Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Pentagon ‘Calls the Tune’ in US’ China Policy as Bomber Flight Follows Blinken’s Beijing Visit

Sputnik – June 19, 2023

The US Air Force has dispatched several B-52H Stratofortress bombers to Abdulrachman Saleh Air Force Base in Indonesia from their bases in North Dakota. The bombers are joining US Pacific Air Forces and Indonesian Air Force aircraft in the Cope West exercise, a bilateral air drill, before returning to the US in the coming days.

The B-52 has been in service with the US Air Force since the 1950s, when it was introduced to haul large numbers of nuclear and conventional bombs to its targets. They were used with devastating effect during the Vietnam War, although it only dropped conventional bombs. The US retains a handful of the massive aircraft to use as “missile trucks” and to intimidate “hostile” nations.

The drills come just days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Beijing to meet with senior Chinese diplomatic leaders, including President Xi Jinping. The two sides reaffirmed their desire to avoid a new cold war and claimed they do not seek the other’s overthrow or to supplant their positions on the international stage.

Experts told Sputnik that this kind of contradictory messaging is all too common from the West, especially the United States, where war and intimidation have always been the primary tools of diplomacy.

James Bradley, China expert, historian and author of the “The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia,” told Sputnik on Thursday that whatever rhetoric the US says at the moment, its long-term strategic concern in East Asia has always been controlling and containing China.

“The US Navy was surveying islands near China as early as the 1850s,” he noted, adding that “1898 saw America grabbing the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii to construct a sluice for the riches of China to flow to the US. Since 1945, the United States has been trying to contain China. The State Department can talk about dialogue, but the former War Department – currently called the Defense Department – calls the tune.”

In fact, Bradley noted that when journalist John Pilger asked him in 2016 if the US was already at war with China, “I answered yes.” That was even before the official US strategic shift toward “great power competition” that came in 2018.

“Economic war, cyber war, propaganda war. The business of China is business, and the business of America is war,” Bradley told Sputnik.

Jeff J. Brown, author of The China Trilogy, editor at China Rising Radio Sinoland and co-founder and curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, told Sputnik that such disjointedness between diplomatic rhetoric and military activity is typical of Western nations, where “in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing.”

“It is not unusual for the US Department of State, Department of Defense, the White House and Congresspersons to have conflicting and confusing messages, since each has their own agendas to push,”he said. “Not only are we seeing the Blinken-Indonesia white-hat black-hat routine, but at the same time, Joe Biden just called Chinese President Xi a ‘dictator!’”

“In the West in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing, so none of this is surprising that the left hand doesn’t care what the right hand is doing. In China, the government practices Marxist democratic centralism: argue and debate beforehand, but then publicly speak and act in one, unified voice,” Brown noted.

As to why Indonesia would agree to host US strategic bombers amid its attempts to stay neutral on the Washington-Beijing rivalry, Brown noted that the forces in power in Jakarta came to power in a US-sponsored pressure of pro-Chinese forces.

“We cannot forget that today’s Indonesia was born in the US genocide of millions of communists, socialists, leftists and liberals in 1965-66, to depose non-aligned President Sukarno for <…> General Suharto. Since then, the US military naturally pulls a lot of strings with the Indonesian army. We see the same situation in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Independent-minded presidents, prime ministers and legislatures are always confronted by the Western imperial toolbox: blackmail, bribery, extortion, false flags and fake news,” he explained.

“This is why we can see executives and legislatures cooperating with anti-imperial countries like China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, while their militaries work with NATO.”

The author predicted that while the US would likely continue to pressure Jakarta to avoid buying advanced military hardware from China or Russia using “negative, reactionary diplomacy,” the inevitable decline of the West and rising of the developing world means its ability to do so is only going to diminish in the future.

“With the West’s continuing decline and the rise of BRICS and SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], Indonesia may want to reorder those Su-35s,” Brown said, referring to a 2018 deal with Russia that the US blocked.

“It might work this go-around. In the meantime, the US will continue to use Western imperialism’s negative, reactionary diplomacy, by heavily playing the Taiwan separatist card, pushing NATO in Japan <…>, patching together hind-end groupings like the Quad and AUKUS, and sanctioning everything that moves,” he added.

