de-funded and de-platformed.
CCDH’s The Disinformation Dozen was preceded and followed by lesser-know reports and op-eds, including; The Anti-Vax Playbook, the Anti-Vax Industry, Substack & Anti-Vax Newsletters, Pandemic Profiteers, and How to Deal With Coronavirus Misinformation. This assembly of outright propaganda had a single intent: ending any dissent to unswerving allegiance to vaccine therapy.
Incredibly, there are no details in all of these publications that informs or assures the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness. What the CCDH reports all have in common is the assumption that vaccines are Big Pharma’s gift to mankind and that all other responses to infectious disease are heresy and worthy of scorn and condemnation. These assaults on dissenters are filled with strongly worded guidance, both for individuals and governments, urging people to resist and disregard those who dare counter the pharmaceutical narrative. Strikingly, the reports show complete indifference to free speech, lateral thinking, and medical autonomy.
CCDH leadership’s lack of qualifications in public health and epidemiology is indicative that their intentions and strategy are other than altruistic. Despite his organization’s goal to identify and counter digital hate, Imran Ahmed’s résumé reveals no recognition of medical or humanitarian ethics.
Not surprisingly, Ahmed has a history of blindly supporting Big Pharma’s dictates concerning the viability and safety of vaccines. For years, he and his associates have specialized in attacking anyone who doesn’t follow the narrow guidelines of pharmaceutical industry preferences.
Ahmed is not medically qualified and shows no understanding of healthcare. However, he has been a political operative and has worked behind the scenes for power brokers at the highest level.
Profiles In Deception
Of particular interest is a telling British political scandal dubbed, Brickgate. Ahmed had been working for MP Hilary Benn, another pharma cheerleader. During the brief challenge in 2016 to the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, he became the communications director for Angela Eagle, an MP who was one of two possible replacements for Corbin. Ahmed was the point man on an allegation that a brick was thrown through a window in Eagle’s office, with the implication that she was being threatened by her political opponents. The UK press promoted the story, reporting on Ahmed’s accusations and outrage.
The facts proved otherwise. The window turned out to be in a shared stairwell and broken from the inside. A brick was never found, and a police inquiry determined it was very unlikely a hostile act. Whereas Ahmed undoubtedly knew these details, he attempted to portray a different story to gain political points for his boss.
This seemingly minor tale illustrates that the noble role Ahmed presents currently was preceded by his willingness to do whatever it takes to serve his masters. It also confirms that his work has been other than in the service of revealing truth.
Ahmed’s shadowy background and relationships with politicians, including his co-founder of CCDH, Morgan McSweeney, certainly do not qualify him to judge anyone’s ethical standards.
Within a few years of Brickgate, Ahmed followed his political godfather, McSweeney, in further machinations toward engineering the agenda of Labour Party leadership. Ahmed took the helm of CCDH, and McSweeney remains integral to the senior staff of MP Keir Starmer. He is a serving member of the vaccine-friendly Trilateral Commission, the current head of the Labour Party, and a likely future UK Prime Minister. Starmer was an early proponent of the COVID vaccine and has a close relationship with Lexington Communications, a lobbying firm that represents Pfizer. With the strong support of Starmer, the United Kingdom was the first country to release the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Even as it was rolled out, he pressed for government repression in a joint effort with CCDH, harassing those who dared to question vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Most of Ahmed’s cohorts all have common interests that have little to do with well-being.
Board Member and MP Damian Collins is another pro-Pharma devotee. Pfizer’s main UK plant was in Kent — Collin’s home district — and he was a strong proponent of the early release of their COVID vaccine. He is also directly associated with the military intelligence group, Integrity Initiative, and a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a secretive association that has connections with the CIA.
The fabric of CCDH’s personnel is embroidered with intelligence community assets. There is no better example of this than Ahmed’s communications director, Lindsay Moran, a self-declared former CIA operative, with experience in consulting for mainstream media. Her previous employment does not make her a criminal, though it does bring further into question the intent and operations of CCDH.
Considering Imran Ahmed’s credentials, known associates, and the profile of other CCDH figures, it can be asserted that there is more to the organization than its stated purpose. At a minimum, this background brings into serious doubt Ahmed’s ability to inform and advise the public in an unbiased manner.
Without awareness or mention of his political affiliations, Ahmed has been relied on for stories and quoted by many news outlets, who present CCDH as a pristine source of factual information.
In one glowing personal profile, his work is described in an article from 2021 on the Global Citizen website. Avoiding questions about his past work, Ahmed’s views are swallowed whole by the authors and repeated gleefully, including the outrageous claim that almost all COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. The most telling information in the entire piece is at the end: This series was made possible with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It is important to evaluate this hagiographic portrait and consider that it is presented by Global Citizen, an international non-profit that does not hide ecstatic support of vaccination. According to its website, the organization’s central pursuit is raising and directing funds toward global poverty and health. Global Citizen sponsored a spectacular fundraising concert in 2021 called VAX Live — where among the luminaries who appeared among performers was President Biden, who described the crisis as a pandemic of the unvaccinated; perhaps the best advertising the pharmaceutical industry ever had. The concert successfully promoted and procured COVID-19 vaccines with funds raised by the event.
The Money Trail
Global Citizen has intimate relationships with the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Health Organization. These partners share a common interest in vaccine advancement and have gained undue influence over governments and the press. As political leadership floundered in the face of the building healthcare scare, these unelected power brokers stepped in to persuade the world that vaccination was the only remedy to consider.
CCDH insists that it does not take money from partisan organizations or receive government funds, however, this is difficult to confirm when they refuse to reveal all details of its funding. The world of non-profits has numerous routes for financing to be directed in ways to avoid scrutiny.
Some of the not-for-profit organizations that are partners with CCDH claim to have high-minded goals, yet support an organization that betrays indifference to freedom of expression. The Institute For Strategic Dialogue facilitates and defends CCDH in contrast to its stated mission:
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to safeguarding human rights and reversing the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide.
ISD structure and membership betray a different agenda. Attacking those with dissenting opinions who question mainstream corporate concerns is a cause of the polarized environment that they claim to safeguard.
Evidence points to well-endowed philanthropic organizations with ties to the pharmaceutical industry propping up CCDH and their hostile scheming. Support also includes money funneled through the shady world of PR agencies that are paid millions by Big Pharma to promote their interests. The Paris-based, Publicis Groupe, has directed such resources, admitting to relationships with fact-checkers that support their client’s positions. CCDH and a similar entity, Newsguard, both depend on minimal scrutiny of the structure and motivation for their financing. The perception of these non-profits would change dramatically if the public realized how their presentations are influenced by money.
Although financing has yet to be tracked, there are signals that point to a possible Bill Gates — CCDH relationship. Ahmed instinctively and repeatedly protects Gates and consistently attacks those who question his motivation for supporting vaccination.
In the Anti-Vaxx Playbook, Ahmed claims Gates is attacked symbolically within a word slaw that sidesteps the powerful influence of the Gates Foundation:
Anti-vaccine campaigners have collaborated with alternative health entrepreneurs and conspiracists to ensure that global health philanthropist Bill Gates has become a symbolic figure that represents all of their attacks on the trustworthiness of vaccine advocates.
These attacks are not aimed at influencing the ongoing debate over a Covid vaccine, in which the role of Bill Gates takes a back seat to more practical issues. The real utility of this campaign of vilification is to create a symbol and associated memes that aid the communication of interrelated beliefs about Covid, vaccines and conspiracies.
Bill Gates has come to represent a complex of anti-vaxxer talking points and conspiracy theories. Virtually every element of the on line anti-vaxx movement has found ways of featuring him in their narratives, in a variety of contexts and tones.
This description is a conspicuous attempt to deflect well-deserved attention from Bill Gates, claiming so-called anti-vaxxers are simply mentioning his name as a talking point.
Contrary to where Ahmed would direct us, an examination of Gates is central to understanding how philanthropy, corporate influence, and profiteering form government policies. Attempts at blurring the role of Gates and his foundation as they support vaccines and COVID response policies reveal CCDH’s loyalty to protecting the milieu of its political and financial benefactors.
The philanthropic and corporate worlds’ support and reliance on CCDH is at the nucleus of this deceptive contrivance, enhancing the facade that protects CCDH from scrutiny.