“This, while China has masterfully united East and Southeast Asia into the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement, totally outclassing the US’ inchoate, anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s so much easier to say ‘yes’ to mutually respectful, win-win cooperation.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Poland denies US media claims about Nord Stream

RT | June 22, 2023

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Poland’s alleged role in the Nord Stream gas pipelines blasts last September is “completely untrue,” the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement to the country’s daily Rzeczpospolita on Thursday.

Citing German investigators, the US media outlet claimed in early June that the EU nation supposedly served as an operational base for the suspects that might be behind the Russian natural gas pipeline sabotage. A Polish source familiar with the investigation told the paper that Berlin allegedly knew very little about some of the suspects and might be following the wrong track entirely.

Warsaw has launched its own probe into last September’s incident, alongside Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, the prosecutor’s office told the Polish outlet. The data gathered by Polish officials contradicts the claims made by the WSJ, it added.

“The statement that ‘Poland was a logistics hub for the operation of blowing up Nord Stream’ is completely untrue and is not supported by the evidence of the investigation,” the prosecutor’s office said.

The WSJ reported that a yacht called the ‘Andromeda’ – which was chartered by a Ukrainian-owned, Warsaw-based travel agency and moored at a Polish port – had been sailing around each of the locations where the explosions later occurred.

The Polish prosecutor’s office said there was “no direct evidence” of the yacht’s or its crew’s involvement in the blasts. ‘Andromeda’ arrived in Poland from a small German port called Wiek with six people on board. It moored in one of the Polish ports for 12 hours before leaving the nation’s territorial waters, according to the prosecutors.

“The findings of the investigation show that, during the stay of the yacht in a Polish port, no items were loaded onboard, and the crew of the yacht was inspected by the Polish Border Guard,” the prosecutor’s office said. The vessel’s crew had Bulgarian passports, which appeared authentic, according to the officials. None of the crew members were banned from entering the Schengen area either, they added.

“There is no evidence that would indicate the participation of Polish citizens in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline,” the prosecutor’s office concluded.

A source familiar with the Polish probe also told Rzeczpospolita that German investigators had contacted Polish officials in mid-May and requested information under the European Investigation Order. The Germans asked many questions about ‘Andromeda’ and its crew, including “many trivial facts,” the source said, adding that they apparently had no knowledge of them. Berlin was also not willing to share its own findings on the issue, the source added.

Rzeczpospolita’s source also questioned the yacht’s role in the sabotage operation by claiming that it could not be used to transport enough explosives to relevant locations and deliver them to the undersea pipelines. No equipment that could facilitate that was found onboard, they added.

Rzeczpospolita also reported that Polish officials had not ruled out the possibility that the yacht might have been used as a distraction from the very onset and its purpose was to put the entire investigation on the wrong track.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

CIA Vet Warns US Intel Agencies ‘Will Do Everything’ to Help Dems in 2024 Race

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 22.06.2023

Former Special Counsel John Durham offered his first public testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday regarding the details of his report into the FBI’s handling of allegations of collusion between ex-President Donald Trump and Russia. The day before, Durham testified behind closed doors to the US House Intelligence Committee.

While it is not completely clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew from the outset that dug-up “information on Trump” had been paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, there is “no excuse for their having learned that and, nevertheless, proceeded with the investigation,” former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi told Sputnik.

“There might have been personal malice involved in going after Trump, but that has not been clearly demonstrated,” the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest added, referencing the FBI’s investigation into the alleged Trump-Russia “collusion”.

Former Special Counsel John Durham paid his second visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to face the House Judiciary Committee over the details of his May report, released after almost a four-year-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation codenamed, Crossfire Hurricane. Durham had found that the agency had been “seriously deficient,” relying on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” when probing the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to “Russia.”

“One has to assume that the Bureau felt it had a great deal invested in maintaining Democratic Party control of the presidency and that there were concerns that Trump would upset the arrangements made under [Barack] Obama,” Giraldi said.

The Durham report had also exposed the Democratic establishment’s anti-Trump narrative, and the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in spawning and then pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

During his probe, the special counsel charged and convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to doctoring an email to state that Trump aide Carter Page had never been a CIA asset (which was not true) in order to push ahead with surveilling the former Trump campaign adviser. Durham also brought charges against Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and Brookings Institution scholar Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI. Danchenko has served as the main ‘subsource’ for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the now infamous Steele dossier. It had been funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through the law firm Perkins Coie, which Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann worked for at the time.

The claims the “dirty” dossier contained were used by the FBI in a series of clandestine preliminary probes against Trump starting from 2016. John Durham, as part of his investigation, found that Steele’s source, Danchenko, when questioned by the FBI was unable to confirm any of the assumptions.

‘Acting on Behalf of the Deep State’

As the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign sought to use fabricated information from the Steele dossier to smear Donald Trump and some of his advisors, similar tactics were wielded in the 2020 elections, Philip Giraldi previously underscored. After the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees found that senior Biden campaign officials colluded with the CIA to falsely discredit Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation”, Giraldi pointed out that former acting CIA Director Michael Morell had drafted the notorious letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails.” It was signed by 51 former intelligence officials including CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence and James Clapper. The letter claimed that the data on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“The CIA did not ‘approve’ of the letter from the 51 former national security officials. My understanding is that it was submitted to them because the Agency exercises ‘prepublication review’ over all articles and books written by former undercover officers to block the publication of any national secrets. In this case, as I understand it, they confirmed that the letter contained no classified information. The letter itself was largely the product of collaboration by Tony Blinken and Michael Morell, both Democratic Party loyalists who expected to benefit personally,” Giraldi emphasized.

The 51 ex-spies’ opinion was quickly disseminated by the US mainstream press, while the Hunter Biden laptop story, shedding light on the Biden family’s questionable business dealings, was suppressed by both Big Media and Big Tech.

“Morell, Blinken and associates should have known that they were acting on behalf of the deep state and were in fact damaging US democracy such as it is! When the national security agencies go after candidates it is in fact the death of government of and by the people,” Giraldi remarked.

Ahead of John Durham’s testimony on June 21, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) underscored in his opening statement that the hearing was tasked to provide more “detail and add more color” to the findings of the May report.

“Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough… What’s more frightening is that any one of us could be next,” Jordan emphasized.

A number of Republicans echoed John Durham’s calls for reforming the FBI, underscoring that the agency, had become “politicized” and “weaponized”, and had carried out a “politically motivated” investigation of Donald Trump.

Looking ahead at the next election cycle, where both Biden and Trump are gearing up to vie for another Oval Office stint, Philip Giraldi concluded:

“For 2024, I expect that the agencies will do everything they can to help Biden or whoever replaces him from the Democratic Party but they will be a lot more careful about how they do it than they were in 2020.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why China ignores the US

By Fernando Gaillardo – New Eastern Outlook – 22.06.2023

Beijing rejected Washington’s offer to conduct negotiations between Ministers of Defense on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit against the background of mutual misunderstanding.

The Singapore Security Summit for many years has served as a neutral forum for discussing controversies in the Asia-Pacific region, where even outspoken opponents can meet and clarify their mutual grievances without sacrificing credibility. This is why the PRC’s refusal to hold a meeting between Li Shangfu and Lloyd Austin has attracted increased global attention.

The formal reason for rejecting the request was that the Chinese Ministers of Defense was under US sanctions. Li Shangfu previously supervised the revamp of the PLA and promoted the purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air defense systems, which angered the Trump administration at the time.

Beijing’s neat diplomatic move is a camouflage for Washington’s complete disregard for China’s foreign policy approaches and interests, including a hint of encroachment on sovereignty. US Air Force conducts about 1,000 surveillance missions per year near China’s maritime borders, while checking the readiness of Chinese air defense forces. The Navy also seeks to come up big in its area of responsibility by regularly sending ships to areas contested by China. Remarkably, even during the persistent attempts of the State Department to organize a meeting at the forum, the ships coming from the US to Japan for exercises could not resist and circled around Taiwan, just in case.