There are a wide variety of theories about why this shaping of public perception is so important. One consequence is obvious; the fraud increases the amount of profits for the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaires who support vaccine sales. Financing organizations like CCDH is a necessity in the general plan to minimize public doubt about an immensely lucrative product.
CCDH is paid to manipulate sentiment without substantiation. It remains stunningly apparent that no supporting details, scientific reports, or verifiable sources of facts appear in any CCDH reports. They merely use the premise that vaccination is the only trustworthy solution for infectious diseases — to vilify their targets.
Defending The Indefensible
The repercussions of the antics of the pharmaceutical-philanthropic consortium are exhibited in this sordid tale. Yet the damning revelations about Imran Ahmed and CCDH are unreported as yet by a press corps that trusts and mimics a political hack.
There remains a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of CCDH while its ability to present an objective assessment of any medical or healthcare opinion is demonstrably biased. Their mission has no basis in exposing the truth, yet nodding promoters still acquiesce to their alleged veracity.
The growing evidence of connections between individuals and entities that promote vaccines and so-called fact-checkers underlines the degradation of news gathering and reporting. The willingness of the news media to accept and disseminate CCDH disinformation without scrutiny reveals these dynamics and the dangerous trend toward authoritarian censorship.
As CCDH faces legal consequences for its negligence and a congressional inquiry into its relationship with the government, the organization continues to manipulate the truth with deceptive lies. They must rely on the press and the public to remain blind to their duplicity.
As a response to the Twitter (X) lawsuit, in an open letter signed by its supporters, CCDH dares to invoke a threat to their rights to free speech;
We view these efforts as a threat to the right to the freedom of expression, resulting in a dangerous chilling effect on civil society, experts, and advocates – and ultimately the public, which deserves to know how X and similar platforms are spreading hate and disinformation.
The appeal ends with desperate phraseology that reflects the height of hypocrisy:
The misuse of the legal system and other forms of intimidation against researchers, experts, and advocates who seek to hold social media companies accountable is an attack of the right to freedom of expression and access to information and must cease. The bullying of those seeking to speak truth to power cannot be tolerated.
Indeed.
In attempting to defend themselves, these words further betray CCDH’s hypocrisy. And the list of those signing on to this rebuttal only indicates how deeply compromised the corporate world has become in pretending to have noble exploits.
It is most important to view the activities of CCDH from the broadest historical perspective.
Their censorship efforts are at the epicenter of an open collaboration between corrupt industrialists and compromised politicians; repressive methodology with hostile tactics display the apparatus and consequences of merging the corporate world with the government.
August 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, Human rights, Rockefeller Foundation, UK, United States, WHO |
Leave a comment
It’s too late to propose questions to Tucker Carlson for his interview with Donald Trump, scheduled to air on Wednesday, August 23, 2023, because that interview has already been recorded.
In a fantasy world, here’s what I wish Carlson would ask:
- Before Covid, your Presidency was going pretty well. You had a good shot at winning another term. Would you agree that the pandemic pretty much reversed that?
- Actually, it wasn’t just the pandemic. It was your government’s response to the pandemic. The Democrats won by claiming you had botched the whole thing. They said hundreds of thousands of people died because you didn’t lock down soon enough and refused to wear a mask. They said the US should have behaved more like China than like Sweden. Do you agree?
- A lot of Republicans now think you should have run the pandemic more like DeSantis did in Florida (even though they might not have said it at the time). It seems to me that before March 10th, 2020, you were planning to run it that way. And you were listening to your public health advisors from the CDC and NIH. Is that correct?
- What was shocking to me was when you seemed to pivot 180 degrees in just a few days, from saying that it would not be worse than a bad flu season, to announcing that we would throw everything we had at it, locking down the whole country, and investing trillions of dollars in keeping the economy shut down. It was especially surprising that you agreed to the economic shutdown. What made you change your mind?
- I’m going to be more specific on this, because a lot of information has come out suggesting that you changed your mind because your National Security Council, and related military and intelligence operatives, told you the virus was a potential bioweapon that leaked from a Chinese lab. Is that what you were told? Did they tell you millions of people would die and you would be responsible, if you didn’t follow their plan?
- In a Time Magazine article you were quoted saying “I can’t tell you that” when you were asked about why you thought the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. You said “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Who was not allowing you to speak openly about the possibility that it was a lab leak? Can you speak about it openly now?
- Can you tell me who made the decision in the middle of March to invoke the Stafford Act in all 50 states at the same time (which had never been done before), and to put FEMA in charge as the Lead Federal Agency for pandemic response, when FEMA had no warning and no experience in this area at all? Who decided to remove HHS from the role of Lead Federal Agency, which it was supposed to have according to every single pandemic planning document before Covid? Did you make those decisions or did the NSC or other military or intelligence advisors tell you to take those steps?
- When you brought Scott Atlas in, he advised you to open the country back up immediately. It seems like you really wanted someone in the White House with an opinion that was different from the one you were hearing in favor of lockdowns. But, for some reason, there was enormous resistance to bringing any experts in. There was even supposed to be a meeting at the end of March (long before Atlas arrived) with top epidemiologists that mysteriously got canceled. Why did you have so little control over who advised you about the pandemic? Why didn’t you follow the advice of Scott Atlas if, as he reported in his book, you pretty much agreed with him that the lockdowns were disastrous?
- Most people think Fauci was in charge of the pandemic response. But in his book, Dr. Atlas reports that you said the main problem wasn’t Fauci, it was Deborah Birx. Is that because Birx was in charge of coordinating the NSC/DHS response, and Fauci was just a front to make it seem like a public health response?
- A few months into the lockdowns, you sounded as if you had lost control of the situation, like in the tweet from May 18th 2020 when you wrote in all caps: REOPEN OUR COUNTRY! You’d think if anyone could have ended the lockdowns, it would have been the President. But you seemed to feel helpless to reverse what was happening. Is that because there had been a sort of silent coup of the NSC and Department and Homeland Security?
- If the answers to all the previous questions are classified, that would confirm that the response to Covid involved secret machinations of national security entities. Can you at least confirm that much?
- Some have suggested that the entire Covid response was launched as a way to make you look bad and make sure you did not get a second term. Do you agree? If so, who do you think was behind that plan?
- Were you aware of the massive censorship and propaganda that were happening to make people accept the lockdowns and vaccines? Do you feel like you were part of that campaign to convince people? Or do you feel like you were somehow forced to participate in it?
- Were you in touch with leaders of other allied countries to coordinate the response to the pandemic? It’s pretty astonishing how all our closest allies ended up doing exactly the same thing at the same time. If you were not the one who was coordinating with foreign leaders, were you aware of that type of coordination going on – especially with the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Germany, and other European allies?
And, of course, the most important question of all: Would you ever do such a thing again?
August 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Donald Trump, United States |
Leave a comment
The conspiracy of silence is obvious. Both political parties like it. The media likes it too because it was a main participant. Academia is compromised as much as the social media companies. Government bureaucrats want the entire fiasco to be a thing of the past, except to the extent it can serve as a template for the future. That leaves only independent voices to raise ever louder questions of the entire establishment.
We are of course speaking about the calamity commonly called Covid that robbed us all of liberty and rights, and kicked off this national and global crisis. All the major national problems the US faces today – inflation, learning loss, ill-health, cultural confusion, demographic disruption, professional instability, tech censorship, widespread substance abuse, and the loss of all trust in the commanding heights including the whole of government and every connected institution – trace to the lockdowns that began that fateful day of March 16, 2020 (oddly, the day following the Ides of March, when Caesar was killed).
It was a decision for the ages. Shouldn’t we know more about what led to it and why all of this happened? The person who wants all questions to go away the most is the person who hopes to reinhabit the White House, namely Donald Trump. Whether or not you support his return to power, the reality is that he presided over the largest and fastest loss of liberty in the history of this country.
No other president can compare, not Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, or Obama. His administration, particularly in the last year, embarked on a new age of censorship, administrative state control over all our lives, astonishing levels of spending and redistribution, and massive invasion of our communities and homes. It attacked small business on a scale we’ve never seen, and seriously compromised even our basic rights to associate. The Biden administration was more of the same with new mandates.
Incredibly, Trump has somehow avoided questions about this. His supporters don’t want it discussed. This is likely why he is skipping the debate: fear that DeSantis will call him out. Neither do his opponents on the Democratic side want this discussed because they fully approve of what he did. His opponents in the primary are compromised too, particularly Mike Pence who led the charge within the Trump administration for lockdowns, mass purchases of PPE from China, nationwide distribution and deployment of killer ventilators, and being the biggest champion of Fauci/Birx, which we know because he wrote this in his book.