The problem of the island that does not recognize Beijing’s authority is most revealing. Technically, the fact that Taiwan is part of the PRC was stated in The Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between China and USA, 1979, and then in the 1982 Communiqué, which reaffirmed the provisions of the previous document. The duplication was necessary because after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC, the United States passed a separate law that allowed to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan and justifying its military presence without recognizing it as a state.

Washington constantly broadcasts an interest in reducing tensions or even “resetting” relations, but is it worth trusting a partner that is constantly looking for loopholes to avoid even documented agreements? Given the recent demarches, Beijing has decided that there is nothing to talk about with the United States.

A few days after the event, the US media reported that the ministers did meet and, allegedly, discussed pressing issues, but there was no coverage of the event by officials of either country. According to “eyewitnesses” the ministers, in fact, crossed paths between venues and simply exchanged pleasantries, as required by protocol. It all sounds like a wounded hegemon is trying to make up for the reputational costs.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

The ramifications of EU efforts to isolate China

Press TV – June 22, 2023

The European Commission is proposing a €10 billion fund to develop strategic technologies in order to become less dependent on high tech imports from China.

It also wants to block EU nations from dealing with China when it comes to so called sensitive technologies. The claim is that it’s to reduce risk.

It would appear that positive ties being advanced outside of the West’s control are putting Washington and Brussels on edge.

Trade between the EU and China is worth an incredible 2.3 billion euro per day. Some analysts believe the US is trying to scupper this vital economic link.

During recent European Parliament debates, lawmakers have heavily criticized the EU’s policy towards Russia and China.

The fallout from energy sanctions against Moscow is severely harming EU citizens and businesses.

At a time of dire economic pressures, the European Commission wants to prioritize the government in Kyiv.

Analysts say vested interests in the United States are benefiting most from deteriorating EU-Russia and EU-China relations.

EU leaders are due to hold a summit at the end of next week to discuss the Commission’s trade proposals.

It’s already clear there are major concerns in member states because current arrangements with China are so lucrative.

It is reported that some EU countries believe the European Commission is overstepping the mark.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

US should pay the bill for devastation in Ukraine – Russian envoy

RT | June 22, 2023

The Ukraine conflict was instigated by the US and other Western countries, and as such it is up to Washington to pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged nation, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, claimed on Wednesday.

Antonov was asked to comment on a statement by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who, while speaking at a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London, claimed that “Russia will eventually bear the cost” of restoring the country.

The Russian diplomat pushed back against Blinken’s remarks, saying the conflict between Moscow and Kiev was “the result of years of deliberate efforts by the United States to create a hotbed of tensions at our borders, to turn Ukraine into ‘anti-Russia,’” which involved a Western-backed coup in the Ukrainian capital in 2014.

Antonov claimed that the US was actively fanning hostilities by pumping Kiev with weapons, while nipping any peace initiatives in the bud. “This means that the administration is fully responsible for what is happening in Ukraine. That’s why it is up to the United States to rebuild the country,” he stated.

He went on to state that while it is possible to restore houses destroyed by American weapons, it will be much more difficult to erase the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.

“How will… Washington evaluate the lives of innocent people? How is the United States going to settle accounts with the Ukrainians, whom they are driving into reckless frontal assaults in today’s so-called counter-offensive?” the envoy asked.

While Western countries have pledged billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance to Ukraine, some of Kiev backers have also called for the seizure of Russian assets that were frozen after the start of the Ukraine conflict, to be used for reconstruction. While legal hurdles have so far prevented this from happening, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has described the initiative as “pure banditry.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

BlackRock Recruiter Claims Senators Can Be ‘Bought’ For $10k, War ‘Good For Business’

BY TYLER DURDEN | ZERO HEDGE | JUNE 20, 2023

The undercover chaps and lasses at James O’Keefe’s new undercover media venture have done it again – this time tricking a BlackRock recruiter into making several damning admissions.

In a series of covertly-recorded meetings, recruiter Serge Varlay describes how BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager – is able to “run the world,” and that it’s easier to pull off shenanigans when “people aren’t thinking about it.”

According to Varlay, US Senators can be ‘bought’ for as little as $10k.

“The senators… are f***ing cheap – you got 10 grand, you can buy a senator,” he remarked.

You can take this big f*** ton of money and buy people, I work for a company called BlackRock… It’s not who is the president, it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president. You could buy your candidates. First, there is the senators these guys are fuckin cheap. Got 10 grand you can buy a senator I’ll give you 500k right now. It doesn’t matter who wins they’re in my pocket. –OMG

Blackrock is also apparently loving the war in Ukraine, which Varley described as “real fuckin’ good for business.”

Ukraine is good for business, you know that right? Russia blows up Ukraine’s grain silos and the price of wheat is going to go mad up. The Ukrainian economy is the wheat market. The price of bread goes up, this is fantastic if you’re trading. Volatility creates opportunity for profit…

According to Varley, it’s “exciting when shit goes wrong.”

“So what are you gonna do if you’re a trading firm? The moment that news hits, within a millisecond, you’re going to pump trades into whoever the wheat suppliers are. Into their stocks. Within an hour or two that stick goes f*cking up and then you sell and you just make, I don’t know, however many mil,” he continued. “The Ukrainian economy is tied very largely to the wheat market, global wheat market, prices of bread, you know, literally everything goes up and down. This is fantastic if you’re trading.

“Volatility creates opportunity to make profit. War is real fucking good for business.”

Watch:

As the Post Millennial notes, Varley also described himself as a person who “decide[s] people’s fates.”

“Every f*cking day, I literally decide how somebody’s life is going to be shaped,” he said. “I’m not actually a finance guy, I just know what happens because I’m recruiting people who do these things.”

More via the PM:

Varlay said these banks run the world because “you acquire stuff. You diversify, you acquire, you keep acquiring. You spend whatever you make in acquiring more. And at a certain point, your risk level is super low. Imagine you’ve invested in 10 different industries, from food to drinks to technology. If one of them fails it doesn’t matter, you have nine others to back you up.”

Varlay said that once “you own a little bit of everything… you can take this big f*ck-ton of money and then you can start to buy people.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Video | | Leave a comment

YouTube Censors Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Jonathan Turley | June 20, 2023

YouTube has continued its censorship of those with opposing positions on Covid 19 and vaccines. This week it prevented users from hearing the views of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Despite Kennedy running on the failures of the pandemic response, YouTube will not allow users to hear what it considers harmful thoughts.

On Sunday, both Kennedy and podcast host Jordan Peterson tweeted that they were the latest to be censored by the company. Kennedy tweeted: “What do you think… Should social media platforms censor presidential candidates? My conversation with [Peterson] was deleted by [YouTube].”

He added: “Luckily you can watch it here on [Twitter] (thank you [Elon Musk]).”

The incident shows why many on the left continue an unrelenting attack on Musk and Twitter. Musk eliminated most of the company’s censorship system and, despite a few censorship controversies, the site is now the most open social media site among the major companies.

A Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Rather than allow experts and others to debate that question, Google and YouTube will not allow the debate to occur. It is consistent with calls from Democratic leaders for dissenting voices to be removed on subjects ranging from Covid to gender identity to climate control.

We have been discussing efforts by figures like Hillary Clinton to enlist European countries to force Twitter to restore censorship rules. Unable to rely on corporate censorship or convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are resorting to good old-fashioned state censorship, even asking other countries to censor the speech of American citizens.

President Joe Biden has at times acted as a virtual censor-in-chief, denouncing social-media companies for “killing people” by not censoring enough. Recently, he expressed doubt that the public can “know the truth” without such censorship by “editors” in Big Tech. There is growing evidence of long-suspected back channels between government and Democratic political figures and Big Tech. Some of those contacts were recently confirmed but Congress again refused to investigate.

For years, scientists faced censorship for even raising the lab theory as a possible explanation for the virus. Their reputations and careers were shredded by a media flash mob. The Washington Post declared this a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

When a Chinese researcher told Fox News that this was man-made, the network was attacked and the left-leaning PolitiFact slammed her with a “pants on fire rating.”