There are a whole host of questions about those fateful days leading to lockdowns. We are not getting answers because no one is asking the questions. All the people who are in a position to end the silence have a strong interest in perpetuating it for as long as possible, in hopes that mass amnesia takes hold and grants them all amnesty. Fauci is the model here: in his deposition in Missouri v. Biden, he testified that he could hardly remember anything. His hope is that everyone else will follow.
We have a small window in which to get answers during the primary season. Perhaps there will be a breakout at some point. There simply must be. Until there is some honesty and truth about what happened and why, we risk perpetuating all the crises of our times. And let’s be clear: there is not one credible study from anywhere in the world that demonstrates that lockdowns, and everything associated with them, were worth the astronomical cost. Indeed, every bit of evidence shows that the entire Covid response was a disaster. It will be repeated if there is no accountability and radical reform.
We know about the “germ games” of Event 201 and Crimson Contagion. The plans for locking down were already in the works. Covid was the excuse but did they seriously believe that this was the killer bioweapon for which they had prepared? We have documented proof that everyone knew that this virus was not massively deadly. We knew this from January 2020. If that wasn’t enough, we have data from the Diamond Princess that suggested that the infection fatality rate was nowhere near the 3-4 percent that the World Health Organization predicted.
What unleashed all this mania to end liberty as we know it? Tucker Carlson visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on March 7, 2020. His message to Trump was to take the coronavirus seriously because it could be a bioweapon export from China. Tucker had heard this from a trusted source within the intelligence community whom he has yet to name. Tucker has since said that he very much regrets his role.
Trump listened and yet seemed unpersuaded. On March 9th, Trump tweeted out his intuition that this bug was flu-like and did not require extraordinary efforts by government. Two days later, however, Trump evidently changed his mind. “I am fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus,” he wrote in a complete about-face.
Whatever changed his mind likely happened on March 10, 2020. What was that? To whom did he speak and what did they say? By chance, was he told that this was indeed a bioweapon from China and yet the pharmaceutical companies were working on the antidote and all he needed to do was lock down until it arrived and then he could be the hero? Was that his thinking?
If that was not his thinking, what precisely did he hope to achieve by locking down the entire country by executive edict? How did he imagine that he was personally going to stop the spread of a virus in the US that was already everywhere on both coasts and likely had been for the prior six months? Did it ever occur to him to call up some independent experts on infectious disease? If not, why not?
Two days later, he ordered a stop to all flights to and from Europe, the UK, and Australia. He announced this in a televised address that evening. When he was giving this address – which looked like a hostage video – did it ever occur to Trump that he was embarking on an exercise of government power never before seen? Millions of families and travel plans were shredded and panic ensued throughout the world. What led him to believe that it was within his legal rights as president to do that?
On March 13, Trump’s own Health and Human Services issued a document on the pandemic plans. It was marked confidential but came to be released months later. Incredibly, this policy document not only declared a national emergency but made it very clear that the rule-making power for pandemic management would rest with the National Security Council. That’s the intelligence community. The public health agencies of the CDC and NIH were reduced in power to deal with implementation and operations but they were not in charge.
Did Trump know what was happening around him? Did anyone come to him and tell him of this large document, which, to this day, is the only blueprint we have for what government was trying to do with its Covid response? Had he ever seen this before publishing? If so, did it not strike him as odd that the National Security Council would be given primacy over the public health agencies themselves?
That weekend, March 14-15, 2020, every report we have says that Trump huddled in the White House with son-in-law Jared Kushner, two of Jared’s college buddies, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Mike Pence. Whom else did he consult on this weekend? At this point, national security had already been given primacy in policy, so surely the military and intelligence community were represented at the White House. Who and what did they say?
According to Kushner, the decisive voice in putting together the lockdown plans was Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, who had previously headed Trump’s own FDA. He is said to have been on the phone with Trump. According to Kushner, Gottlieb told him: “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with… When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”
How much did Gottlieb’s opinion matter to Trump and did Trump ever consider perhaps that Gottlieb, as the voice of Pfizer, might have had a conflict of interest? What else does Trump remember about this weekend?
All of this really matters because on Monday, March 16, Trump held a national press conference together with Fauci and Birx. At this event, they handed out a PDF to the press which in turn was issued to every public health agency in the country. It read in part: “Bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”
That sounds like a federal edict to close churches, schools, and essentially put the entire country under house arrest. Indeed, the restrictions on human association also pertained to houses, which in many states were restricted in the number of people who could gather inside them. Only one state, South Dakota, refused to go along.
During the press conference, Trump waffled a bit on whether he was shutting everything down but Fauci stepped in to clarify that, yes, the Trump administration was in fact shutting down the whole country, Bill of Rights be damned.
At the very moment when Fauci was reading these sentences from the microphone, Trump was standing to his side but was suddenly distracted by someone or something in the audience. He waved and smiled, almost as if he either did not want to hear what Fauci was saying or did not care. To whom was he waving and why?
Did Trump even know about the edict that was being issued that day, that he was effectively using his power as president to close churches and impose universal quarantine on the population? If so, how was this consistent with his promise to make America great again?
The next day, the Trump team got busy on hospital protocols, which amounted to the mass production and distribution of ventilators plus giving out the deadly drug Remdesivir. Who was it that told Trump that intubating people was the best way to deal with this virus? Why did they believe that, given that people who are intubated are very likely to die either from the procedure or the secondary bacterial infection that likely followed?
Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force companies to make more ventilators, which they did. Today these are mostly scrap metal, of course, and most hospitals and doctors abandoned the practice once it became clear that it was killing thousands. Why did Trump seize on this whole idea to begin with? Who was advising him and why did it not occur to him to call any one of thousands of people with hands-on specializations in respiratory viruses for a second opinion?
As late as April 30, 2020, Trump was still pushing lockdowns as the solution. He even criticized Sweden for not locking down. As the summer approached and many people violated lockdown orders to protest the George Floyd killing, it seems like Trump began to wonder if he had been hoodwinked.
If Fauci and Birx tricked him into wrecking his presidency and the country, why not just admit that? If he swears that he was right to greenlight lockdowns, why should voters trust that he would not do it again? What does he believe the limits to government power are?
Even as late as July 20, 2020, Trump was still claiming that he would “defeat” the virus, this time with facemasks. “It is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance,” he wrote.
Moving to the fall, Trump wisely allowed himself to be schooled in medical realities by Scott Atlas, who arrived at the White House to talk some sense into the crazy people who were running the show. Trump seems to have been convinced. But meanwhile, the whole country was in ruins with millions of businesses closed, the kids not in school, and the whole population in a state of trauma at the loss of liberty.
There were two months remaining before the November 2020 election. During his campaign stops, he dropped the lockdowns, called for openings, but largely left the subject off the stump speech entirely, as if nothing had ever happened. Going into the election, Covid was largely off the agenda but for the media and Democrats who urged further lockdowns, which they implemented once in power.
Trump should explain what was going through his head during these months. Did he know what was actually going on in the country, how many businesses had been boarded up, how many kids denied in-person education, how many churches were closed, how many families had been broken up with travel restrictions? Further, did he worry that his spending and money-printing policies, plus trillions in stimulus payments, would fuel inflation after he left office?
We still cannot get a fix on how it came to be that the shots were widely mandated on people who never needed them. Nor is there an honest discussion of the resulting job losses, injuries, and deaths that resulted. Did these mandates come about simply because too many Americans thought better than allowing a stranger to inject them with a mystery potion ginned up in a lab and deployed ten times faster than any vaccine in history? Was there an industrial interest in forcing compliance? If so, that’s next-level corruption.
As for masking that all science knew for certain would be ineffective for stopping the spread of a respiratory pathogen, were they merely symbols imposed to scare the public? This is truly dystopian.
This is just the start of the unanswered questions. The Norfolk Group has raised many more.
Some independent journalists with access to the candidates, and this includes even Biden but certainly also every Republican who expects to earn votes, must get up to speed on the details of this calamity. It is simply unthinkable that this country, born of the ideal of freedom, would have undergone a quiet coup against liberty and the Constitution, and yet there be no serious discussion of what happened, much less reform efforts to restore what we lost.