The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children. The closing of schools and businesses was challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

The point is only that there were countervailing indicators on mask efficacy and a basis to question the mandates. Yet, there was no real debate because of the censorship supported by many Democratic leaders in social media. To question such mandates was declared a public health threat and what the WHO called our “infodemic.”

A lawsuit was filed by Missouri and Louisiana and joined by leading experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University). Bhattacharya previously objected to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents. Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks and the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination.  Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.

The media has quietly acknowledged the science questioning mask efficacy and school closures without addressing its own role in attacking those who raised these objections.

Yet, the censorship continues to the point that even a presidential candidate is now being silenced on social media.

The censorship of Kennedy is a national disgrace. Despite the proven legitimacy of prior censorship of viewpoints like the lab theory and natural immunities, Google continues to silence those with opposing views.

YouTube is signaling that this election will be another exercise in corporate approved messaging and ideas.

If you want to use YouTube, you will now have to engage in self-censorship, eliminating views that Google disagrees with. You may be able to “Broadcast Yourself” but you must first “Censor Yourself” . . .  or YouTube will do it for you.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Raytheon CEO Explains Why China Has US Military By The Balls

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 21, 2023

Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes admitted last week that Beijing effectively has the US military’s supply chain by the balls thanks to its reliance on rare earths and other materials which come from, or are processed in, China.

According to Hayes, Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China,” because of which “decoupling … is impossible.”

“We can de-risk but not decouple,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he thinks this is the case “for everybody.”

“Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” Hayes continued, adding “If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”

Hayes’ comments underline the difficulties facing western manufacturers amid growing friction between China and the US and its allies.

Beijing in February imposed new sanctions on both Raytheon and US defence peer Lockheed Martin for supplying weapons to Taiwan. Hayes has also been placed under sanctions.

The sanctions have had little commercial impact as the groups are not allowed to sell military equipment to China. Raytheon, however, has a substantial commercial aerospace business in the country through its engine subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney, and aviation systems and cabin equipment specialist Collins Aerospace. It has about 2,000 direct employees in China. – FT

Hayes said that the company is looking “to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.”

That said, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand makes a solid point – that this makes war with China “less likely.”

Except that they have all the leverage and we have have Joe Biden.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Extremists who left Syria to fight in Ukraine realize journey ‘futile’: Expert

The Cradle | June 21, 2023

Egyptian researcher and political analyst Ahmad Sultan was quoted as saying on 21 June that many of the extremist militants who left Syria for the Ukrainian battlefield last year have realized that the fight against Russia is futile.

“The jihadists have realized that the situation in Ukraine is difficult for them, and that the arena there is not suitable for them, and that their fight against Russia is a lost battle,” Sultan said.

“Among the jihadists who returned [to Syria] recently is the leader Abdel Hakim al-Shishani … he is one of the most prominent leaders who left with their fighters from Idlib to Ukraine,” he added.

“Dozens of foreign jihadists, especially Chechens, led by Abdel Hakim al-Shishani, the leader of the Soldiers of the Caucasus group, left Idlib in northern Syria and relocated to the fronts against Russian forces in Ukraine,” Sultan went on to explain, adding that Shishani made his way back to Syria “recently.”

Shishani is a Chechen militant leader who was in charge of the Idlib-based group of foreign fighters, Soldiers of the Caucasus.

At the start of the year, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported that after several months of disappearance, the well-known Chechen extremist appeared in Ukraine as part of Kiev’s ‘international legion.’ The Chechen commander appeared in a video posted by the official Twitter account of Ukraine’s defense intelligence.

According to Sultan, Shishani and his Soldiers of the Caucasus were stationed on the fronts near Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city which just last month fell to Russian forces.

“The available data confirms that there are countries that facilitated the process of these fighters’ exit from Syria to Ukraine and that the process of transferring foreign fighters was planned by intelligence services affiliated with countries involved in the conflict inside Ukraine,” the Egyptian researcher continued.

According to Al-Akhbar’s January report, Turkish intelligence played a leading role in facilitating the transfer of militants from Syria to Ukraine.

Sultan adds that these cross-country transfers of militants were ignored by the US coalition operating in Syria, which he said “raises questions.”

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, hundreds of Syria-based militants belonging to ISIS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and other groups, have made their way to the eastern European country.

“The transfer of foreign fighters suggests that there is an attempt to recreate the scenario of the Afghan-Soviet war in Ukraine. There are fundamental differences between the two cases, but this did not prevent some countries from using the same tactics,” he concluded.

During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, foreign militants joined the Afghan side under heavy backing from the US and Saudi Arabia.

US-backing for the ‘Mujahideen’ in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s resulted in the formation of what is today known as Al-Qaeda. This was admitted by Hilary Clinton in 2009.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Democrat blames conservative media for hyping Trump assassination remark

Trump “needs to be shot”

RT | June 21, 2023

Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) excoriated “conservative media” for calling attention to a television appearance in which she appeared to call for the assassination of former US president Donald Trump, insisting in a statement on Tuesday that she had done no such thing.

“It is unfortunate that conservative media has taken an instance where I misspoke and misrepresented it as though I advocate for violence–I unequivocally do not,” Plaskett said. “I wish former President Trump no ill will or harm, only that justice be served in his case as with every other American who must face penalties for wrongdoing.”

Plaskett claimed to have misspoken during an MSNBC segment discussing the Republican candidate’s indictment over his alleged mishandling of confidential documents. “Having Trump not only have had the [nuclear] codes but now having the classified information for Americans and being able to put that out and share it in his resort with anyone and everyone who comes through should be terrifying to all Americans and he needs to be shot – stopped,” she had said, without elaborating on whether the latter word was meant as a correction or simply a clarification.

Several conservative outlets including Fox News and d the New York Post published articles about her supposed slip-up, including responses to the clip on social media calling for Plaskett to be investigated by the Secret Service or even criminally charged for threatening the former president.

“I do believe and did intend to say that he must be ‘stopped’,” the delegate, a non-voting member of the US Congress, continued, reiterating, “I do not advocate for anyone to shoot former President Trump.”

In April, Plaskett called for journalist Matt Taibbi to be charged with perjury based on a rival journalist’s claim that Taibbi had deliberately substituted the name of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) subsidiary for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) in order to falsely depict an unconstitutionally cozy relationship between the government agency and Twitter. Taibbi countered that the switch was a mistake he had immediately corrected – and which ultimately turned out to be true.

In her statement on Tuesday, Plaskett claimed she did not “encourage or condone political violence nor behavior that goes against democratic principles at any time.” That also appeared to clash with her sign-off from the MSNBC program, in which she remarked that “In the Virgin Islands, we’re celebrating our 175th year of emancipation through violent and organized slave rebellion to remove ourselves from chattel slavery.”

While running for Congress, Plaskett actively pursued (and received) campaign contributions from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after securing lucrative tax breaks for the pedophile in her role as general counsel for the islands’ Economic Development Authority.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Biden Crashes Down the Stairs of U.S.-China Reset

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 21, 2023

Joe Biden’s penchant for tripping over his feet – and verbally – couldn’t have happened at a most unfortunate moment. Mocking China’s president as a “dictator” just when his administration attempted a big reset in U.S.-China relations has to rank as one of Biden’s clumsiest gaffes.

A day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in a high-profile attempt to mend frayed relations, Biden kicked those efforts in the teeth by telling a crowd in California that Chinese President Xi was a dictator.

Beijing responded furiously, denouncing the American president’s “extreme” disrespect and lack of etiquette. China’s anger is no doubt reinforced because it showed magnanimity in receiving Blinken and affording him a top-level diplomatic meeting with President Xi Jinping.

Biden’s latest gaffe is made all the more absurd because he was referring to the incident of a Chinese weather balloon that had strayed over U.S. territory in February, which Biden ordered an F-16 fighter jet to shoot down with a sidewinder missile. Biden is still claiming that it was a Chinese spy balloon even though the Washington Post had reported earlier that it was a meteorological aircraft blown off course whose errant trans-Pacific course was being monitored in real-time by the Americans.