All of this is more important than January 6, election doubting, or tribal partisan bickering. As curious as these topics are, they are distractions from that which should interest us all: the status of freedom in America and the enforcement of the Bill of Rights. Every day, the censorship continues and every day the plots against the common good are ongoing. The kids are suffering as never before. The economic crisis still surrounds us and can get much worse. All the agencies that did this enjoy more funding than ever before.
We are supposed to live in an age of information. It takes herculean efforts to bring about silence on the most important questions of our time. But thus far, all the major institutions are managing to pull it off. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
August 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, Deborah Birx, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, National Security Council, United States |
Leave a comment
Ukraine should hasten to end hostilities with Russia before the flow of American military and financial aid to the country dries up, a former aide to two Ukrainian presidents has said.
In a video on his YouTube channel posted on Tuesday, Oleg Soskin, who served as an economic adviser to Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma in the 1990s, described the US as “the key country” in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, arguing that if it cuts off its military assistance to Kiev, the latter will sign some kind of agreement with Moscow “within days.”
Against this backdrop, Soskin suggested that the US Congress may refuse to rubberstamp the request of US President Joe Biden to provide Kiev with an additional $24 billion in assistance, citing reports of growing reluctance among Republicans to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
“Basically, this means that the House [of Representatives] will not pass this $24 billion. They think the situation is at a complete impasse. That’s why Ukraine won’t get any money,” he said.
If the US, which has already provided Kiev with tens of billions of dollars in various forms of aid, were to stop helping Ukraine, its NATO allies, including Germany, Britain and all other European countries, would follow suit, crippling Kiev’s military potential, the ex-official noted.
“I think that [Ukraine] should stop before the US does that,” Soskin said, suggesting that “there should be a meeting of smart people in Ukraine who would be more forward-looking” than Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his small group of what he called “war chanters.”
Soskin also noted that the Ukrainian army has already lost the backbone of its seasoned troops, with replacements being prone to serious morale issues. He said that Kiev is forcibly drafting inexperienced soldiers who are reluctant to fight. “Ukrainians lack the motivation they had in the past year and a half,” he pointed out, suggesting that, under these conditions, Kiev stands little chance against the Russian army.
The ex-official’s comments come on the heels of a recent Politico report that said “even pro-Ukraine Republicans are hedging against supporting” a new assistance package for Ukraine, with Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland noting that Kiev “can’t win the war and, therefore, the US should reconsider further stocking its defenses.”
August 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
In 2013, the National Vaccine Program Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commissioned an update of earlier findings on the lack of evidence to support claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) infant/child vaccination schedule was safe.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee, charged with producing the update, found that “few studies have comprehensively assessed the association between the entire immunization schedule or variations in the overall schedule and categories of health outcomes, and no study has directly examined health outcomes and stakeholder concerns in precisely the way that the committee was charged to address in its statement of task.”
According to the IOM committee, “studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.”
The lack of information on the overall safety of the vaccination schedule was so compelling that the committee then recommended HHS incorporate the study of the safety of the overall childhood immunization schedule into its processes for setting priorities for research, “recognizing stakeholder concerns, and establishing the priorities on the basis of epidemiological evidence, biological plausibility, and feasibility.”
The IOM also recommended the CDC use its private database, the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), to study the overall health effects of the vaccination schedule using retrospective analyses.
Ten years later, the CDC has yet to do such a comparison study, even though it is sitting on a vast repository of data in the VSD, which include comprehensive medical records for more than 10 million individuals and 2 million children.
The VSD also contains records for a significant number of unvaccinated children, yet the CDC refuses to compare the health outcomes of vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children.
The CDC also prohibits VSD outside researchers from accessing the VSD data so they can do the studies.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the researchers who had VSD access as I worked with Dr. Mark R. Geier and his son, David Geier, on a series of studies on thimerosal-containing vaccines in the early 2010s.
However, the CDC subsequently revoked the Geiers’ access because one of the health maintenance organizations (HMO) participating in the VSD project did not like the results the Geiers were obtaining, tying thimerosal exposure to a variety of childhood chronic disorders including autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), birth defects, acute ethylmercury poisoning, fetal/infant/childhood death, premature puberty, emotional disturbance, tic disorder and developmental delays.
In Chapter 2 of “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I present the very few studies completed on the entire infant/child vaccination schedule, including the groundbreaking study, “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U.S. Children,” by Anthony Mawson, doctor in public health.
Mawson and his co-authors studied fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated and unvaccinated home-schooled children for both infectious and chronic disease incidence.
Not only were chronic diseases more prominent in fully and partially vaccinated children — where the incidence of these diseases ranged from 30 times higher for allergic rhinitis to 3.7 times for neurodevelopmental disorders — but there also was a higher prevalence of infectious diseases like pneumonia and ear infections in vaccinated children.
In a separate 2017 study, “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: a Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” Mawson et al. also found that the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders among vaccinated children was compounded by low birth weight.
Low birth weight, vaccinated children were 14.5 times more likely to get a diagnosis compared to unvaccinated, normal birth weight children.
I also completed two studies with Neil Z. Miller on vaccinated versus unvaccinated children using medical records from six separate pediatric practices.
Our first study, “Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections and Gastrointestinal Disorders,” published in 2020, focused on vaccines administered during the first year of life and specific diagnoses occurring after the first birthday.
Those children who received one or more vaccines during their first year of life were 2.2 times more likely to be diagnosed with a developmental delay, 4.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with asthma and 2.1 times more likely to suffer from ear infections when compared to unvaccinated children.
In our second study, “Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children, with Covariates for Breastfeeding Status and Type of Birth,” published in 2021, we compared fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated and unvaccinated children for incidence of autism, ADHD, asthma, chronic ear infections, severe allergies and gastrointestinal disorders.
Most notably, fully vaccinated children were 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with autism, 17.6 times more likely to be diagnosed with asthma, 20.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and 27.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with chronic ear infections compared to completely unvaccinated children.
In a separate analysis within this same study, we changed the statistical model to reflect breastfeeding status and type of birth (normal or Cesarean). Breastfed unvaccinated children fared much better than non-breastfed vaccinated children when comparing the incidence of autism, asthma, ADHD, gastrointestinal disorders, severe allergies and chronic ear infections.
We obtained similar results when investigating the type of birth and vaccination status.
James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., and Dr. Paul Thomas also published a study in 2021, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination,” investigating children in Thomas’ Portland, Oregon, pediatric practice.
This study compared the relative incidence of office visits for different disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Lyons-Weiler and Thomas found significant increases in office visits among vaccinated children for fever, ear infections, conjunctivitis, asthma, breathing issues, anemia, eczema, behavioral issues, gastroenteritis, weight/eating disorders and respiratory infections.
Notably, there were no ADHD diagnoses among unvaccinated children, whereas the rate of diagnosis among vaccinated children was 5.3%.
Unfortunately, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health retracted the study on the basis of a lone, anonymous complaint. Lyons-Weiler and Thomas were not allowed to rebut the complainant’s concerns regarding the healthcare-seeking behavior of families of unvaccinated children.
However, Lyons-Weiler fired back with Dr. Russell Blaylock in their 2022 paper, “Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them,” published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research — an article in which the authors definitively showed that vaccinated children tended to visit their pediatrician more not less than unvaccinated children, which affirmed their original analysis.
Chapter 2 of “Vax-Unvax” also highlights the 2022 study, “Association Between Aluminum Exposure From Vaccines Before Age 24 Months and Persistent Asthma at Age 24 to 59 Months,” by CDC scientists who used the VSD to calculate the level of aluminum exposure in infant vaccines administered up to 2 years of age.
The authors compared the health outcomes of children exposed to more than 3 milligrams of aluminum in their vaccines versus those exposed to less than 3 milligrams of aluminum.
Although this was not a true “vax-unvax” study as there was no unvaccinated control group (the CDC never includes one, unfortunately), Kennedy and I decided to include it in the book because of the study’s alarming findings.
The study authors found that children exposed to higher levels of aluminum were 1.36 times as likely to be diagnosed with persistent asthma prior to their 5th birthday.
Children diagnosed with eczema and exposed to the higher level of aluminum fared even worse and were 1.61 times as likely to be diagnosed with persistent asthma prior to their 5th birthday.
Each of these results was statistically significant, leading us to wonder what the risk of asthma would have been if the CDC had chosen to compare vaccinated children exposed to aluminum to an unvaccinated cohort of children.
“Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak” will be released Aug. 29 and is available for preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D., is senior director of science and research at Children’s Health Defense and professor emeritus of biology at Simpson University in Redding, California.
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.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | ADHD, Asthma, Autism, CDC, United States |
Leave a comment
New memos indicate that then-Vice President Joe Biden did not act in concert with the US government when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in Ukraine aid unless the Poroshenko government fired the prosecutor general who targeted Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian employer at that time.
Joe Biden and Democrats have repeatedly stressed that his insistence on firing Ukrainian then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokhin back in December 2015 was consistent with the US policy of stamping out corruption in Ukraine.
At the time, then-Vice President Joe Biden even went so far as to threaten then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that Washington would deprive Ukraine of a much-needed $1 billion loan guarantee in case the latter did not fire Shokhin. The conversation reportedly occurred in December 2015. Biden openly bragged about the incident to the Council on Foreign Relations gathering in January 2018:
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
However, memos by Treasury and Justice Department officials obtained by Just the News, an independent US media outlet founded by award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, indicate that the US government held Shokhin in high regard at the time and concluded that Ukraine had made progress in fighting endemic corruption, thus deserving the loan guarantee.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” read an October 1, 2015, memo by the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), a Barack Obama task force.
Moreover, Senior State Department officials sent Shokhin a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work and invited him and his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session prior to his sacking.
Remarkably, an audio tape from March 2016 which appeared to record Biden and Poroshenko’s conversation showed that the Ukrainian president pointed out that there was no evidence that Shokhin and his office were anyhow mired in corruption:
“Despite the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him … No, it was the day before yesterday. I especially asked him to resign,” Poroshenko allegedly told Biden in a tape released in 2020 by then-parliamentarian Andrii Derkach.”
Per Solomon, Biden’s political maneuver stemmed from the fact that the latter had been aggressively investigating Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm that hired Joe’s son Hunter in 2014 and paid him a hefty salary of $83,333 a month despite Hunter having no expertise or experience in the energy sphere.
What’s more, Hunter’s business associate Devon Archer, who was also employed by Burisma at the time, testified to the House Oversight Committee on July 31 that Shokhin’s investigation was rattling the Ukrainian gas firm and that the Burisma leadership was putting pressure on Hunter to deal with it.
Joe Biden’s role in firing Shokhin created much controversy in 2019, when House Democrats pushed ahead with the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump who asked Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look into the Bidens’ conduct in a phone conversation.
Democratic lawmakers and officials testified during Trump’s first impeachment that Joe’s actions in withholding the $1 billion in aid had nothing to do with Hunter and were thoroughly consistent with the US government’s Ukraine policy. Per Solomon, this narrative appears to be false.
The US investigative journalist specifically quoted lawyers who worked on Trump’s impeachment defense. They said that they didn’t have access to the memos unearthed by Just the News, showing that the Obama government was satisfied with Shokhin’s work. As per Trump’s former legal team, the documents in question would have made a significant difference to the Trump impeachment case.
The Democratic Party’s apparent attempts to shield Biden, who announced his presidential bid on April 25, 2019, seemingly fit into a broader set of actions by US officials, Biden campaign aides, intelligence operatives, Big Tech and Big Media to suppress any narrative which could cast a shadow on the Bidens’ conduct.
In October 2020, a concerted action by the former top brass of US intelligence agencies, Silicon Valley giants and the US mainstream press smeared a legitimate story by the New York Post stemming from files of a so-called “laptop from hell”, belonging to Hunter Biden, as “Russian disinformation”. It turned out later that the damning materials on the infamous laptop were genuine.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Joe Biden, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Interview with Iranian Hamshahri newspaper
Hamshahri
1. Some American officials, such as Tom Cotton, have described Iran’s recent victory as the White House dancing to Iran’s tune, and are angry about it. Former Vice President Mike Pence also lashed out at the recent prisoner swap with Iran, terming the new arrangement as “the largest ransom payment in American history” to the Islamic Republic. In your opinion, what is the main reason for the anger of the American officials, and more importantly, is Washington humiliated?
Tom Cotton and other Republicans who are criticizing the US-Iran prisoner swap and funds release are doing so for only one reason: They want to reap political gains. They hope to fool ignorant voters into viewing them as tougher on officially-designated US adveraries than their Democratic opponents. More importantly, they are preening in front of the mirror offering anti-Iran poses and gestures in order to convince wealthy hardline Zionists to give them more of the lavish bribes that fuel the American political system, euphemistically known as “campaign contributions.”
Ironically, Cotton and other anti-Iran Republicans are traitors posing as hyper-patriots. They and the Zionist-owned-and-operated mainstream media will never tell the American people the real reason for US hostility towards Iran: the power of the Jewish billionaires who constitute between one third and one half of the corrupt oligarchs who rule America, and who work together to make sure US foreign policy serves Israel first and America second if at all. Though US interests dictate comity with Iran, Zionist interests dictate the reverse. Since the US has been taken over by Zionists, it shoots itself in the foot by slavishly following Zionist orders to maintain hostile relations with Iran. Politicians like Cotton are, in essence, agents of a hostile foreign power. If the American people ever wake up, Cotton and his fellow traitors will face a harsh reckoning.
2. As you probably know, Iran’s blocked assets are estimated to be between 100 to 120 billion dollars in international accounts. On the other hand, it has been proven that there is no way to release Iran’s blocked assets except to put pressure on US officials. What are the ways to put pressure on the US from your point of view and which solution is more effective?
Iran is not really in a position to pressure US officials the way Israel does. Imagine, if you will, a world in which 40% of the richest Americans are ethnic Iranians and fanatically loyal to Tehran’s government. Then imagine that this group dominates the US media and uses it to propagandize on behalf of Tehran. Go one step further, and imagine that these maniacal ethnic loyalists dominate American and to some extent global organized crime, and liase with Iranian intelligence to gather blackmail material on American politicans and other leaders. That would be a world in which Iran could seriously “pressure,” or even control, the United States. And that is the world we are in—except that the nation in question is Israel, not Iran. (Those wishing to learn more about Israeli-linked organized crime’s death grip on the US should read the works of Michael Collins Piper, especially Final Judgment, alongside One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb.)
In the world as it stands, Iran, with its unshakeable support for Palestine, confronts an America that is largely controlled by its worst enemy. So it must do what it can to gain modest leverage, including finding ways to annoy the United States and then offering to reduce those annoyances in return for the US giving back its stolen money.
3. The Pentagon’s central command has claimed that the US will strengthen its military presence in the Strait of Hormuz with two ground-water offensive vessels to protect international shipping against the threat of Iran. How should this military presence be interpreted, and what are its effects on the resistance front?
Iran has two immense strategic advantages over the Zionist-controlled United States, which taken together largely negate the US edge in military firepower. Iran’s first advantage is its ability to decimate US military bases in the region, thanks to its rocket and drone programs. The US has kindly chosen to station substantial numbers of troops within easy range of Iranian rocket and drone fire. As in the parallel case with North Korea, that means that the US has essentially volunteered its troops as hostages. The fact that large numbers of Americans would quickly die in any major shooting war with Iran (or North Korea) serves as a potent deterrent to any US attack plans.
Iran’s second ace in the hole is its ability to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, the choke point through which more than a quarter of the world’s oil transits. Iran has massive firepower, including unstoppable anti-ship missiles, dug deep into the Zagros Mountains overlooking the Straits. Additionally, it can use its highly maneuverable navy to distribute mines and launch attacks on larger and clumsier craft.
In 2004 The Atlantic Magazine commissioned a war game, run by top military experts, simulating war between the US and Iran, and the result was “sobering”: Iran won in every conceivable scenario short of all-out nuclear annihilation. Since 2004 the Iranian edge has only grown, as Iran’s rocket, drone, and anti-ship-missile programs have made quantum leaps.
So when the US sends more men and materiel into the Strait of Hormuz, it is making an empty theatrical gesture which does not change the strategic equation. Unfortunately, though, the Straits are narrow and crowded, and the more American forces enter the area, the greater the possibility of misunderstandings and unintended clashes that could get out of hand.
The resistance front will no doubt figure out how to take advantage of the situation by raising the costs of (Zionist-driven) American aggression without crossing red lines that could lead to tragic losses on both sides.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
They will never give up until we’re all dead
It is interesting to observe how, over the past twenty-five years, the United States has become not only a participant in wars in various places on the planet but has also evolved into being the prime initiator of most of the armed conflict. Going back to the Balkans in the nineteen-nineties and moving forward in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia there is almost always an American leading role where there is bombing and killing. And where there is no actual war, there are threats and sanctions intended to make other nations come to heel, be they in Latin America like Venezuela, or Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea in Asia. And then there is the completely senseless act of turning major competitors like Russia and China, as we are now seeing, into enemies, with a proxy war raging in Ukraine, threats over Taiwan, and the world moving one step closer to a nuclear disaster.
It seems to me that the transition from an America bumbling its way into war and the current situation where wars are pursued as a matter of course coincides with a certain political development in the United States, which is the rise of neoconservatives as the foreign and national security policy makers in both major parties. This has developed together with the evolution of the view that the United States can do no wrong by definition, indeed, that it has a unique and God-given right to establish and police the globe through something that it invented, exploits and has dubbed the “rules based international order.”
Who would have thought that a bunch of Jewish student-activists, mostly leftists, originally conspiring in a corner of the cafeteria in the City College of New York would create a cult type following that now aspires to rule the world? The neocons became politically most active in the 1960s and eventually some of them attached themselves to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, declaring their evolution had come about because they were “liberals mugged by reality.” The neoconservative label was first used to describe their political philosophy in 1973. Since that time, they have diversified and succeeded in selling their view to a bipartisan audience that the US should embrace an aggressive interventionist foreign policy and must be the world hegemon. To be sure their desire for overwhelming military power has been strongly shaped by their tribal cohesion which has fed a compulsion to have Washington serve as the eternal protector of Israel, but the hegemonistic approach has inevitably led to expanding conflict all over the world and a willingness to challenge, confront and defeat other existing great powers. Hence the support for a needless and pointless war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” and a growing conflict with China over Taiwan to do the same in Asia. To make sure that the Republicans do not waver on that mission, leading neocon Bill Kristol has recently raised $2 million to do some heavy lobbying to make sure that they stay on track to confront the Kremlin in Europe.
One of the leading neocon families is the Kagans, who have successfully penetrated and come to dominate the establishment foreign policy centers in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Victoria Nuland nee Nudelman, the wife of Robert Kagan, is entrenched at the State Department where she is now the Deputy Secretary, the number two position. Up until recently, she was one of the top three officials at State, all of whom were and are Jewish Zionists. Indeed, under Joe Biden Zionist Jews dominate the national security structure, to include the top level of the State Department, the head of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Intelligence, the President’s Chief of Staff, and the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nuland’s hawkish appeal is apparently bipartisan as she has served in senior positions under Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. As adviser to Cheney, she was a leading advocate of war with Iraq, working with other Jewish neocons Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at Defense and also Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office. As there was no actual threat to the US from Saddam Hussein she and her colleagues invented one, the WMD that they sold to the media and to idiots like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nuland is also considered to be close to Hillary Clinton and the recently deceased ghastly former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. All of her government assignments have included either invading or severely sanctioning some country considered by her and her colleagues to be unfriendly. She particularly hates the Russians and anyone who is hostile to Israel.
Apparently, Nuland’s record of being seriously wrong in the policies she promoted has only served to improve her resume in Washington’s hawkish foreign policy establishment and when Biden came into the presidency she found herself appointed to the number three position at the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her return to power with the Democrats might also be due in part to the activism of her husband Robert, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, who was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Robert famously has never seen a war he disapproved of and, while urging Europe to do more defense spending, commented that “When it comes to use of military force “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.” Robert’s brother Frederick, a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and Frederick’s wife Kimberly, who heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War, are also regarded as neocon royalty.
Nuland is particularly well known for her being the driving force behind the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 that replaced the fairly-elected but friendly-to-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych with a selected candidate more accommodating to the US and Western Europe. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has been unstable ever since and the current war, also initiated by interference from the US and UK, has brought about the deaths and wounding of an estimated half million Ukrainians and Russians.
Nuland was recently in Africa, stirring up developments in Niger, which has experienced a recent military coup that removed a president who was corrupt but also a friend of the US and France, both of which have troops stationed in the country. As I write this, a number of African nations (ECOWAS) friendly to US and French interests in the region are gathering together their own military force to reverse the coup, but there is little enthusiasm for the project. We will see how that turns out, but predictably Nuland is advertising a possible intervention as a “restoration of democracy.”
And there is more over the horizon with neocons like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Nuland in charge of US foreign policy and supported by most of congress and a Jewish dominated media and entertainment industry. Joe Biden is too weak and too much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby to pursue any policies that would be beneficial to the American people in general, so the course will be set by the current crop of zealots, just as Donald Trump was guided by his Christian Zionist advisers.
If you want to understand just how what remains of our republic is in a bus being driven over the cliff by a group that has no regard for most of the citizens of the country that they reside in, one only has to read some of what passes for neocon analysis of what must be done to make America “safe.” Not surprisingly, it also involves Israel and a war on behalf of the Jewish state.
One astonishingly audacious article that appeared on August 13th in The Hill entitled “If Israel strikes Iran over its nuclear program, the US must have its back,” gives Israel the option of starting a war for any or no reason with the United States compelled to join in in support. It was written Michael Makovsky, a well-known Jewish neocon, and Chuck Wald. Makovsky is President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) while Wald is a former general who also is affiliated with that group as a “distinguished fellow,” which means he is getting paid generously to serve as a mouthpiece providing credibility for the group. For those unfamiliar with The Hill, it is an inside the beltway defense contractor funded online magazine that pretends to be serious but which is actually an integral part of the status quo Zionist and war-on-demand network. That the Jewish Institute for National Security is “of America” is, of course, a characteristically clever euphemism.
The article begins with “The Biden administration should learn from its unpreparedness for the Russia-Ukraine war and begin to prepare for a major Israel-Iran conflict. The administration needs to set aside its differences with the Israeli government, overcome its aversion to conflict with Iran, and begin to work closely with Jerusalem to prepare for the growing likelihood that Israel will feel it has no choice but to initiate a military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. In ‘No Daylight,’ a new report from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)… retired senior military officers and national security experts explain that whatever differences the US might now have with Israel over Iran policy, our two countries’ interests will be aligned after an Israeli strike. Consequently, in preparing its response, the U.S. guiding principle should be ‘no daylight with Israel,’ to ensure Israeli military success, mitigate Iranian retaliation and limit the scope of the conflict — vital interests for both countries.”
That war with Iran is a “vital interest” for the United States is, of course, not really explained as the point is to let Israel to decide on the issue of war and peace for the United States. The article then trots out the old “credibility” argument, i.e. that if we don’t go to war no one will ever trust our security guarantees: “A US betrayal of its close Israeli ally, at a time of great peril for the Jewish state, would be ‘one of the greatest catastrophes ever,’ an Arab leader told us privately recently. Because Israel is widely perceived as a close American ally, the US stance as Israel risks thousands of casualties in defense of its very existence, will resound broadly. Strong American support will reassure allies from Warsaw to Abu Dhabi and Taipei; American equivocation will shred Washington’s credibility and embolden adversaries from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing.”
One would love to know who the anonymous Arab leader so concerned about Israel is and, of course, the Jewish state is not in fact an American ally apart from in the fertile imaginations of congressmen, the media and the White House. And Israel will, of course, need more weapons and money from the US taxpayer to include “expediting delivery to Israel of KC-46A tankers, precision-guided munitions, F-15 and F-35 aircraft, and air and missile defenses… Washington should accelerate building integrated regional air, missile and maritime defenses against persistent Iranian threats.” And America must be prepared to expand the war: “Privately, Iranian and Hezbollah leadership should be warned that heavy retaliation against Israel… will prompt severe Israeli and/or American responses that could threaten their very grasp on power. Upon commencement of an Israeli strike, the United States should promptly resupply Israel with Iron Dome interceptors, precision-guided munitions, ammunition and spare parts, and deploy Patriot air defenses to Israel…”
So the United States must be prepared to turn over its national security to Israel in exchange for what gain for Americans? In part it would apparently involve “finding a permanent solution to Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program” which is based on a lie even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for over 20 years that Iran is only six months away from a weapon. Both the CIA and Mossad have confirmed that Iran has no such program while Israel does have a secret illegal nuclear arsenal built using enriched uranium and nuclear triggers stolen from the US. The article concludes with another reference to the non-existing program, claiming “the most effective way to address Iran’s nuclear program already has been articulated by President Biden and communicated by America’s ambassador in Jerusalem: ‘Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with it, and we’ve got their back.’”
Supporting Israeli war crimes is not the way to go. As Chris Hedges puts it correctly, there is no compelling American interest in damaging itself by supporting Israel blindly, quite the contrary: “The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of US dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless. Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars.”
And, of course, while Israel engages in slaughter and torture it always portrays itself as the victim only engaged in fighting against “terrorists.” I have a better idea for where we should go with all of this. President Joe Biden should be impeached for ignoring war powers legislation and indicating that he is willing to sacrifice US interests and kill American soldiers, few or plausibly none of whom will actually be Jewish since it is not an occupation that attracts them, to please and support a manifestly evil foreign government. And Donald Trump should also be punished for having done much the same type of pandering to a foreign country while in office. Meanwhile, haul Makovsky and Wald together with their buddies at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) down to the Justice Department and put them in jail for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) in that they are willfully acting as agents of a foreign government and are operating corruptly to serve the interests of that government. The criminals at AIPAC are already using their associated PACs to oust targeted members of Congress up for re-election in 2024 who have in any way been critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian. And while you’re at it Mr. Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, please have Mr. Blinken and Ms. Nuland pop by for a chat just for starters and see how far you can make the laws apply to those in power. There is some confusion evident here as Israel is not part of the United States, no matter how politically dominant and wealthy its lobby might be. Time to put an end to this nonsense and call it out for what it is – it is treason.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
By Lucas Leiroz | August 22, 2023
It seems increasingly clear that the West wants to replace Zelensky. In addition to several predictions by experts that the Ukrainian president will be removed from power, it is now revealed that some previously leaked Pentagon documents expose a plan to make the mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, the new head of state.
The documents were leaked months ago when several secret US Department of Defense’s files were exposed by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old soldier working at the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Being employed in the information technology sector, Teixeira had access to several classified government data, having leaked many of them. In April, Teixeira was arrested and is expected to be sentenced to around 10 years in prison.
What was not known until now is that among the documents there was a letter in which a Pentagon official showed his interest in putting someone more competent than Zelensky to take the presidency in Ukraine. In addition, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland herself is apparently also involved in this plan, having expressed her personal desire to see Vitali Klitschko as president. In a certain part of the document, there is an open call for “creating conditions” to elect Vitali in 2024.
“The letter, dated February 22, 2023, states that the leadership of the US State Department, as well as top officials of the US Department of Defense, are not happy with Ukrainian President Zelensky and are planning his exchange as President of Ukraine, for the ex-boxer Vitali Klitschko as his replacement in 2024 (…) According to the letter, the leadership of the Pentagon expresses agreement with an opinion of the United States Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland that Zelensky is ‘exhausting his political capacity rapidly’. Judging by the letter, both Department of Defense and Department of State would like to see the former boxer and an active participant of the events of 2014 Maidan coup d’état Vitali Klitschko, now the mayor of Kiev, as the President of Ukraine”, Dutch journalist Sonja van den Ende wrote.
Former boxer and a famous supporter of the neo-Nazi regime, Vitali Klitschko has governed the city of Kiev since the 2014 coup d’état. He gained notoriety in the international media for his “patriotism” after the start of Russia’s special military operation, when he stated that he would “take up arms” with his brother, Vladimir, to defend the Ukrainian capital and repel the Russian “invaders”. Portrayed by Western newspapers as “courageous” and “heroic”, Klitschko has won the sympathy of many Westerners, which explains why some figures now want him as the new head of state.
However, Klitschko is not the only name on the list of predictions to replace Zelensky. There are several reports that point to different people as possible candidates for the Ukrainian presidency. Previously, names like the Commander in Chief of Ground Forces Alexander Syrsky, Ukrainian intelligence head Kirill Budanov and Armed Forces Commander Valeri Zaluzhnyi have been mentioned as possible candidates for Zelensky’s office. More recently, western media outlets have suggested that the Ukrainian president would be replaced, not by another individual head of state, but by a team of officials led by the head of parliament Ruslan Stefanchuck.
Apparently, there is still no consensus on who may be the new president of Ukraine. But the consensus is real about the Western desire to remove Zelensky. For Western authorities and media, Zelensky is already a problematic and negative public figure. As stated in the documents, the Ukrainian president is “exhausting his political capacity rapidly”. This is due to his constant unjustified “beggar” behavior towards his NATO partners, in addition to the repeated military failures and territorial losses.
The possibilities of justifying Zelensky’s actions through mere propaganda are running out, which is why he is likely to be removed. In this sense, Vitali Klitschko seems to sound more interesting to Kiev’s international partners. His image seems more positive than Zelensky’s for public opinion, which tends to legitimize among citizens the continuity of the military assistance policy. In other words, in order to continue to wage the proxy war against Russia, the West needs someone more competent, less criticized than Zelensky.
It remains to be seen how Zelensky would be removed. Being a dictatorial regime under martial law, it is difficult for changes to occur through electoral and democratic means. Recently, in an article published by Politico, it was suggested that Zelensky could be assassinated and some officials even have a “secret plan” to be followed in case this happens.
Considering that plans to replace him have been in the works since at least February – as leaked documents show – and that the media is already talking about a possible assassination, Zelensky could be killed and his death falsely blamed on Russia. The move looks like an attempt to prepare public opinion for a false flag operation legitimizing a new escalation.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Average Westerners were told for the past 18 months how fearless and optimistic the Ukrainians were, which was done to convince the former to continue supporting their leaders’ decision to fund the latter, but now the Mainstream Media (MSM) is telling them the complete opposite. The Washington Post wrote earlier this month that “Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine”, which was followed by The Economist declaring that “Ukraine’s sluggish counter-offensive is souring the public mood”.
These four major updates were shared in the 10-day period between those two pieces:
* Washington Post : “U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal”
* CNN: “Ukraine’s recent focus on Crimea draws skepticism from corners of the Biden administration”
* Washington Post : “Ukraine running out of options to retake significant territory”
* Financial Times : “US grows doubtful Ukraine counteroffensive can quickly succeed”
The impression that one gets from all this is that a new information campaign has begun.
As was explained in this recent analysis about how “A Vicious Blame Game Is Breaking Out After The Counteroffensive Predictably Failed”, everyone’s now pointing fingers out of desperation to eschew their own responsibility for this spectacular disaster, which set this latest media trend- into motion. The average Westerner is now either very confused if they’re a hardcore pro-Kiev supporter or feels vindicated if they were against funding the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine.
In any case, the point is that the Western public is finally discovering the truth about this conflict, both in terms of the counteroffensive’s failure as well as Ukrainians’ fatigue and frustration with everything. The first revelation proves that their tens of billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-provided funding for the counteroffensive failed to achieve any military dividends while the second suggests that Ukrainians aren’t as gung-ho about fighting as before. Taken together, they hint that a ceasefire is possible.
Regrettably, “US Policymakers Are Caught In A Dilemma Of Their Own Making After The Failed Counteroffensive”, which the preceding hyperlinked analysis explains is due to them sabotaging peace talks last spring and then declining to resume them last winter. Since then, the path towards peace has become much more complex since the top four stakeholders in this proxy war – Russia, the US, Ukraine, and Poland – have increasingly divergent interests that thus greatly impede the possibility of a ceasefire.
Even so, the two revelations that the MSM just shared help shift Western public opinion in support of that scenario. The first one about the counteroffensive’s failure is enough for the average person to turn against continuing the proxy war, while the second absolves the most brainwashed among them of guilt by informing them that a growing number of Ukrainians want to end it too. Nobody can be “more pro-Ukrainian than the Ukrainians themselves” so that group would feel pressured to go along with this.
Simply put, what’s taking place is a “de-programming operation” aimed at reversing the effect that pro-Ukrainian/-war and anti-peace/-Russian propaganda had on the Western masses. The purpose is to precondition them for accepting the scenario of peace talks and the resultant ceasefire that they could lead to if successful. Even if the aforesaid doesn’t transpire, the impact that the MSM’s latest information campaign will have on reshaping the Western public’s perceptions will likely be irreversible.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Even during the period of wild optimism in the United States during 2022 and early 2023 about Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russian forces, there was a small, dark cloud of doubt about what the Joe Biden administration would do if the prospects of victory unraveled. That question has now become more pertinent and urgent as Kiev’s vaunted offensive clearly is faltering. Territorial gains in Russian-occupied regions are minimal, and they have occurred only with great cost in the lives of Ukrainian troops. For Ukraine’s forces, the war has become a meat grinder reminiscent of the fighting in World War I. Attacks on entrenched Russian defenses have proven to be horrifically costly in terms of both personnel and military hardware.
Hawks in the United States and other NATO members are reacting in two rather different ways. One faction, typified by the latest propaganda campaign undertaken by Defending Democracy Together, headed by Bill Kristol, has redoubled lobbying efforts to give Kiev more potent weapons with longer ranges so that Ukraine can launch larger and more frequent attacks inside Russia. Through a new front group, Republicans for Ukraine, neo-conservative stalwarts insist, “Supporting Ukraine is in the best interests of the United States and the best traditions of the Republican Party. Now is no time to give up the fight.”
At the same time, there are noticeable leaks in the news media, apparently from high-level sources, about Ukraine’s fading chances of victory. One especially important foray was a leaked report from U.S. intelligence agencies that Kiev’s current military offensive has failed to achieve its objectives. The report also expressed dissatisfaction with a growing unwillingness of Ukrainian forces to follow the advice of NATO advisers and continue to mount frontal assaults on Russian defenses. There was grousing from American sources about the Ukrainians becoming excessively “casualty averse.”
Even some staunch congressional supporters of Ukraine concede that the war may not be winnable. A corollary to that grudging acknowledgement are the hints coming out of Europe that peace negotiations may need to commence soon, even if the ultimate settlement requires Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to make territorial concessions to Russia. Perhaps even more indicative of the shifting attitude among portions of America’s opinion elite is a mounting whisper campaign, as epitomized by the leaked intelligence report, to denigrate Ukraine’s military strategy and “willingness to fight.” As yet, there are only a few trial balloons conveying that message, but they hint at the onset of an effort to prepare the American public for possible abandonment of a U.S. client.
Either doubling down on the commitment to Ukraine or conducting a policy retreat entails serious perils for America’s foreign policy establishment. The Biden administration and NATO already have escalated their proxy war against Russia to reckless levels. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, NATO responded by sending large quantities of weapons to Kiev. Initially, though, those items were defensive weapons, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, designed to thwart Russian invading forces. A gradual—and dangerous–escalation in the NATO commitment has taken place since then. Indeed, it has reached the point of equipping Ukraine’s military with heavy battle tanks and other offensive weapons. The Biden administration has been deeply involved in that process, sending Abrams tanks and Patriot missiles to Kiev. Washington has also now authorized NATO allies to transfer U.S. F-16 fighters in their arsenals to Ukraine, and U.S. officials flirt with the idea of sending such planes directly from the United States.
A key problem for establishment types who are looking for an exit from the Ukraine morass is that the Biden administration has hyped the alleged importance of events there to stratospheric levels. The president and his key advisers have insisted from the outset that the war is an existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism and between a “rules-based” international order and the law of the jungle. It is now difficult for those same officials and their supporters to call for negotiations and a compromise peace accord.
Indeed, the Biden administration and its supporters may be doubling down on the Ukraine commitment. In mid-August, the president asked Congress to approve another $24 billion in economic and military aid to Kiev, despite public opinion polls showing rapidly declining support for that option.
If the administration chooses a more prudent approach (however belatedly), the nightmare of a direct military clash between NATO and Russia would fade. The cost in terms of credibility for Western foreign policy hawks would be considerable, however. They would have to implicitly admit yet another U.S.-led interventionist crusade had failed. Coming on the heels of the fiascos in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, public (and even congressional) discontent with that approach to world affairs could rise sharply. The images of the humiliating, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021 are especially fresh.
Escalation, though, would likely prove futile as well as excessively dangerous. Ukraine has served effectively as NATO’s bloody pawn, but its usefulness in the campaign to weaken Russia is drawing to a close. The apparent failure of Kiev’s current military offensive confirms that future significant gains are improbable. It is uncertain, though, if America’s foreign policy hawks are smart enough to abandon a used pawn. The danger still exists that they may instead succumb to their own propaganda and conclude that the Ukraine war really is an existential struggle requiring the West to double down on its commitment to Kiev.
Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. Dr. Carpenter also served in various policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. He is the author of thirteen books and more than 1,200 articles on international affairs and the threat that the U.S. national security state poses to peace and civil liberties at home and around the world. Dr. Carpenter’s latest book is “Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy” (2022)
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Joe Biden, NATO, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
By Ahmed Adel | August 22, 2023
Ukraine is running out of possibilities for a counteroffensive, according to the Washington Post. This report comes as it was recently revealed that cracks are beginning to emerge between Washington and Kiev over the latter’s handling of the war. These cracks will only deepen as we slowly creep towards next year’s US presidential election, where Biden’s unwavering and uncritical support for Ukraine is making him lose support – and at a fast pace.
The Washington Post writes that Ukraine appears to be running out of options in a counteroffensive that officials initially saw as Kiev’s most crucial operation. Although Ukrainian and Western officials call for patience, the newspaper stressed that “the window of time for Ukraine to conduct offensive is limited” because of the “inhospitable weather” in autumn and winter.
“Without more advanced weapons slated to bolster the front line or fully committing forces still being held in reserve, it is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to secure a breakthrough in the counteroffensive, according to analysts,” said the newspaper.
The article also warned that “the inability to demonstrate decisive success on the battlefield is stoking fears that the conflict is becoming a stalemate and international support could erode.”
According to the newspaper, Western and Ukrainian officials, answering questions about the progress of the counteroffensive, call for patience. They describe the fighting as slower than expected but emphasise that Ukraine is progressing. However, away from the public eye, US officials are expressing their disappointment in Ukraine’s handling of its counteroffensive and doubt Kiev will be able to achieve any significant gains by the end of the year.
The Financial Times claimed that Washington had urged Kiev to push hard on the Zaporozhye region instead of spreading its forces thinly along a lengthy frontline. The British outlet says that rifts between the two countries are beginning to grow. This signals that US President Joe Biden feels pressure for his bungled Ukraine policy.
According to the report, Washington and Kiev planned to launch the counteroffensive in the spring and breach Russian defences to reach the Sea of Azov during the summer. In addition, the Ukrainian military was supposed to employ NATO’s combined arms-manoeuvre tactics, as taught by their Western trainers. However, the Ukrainian military reverted to older Soviet-era tactics due to endless setbacks, which displeased Washington. The outlet reported that more US officials are privately preparing for a “war of attrition that will last well into next year.”
At the same time, US officials reportedly “encouraged Ukraine to be less risk-averse and fully commit its forces to the main axis of the counteroffensive in the south” so that Moscow’s land bridge to Crimea could be severed.
A source told the Financial Times that US officials are privately preparing for a war of attrition in Ukraine, which could continue as late as 2024, while they publicly reiterate their support for offensive attempts by Ukrainian troops. It is not understood why the US believes that a war of attrition that hurts Russia can occur since it is Ukraine being demilitarised.
Ukraine launched its much-touted offensive in early June after multiple postponements. Citing its needs, Kiev pressured its Western partners to increase military and financial aid. According to Moscow, as of August 4, the losses of the Ukrainian Army since the start of the counteroffensive were about 43,000 troops and 4,900 units of military equipment, while more than 150,000 Ukrainian servicemen have been killed or wounded since the beginning of the special military operation. This unmitigated disaster also has a significant effect on the US, as Biden’s Ukraine policy, among other reasons, has seen his popularity plummet.
According to a CNN survey released at the beginning of August, 55% of citizens are against the US continuing to send funds to Ukraine, including 38% of Democratic voters, the party that champions the head of the federal executive. The data reflects a growing chorus speaking against Biden’s reckless Ukraine policy.
It is worth remembering that the US has already sent $113,000 billion of aid to Ukraine since February 2022, when the operation launched by Moscow began, of which $70 billion have been allocated to security. This vast sum for no gain is proving disastrous for Biden as Ukraine is effectively a financial blackhole and a source of criticism against the current administration.
The Biden government, Kiev’s main ally, has sent it all kinds of military weapons, humanitarian aid, and intelligence and training contributions for Ukrainian soldiers. This is in addition to leading political efforts worldwide, rejecting peace negotiations and imposing sanctions against Russian citizens and companies. Yet, all these efforts have not been enough to deter the special military operation, thus deepening the emerging cracks between Washington and Kiev.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
August 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