That crass overreaction by Biden resorting to a military attack over a balloon sent U.S.-China relations into a further tailspin. Blinken canceled a visit to Beijing in February in what was a cheap protest stunt against an alleged Chinese breach of U.S. national security. His trip last weekend was meant to signal a new reset in relations. There was much talk during the U.S. diplomat’s visit about improving communications between Washington and Beijing to avoid a military confrontation.

Then there came the crash, bang, wallop from Biden’s strange outburst insulting his Chinese counterpart.

During the California fundraising foray this week, Biden claimed that Xi knew nothing about the “spy balloon”, implying that he was being kept in the dark by Chinese intelligence officials as befitting a hapless “dictator”.

In reality, it looks like Biden is the one who is hopelessly benighted. Ordering the shoot-down of an errant balloon with million-dollar air-to-air missiles and to continue insisting that it was a spy vehicle shows an abject lack of judgment. Could anyone trust a balloon-popping commander-in-chief who has access to grabbing the nuclear football? This is Doctor Strangelove’s twilight stuff. All the more frightening because it’s real life, not a movie.

But on top of that, Biden then goes on to gratuitously insult the Chinese leader.

Biden’s loose tongue and legs at this frail stage in his half-century political career are beyond parody. Falling on the stairs of Air Force One and tripping over podiums is an embarrassing routine spectacle for this president.

His congenital bad manners of referring to Russian and Chinese leaders as “thugs”, “killers” and “dictators” shows Biden’s low class as a person, as well as extreme hypocrisy for a politician who is responsible for causing millions of deaths from promoting U.S. criminal wars down through the decades.

One good thing, however, is the impeccable clarity that all this provides (if that were needed).

China – and Russia– by now know beyond doubt that Washington cannot be trusted in anything it says. Biden is just the decrepit embodiment of the treacherous and duplicitous politics inherent in Washington. It is blinded and stupefied, incapable of meaningful dialogue because of Washington’s insufferable delusions, its arrogance, hubris, and self-righteous propaganda. And its total addiction to war for fixing its corporate capitalist junkie economy.

Top U.S. diplomat Antony Blinken went on a mission to appease China with ostensible declarations of wanting to normalize relations, avoid confrontation and professing adherence to the One China policy with regard to abjuring Taiwan’s independence and recognizing the island territory as being under China’s sovereign control. In other words, respecting international law.

China’s leadership warily shook hands with Blinken and appeared to give him the benefit of doubt for a public reset in U.S. bilateral relations.

Biden’s subsequent rush to the brain and his rash, churlish words demonstrate that Washington is not capable of adhering to decorum, decency and diplomacy, or anything for that matter, apart from a handrail on a staircase. And even that’s unreliable.

After Blinken’s smarmy visit to China, one can bet the farm that in the coming weeks there will be more provocative U.S. naval maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait; there will be more provocative U.S. multi-billion-dollar arms sales to Taiwan; and there will be more provocative U.S. political delegations ostentatiously traveling to Taipei in order to foment instability and the offensive notion of independence from China.

Thus, it’s altogether better that Beijing does not waste time by engaging Washington with disingenuous diplomacy. Forget smarmy, florid rhetoric about improving relations, and smiley handshakes. The only proof needed is deeds and practical compliance with already established legal treaties.

Washington says it respects the One China policy and three legally binding treaties that it has signed with Beijing since 1979 on that. That should mean the United States ending all interference in China’s sovereignty. No more arms sales to Taiwan and no more “freedom of navigation” maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait by U.S. warships.

It’s a rather straightforward obligation that avoids ambiguity and equivocation. It’s almost incredible that this has to be spelled out which illustrates just how rogue the United States is.

Moscow can make the same arguments and conclusions with regard to the U.S.-led NATO expansion up to its borders and the infiltration of Ukraine with NeoNazi proxies.

But here’s the deplorable rub: the United States is agreement incapable, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has caustically noted. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also recently lamented the complete dearth of American political integrity, at least for the past few generations.

Joe Biden figuratively falling down the stairs of the U.S.-China reset attempts is the latest confirmation that forked-tongued American politicians should be repudiated until Washington actually begins to behave as a law-abiding entity.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »