U.S. lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant the U.S. government vast new powers to surveil and censor U.S. citizens.
The RESTRICT Act — the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or Senate Bill 686 — would give the federal government new powers ostensibly to mitigate national security threats posed by technology products from countries that the U.S. deems adversarial.
The bill would grant the U.S. secretary of commerce the authority to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” national security risks associated with technology linked to a foreign adversary.
There are only six countries on the foreign adversary list — China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia and Cuba — but the bill allows the secretary and Congress to add any other country “if it became necessary.”
The bill does not stipulate the criteria for adding a country.
Additionally, the bill would give the commerce secretary the power to negotiate, enter into, impose and enforce “any mitigation measure” in response to national security risks.
The bill’s “broad” and “vague” language puts a great deal of power into the hands of the executive branch, according to critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a “leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”
The EFF called the bill a “dangerous substitute for comprehensive data privacy legislation.”
Meanwhile, the White House “applauded” the bill, stating that it would “empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services operating in the United States in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our national security.”
The bill — which has yet to be scheduled for a vote — would create a legal framework through which the U.S. government could ban TikTok.
TikTok is regarded as a national security risk by some U.S. lawmakers who fear that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, might share sensitive information from the more than 150 million U.S. TikTok users with the Chinese Communist Party.
U.S. Big Tech companies including Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google’s parent, Alphabet, are expected to benefit from an expanded market share if the U.S. government bans the Chinese-owned TikTok.
‘Mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul’
However, according to investigative reporter Jordan Schachtel, “This bill is no mere ‘TikTok ban,’ it is a mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” agreed. He told The Defender :
“The RESTRICT Act is not only aimed at the activities and expression of companies and individuals from nations deemed inimical to U.S. interests; it is a backdoor means through which the federal government can oversee the opinions and activities of all U.S. citizens, increasing the state’s powers of surveillance and abrogating citizen’s first amendment rights.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also had harsh words for the proposed legislation:
Many on both the Left and Right have criticized the bill, calling it the “Patriot Act on steroids” or the “Patriot Act 2.0.”
Weeks after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which the American Civil Liberties Union said was “an overnight revision of the nation’s surveillance laws that vastly expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances on those powers like judicial oversight, public accountability, and the ability to challenge government searches in court.”
Critics fear the RESTRICT Act would expand those powers even further.
EFF condemned the bill’s potential threats to free speech, noting that the bill doesn’t require the executive branch to justify its restrictions on expressive technologies like TikTok and that it limits lawsuit challenges to the restrictions it sets.
“Due to undefined mitigation measures coupled with a vague enforcement provision, the bill could also criminalize common practices like using a VPN or side-loading to install a prohibited app,” EFF said. “There are legitimate data privacy concerns about social media platforms, but this bill is a distraction from real progress on privacy.”
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who co-sponsored the bill, said in remarks on the Senate floor that the bill would not allow the government to “surveil Americans’ online content” or “access any American’s personal communications device.”
However, the RESTRICT Act’s broad language could potentially be interpreted to address satellite and mobile networks, cloud services and storage, internet infrastructure providers, home internet gear, commercial and personal drones, video games and payment apps, CNN said.
“Instead of passing this broad and overreaching bill, Congress should limit the opportunities for any company to collect massive amounts of our detailed personal data, which is then made available to data brokers, U.S. government agencies, and even foreign adversaries, China included,” EFF concluded.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
May 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
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Less than a year after successfully winning the fight to force Pfizer to release their COVID-19 vaccine trial data that the FDA was attempting to block for 75 years, ICAN’s Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq., joins Del with a new, updated ruling, and great news about what this ruling means for Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID vaccine trial data.
Biden’s new pick for Head of the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, received more than 290 million in grants from Pfizer. This appointment comes more than a year after former director, Francis Collins, left the beleaguered agency. With deep ties to Pfizer and the cancer industry, she joins a roster of agency heads with questionable conflicts of interest, contributing to a growing distrust of our health agencies now seemingly beyond repair.
May 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, NIH, United States |
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The ‘crimes’ of Anthony Fauci are legion. From involvement in and denial of that involvement in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, whence the ‘deadly’ Covid-19 virus came, to exaggerating the lethality of the virus, through Covid-19 vaccine mandates involving widespread rollout of an experimental gene therapy to complicity in the almost ubiquitous and dangerous early use of ventilators for the treatment of Covid-19 patients.
The danger of ventilators and their likely involvement in the unnecessary deaths of Covid-19 patients has already been raised in these pages. That article was unconvincingly ‘fact checked’ with the customary ‘conspiracy theory’ trope being levelled at the authors. However, while ventilators may not have been fully responsible, for example, for the unusually high deaths of Covid-19 patients on ventilators in New York, they were associated with a higher level of mortality.
Ventilation, a procedure exclusively carried out in intensive-care environments, involves the introduction of an endotracheal tube into the lungs by which air is then pumped in. Despite the sterile conditions under which the tube is introduced into the lungs, bacterial infection referred to as ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) is common within 24 hours. This is especially dangerous because the patient will already be medically compromised, and the immune system will be less able to combat the infection. VAP has a mortality rate of between 20 and 50 per cent.
An article published earlier this month by the News Center of Northwest Medicine, which is a non-profit healthcare system associated with Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, published an article titled: ‘Secondary Bacterial Pneumonia Drove Many COVID-19 Deaths.’ The article featured Professor Benjamin Stinger of Northwest Medicine, who led a study linking secondary pneumonia caused by being on a ventilator to mortality which was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. JCI is a leading medical journal with an impressive impact factor, a measure of how much it is cited, of 19.
The new study involved 585 ventilated patients including 190 diagnosed with Covid-19 and used a computerised machine-learning procedure called CarpeDiem to analyse the patients’ clinical data over the course of the study. The link between the deaths of Covid-19 patients was made because longer periods on ventilation are associated with VAP which, if unsuccessfully treated, leads to death. Covid-19 patients tended to spend longer than other patients on ventilators.
But, in addition to providing further evidence of the dangers inherent in ventilating Covid-19 patients, the article inadvertently uncovers that Anthony Fauci was aware of the dangers of VAP. He led a study in 2018 published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, cited in the JCI article, which ‘suggested an unexpectedly important contribution of secondary bacterial infection to mortality after severe viral pneumonia’. VAP is a secondary bacterial infection and, given the high use of ventilators in the early days of Covid-19, based on their study, the JCI authors concluded that:
‘Mortality in patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia results from a low mortality attributable to the primary viral pneumonia that is offset by an increased risk of mortality from unresolving VAP or other ICU complications.’
Despite the knowledge, based on his own work, of the potential dangers of using ventilators, Fauci’s enthusiasm for them was not dampened, and he did not discourage their use when he was managing Covid-19 in the U.S. In fact, he warned that they may not have enough, saying that despite having 12,700 ventilators stockpiled they might be insufficient if the virus spreads quickly. He said: ‘If you don’t have enough ventilators, it’s obvious people who need it will not be able to get it. That’s when you’re going to have to make some very tough decisions.’ Asked if he was, perhaps, overreacting to the situation, he responded: ‘We’ll be thankful that we’re overreacting.’ Try telling that to the families of deceased Covid-19 patients who were unnecessarily artificially ventilated.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, United States |
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A New York State assembly member has introduced a legislation to stop charities from sending millions of dollars to Israel to stop its settlement expansion activities across the occupied Palestinian territories which are being advanced in flagrant violation of the international law.
The legislation, dubbed “Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” was introduced by state assembly member Zohran Mamdani, the third Muslim in the New York State assembly, earlier this week.
It would give the state attorney general authority to sue and dissolve not-for-profit organizations that are found to be using their tax-deductible donations to support organizations funding illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The legislation would also give Palestinians harmed by settler organizations funded by New York-based charities the right to seek damages in American courts.
“Charities registered in New York State currently send more than $60 million dollars a year in tax-deductible donations to aid and abet Israeli settlements. This is done on our dime as New Yorkers,” Mamdani said, the Middle East Eye reported on Thursday.
He added, “This legislation puts an end to that and makes explicit that subsidizing violence and activities outlawed by the Geneva Convention is not, and should not be considered, charitable giving. It’s past time for New York to catch up to international law.”
Mamdani noted that while this issue is important to him as a Muslim, as his faith informs his fight to ensure justice for all people, this is not a bill motivated by religion.
“It is a bill motivated by a desire that New York State stop subsidizing human rights violations through the conferring of charitable status to organizations such as these,” he said.
“Too often, we see an exception drawn when it comes to Palestine – whether it be in our policies or the application of them. This makes it clear that our belief in human rights is universal, without exception,” he added.
The legislation has already received some backlash. Mamdani highlighted that his office has received a call saying all Muslims should die and all Muslim lovers should be killed as well.
“This is the reality when you dare speak up about Palestine and Palestinians,” he said.
Additionally, 66 lawmakers signed an open letter condemning the legislation, saying it “attacks” Jewish organizations.
Emboldened by former US president Donald Trump’s all-out support, Israel has stepped up its illegal settlement construction activities in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which pronounced settlements in the West Bank and East al-Quds “a flagrant violation under international law.”
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.
Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent state with East al-Quds as its capital.
The last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014. Among the major sticking points in those negotiations was Israel’s continued illegal settlement expansion.
Many Palestinians believe the Israeli plans to annex one-third of the already occupied West Bank, including parts of the strategic Jordan Valley, is only a formality and that a de facto Israeli occupation of their land has been underway for many years.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Syria’s triumphant return to the Arab League fold after almost 12 years shows not just that Arab countries now recognize the failure of the “regime change” project in Damascus but also that they can defy the United States, according to a former British diplomat.
In an exclusive interview with the Press TV website, Peter Ford, a former UK diplomat who served as ambassador in Syria between 2003 and 2006 and before that in Bahrain from 1999 to 2003, said the importance of the recent turn of events in the Arab world “goes beyond Syria”.
“It is a symptom of the development of a new multipolar world order where not just Russia, China and Iran refuse to accept US hegemony but also countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Brazil and South Africa. This is the Global South manifesting itself,” Ford asserted, referring to Arab normalizations.
Syria has restored diplomatic ties with many Arab countries recently after years of hostility, including Saudi Arabia, and is set to formally return to the Arab League, a 22-member body of Arab states.
This wave of normalization comes more than a decade after Syria’s Arab neighbors severed their diplomatic ties with the Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus and demanded his ouster.
On Thursday, Assad touched down in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to attend the Arab League summit, marking another step toward the full restoration of ties between Syria and its Arab neighbors.
Ford said Syria’s return to the Arab League, in defiance of US warnings, has raised expectations that the Arab world will now “show more support for Palestine and less concern for their ties with Israel”.
“The Abraham Accords was founded on hostility to Iran and fear of the US. These conditions no longer apply,” the former British diplomat told the Press TV website.
On whether these developments will bring regional countries closer in fighting the menace of terrorism, Ford said he expects “much more intra-Arab security cooperation” now, adding that Syria has “more experience with this phenomenon than any country in the world”.
The veteran diplomat noted the US interference in the Arab country hasn’t ended but that it has “got tired” and is going through the motions “with no real hope of achieving anything”.
“It keeps up the economic war, the propaganda war and legal war, and it maintains a military presence to control Syria’s oil, but it’s all to no purpose,” he said about the US.
The restoration of diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Ford said, augurs well for the region, as both countries have “a shared interest in modernization and the peaceful Persian Gulf”.
“The only beneficiaries from hostility (between Tehran and Riyadh) have been the US and Israel. The new perspectives for cooperation (between them) are exciting. No wonder the US think tanks are bitter in their commentaries,” he remarked.
Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic ties in March following two years of negotiations brokered by Baghdad. The breakthrough, however, came courtesy of Beijing.
Ford stated that while Western countries “stubbornly persist in economic warfare against Syria, Iran’s role in Syria’s post-war reconstruction and rebuilding “remains crucial”.
On President Ebrahim Raeisi’s recent historic visit to the Arab country, the former American ambassador in Damascus said it “set the seal on the success of Syria and Iran in standing firm against Western-directed attempts to overturn the Syrian government and weaken Iran.”
“It also signaled that the normalization of Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia came not at Iran’s expense but because of what’s now triangular Syrian-Saudi-Iranian cooperation,” Ford stressed.
While warning that the US power to do harm “should never be underestimated”, he said the US “is now beating a retreat from the Middle East and is focused more and more on China”.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Middle East, Syria, United States |
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Lotfi Hassan Misto, who was killed on 3 May 2023 by a US drone strike in Syria. (Photo courtesy of the Misto family)
After US military officials claimed to kill an important Al-Qaeda figure in Syria in an airstrike earlier this month, evidence from the dead man’s family indicates he was instead an impoverished shepherd and father of 10 children, The Washington Post reported on 19 May.
According to interviews with his brother, son, and six others who knew him, the slain man was Lotfi Hassan Misto, 56, a former bricklayer who they described as a kind, hard-working man whose “whole life was spent poor.”
Misto was killed by a Predator Drone strike using a Hellfire missile on 3 May. Hours later, without evidence or providing a name of the person targeted, US Central Command claimed that they had killed a “senior Al Qaeda leader.”
The interviews with Misto’s family members have caused US officials to backtrack from their original claims.
“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” one US official told The Washington Post. Another said that “though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” Both spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Post notes further that, “In the weeks since the attack, US military officials have refused to identify publicly who their target was, how the apparent error occurred, whether a legitimate terrorist leader escaped and why some in the Pentagon maintain Misto was a member of al-Qaeda despite his family’s denials.”
In a statement, Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for Central Command, said that “Centcom takes all such allegations seriously and is investigating to determine whether or not the action may have unintentionally resulted in harm to civilians.”
The US military has faced accusations it has covered up past instances of airstrikes that killed innocent people as a result of what The Post described as “flawed intelligence” and “confirmation bias,” including in the case of a 2021 strike in Afghanistan that officials claimed targeted a suicide bomber but instead killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.
In perhaps the most famous case, the US military carried out an airstrike in Mosul in 2017 during the battle against ISIS that killed 240 civilians sheltering in a large home.
The US military has carried out airstrikes in Syria intermittently in recent years in areas controlled by Al-Qaeda affiliated groups, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, previously known as the Nusra Front.
This is despite the fact that US planners played a key role in helping the Nusra Front capture Syria’s northwest Idlib governate in 2015 by supplying TOW anti-tank missiles to Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups fighting as Nusra proxies.
Supplying the weapons was part of the CIA’s Timber Sycamore Program, which sought to arm and fund extremist Salafist armed groups fighting the Syrian government under the FSA banner.
US, British, Turkish, and Gulf efforts to effect regime change in Syria failed, however, and President Donald Trump ended the CIA program, which enjoyed a budget of over $1 billion per year, in 2017.
The extremist groups occupying Idlib have enjoyed continued Turkish support since that time, while Turkish troops have also occupied areas in northern Syria directly.
But the status of Turkish-backed and Al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups in Syria is now in doubt as Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan has in recent months participated in Russian-backed talks to normalize relations with Damascus.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has demanded that Turkiye end its occupation of northern Syria and cease support for extremist groups as a condition of any normalization of ties with Ankara.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | CIA, Syria, Turkiye, United States |
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The most high-profile Ukrainian “terrorist acts” in Russia were carried out with the assistance of Washington, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, has claimed.
Speaking at a government meeting on Friday, Patrushev said that Russia has information that “the murders of Darya Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky, the bombing of Zakhar Prilepin’s car, the explosion at the Crimean Bridge,” the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage, and other “terrorists acts” were “planned and carried out under the coordination of US special services”.
Those attacks were “accompanied by an information campaign prepared in advance in Washington and London, designed to destabilize the social and political situation, [and to] undermine the constitutional foundations and sovereignty of Russia,” the security chief stressed.
“The intensity of terrorist attacks has vastly increased” since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine over a year ago, he added.
According to Patrushev, Ukrainian saboteur groups, who are trained by NATO instructors, have been actively trying to target important infrastructure inside Russia, including with drones.
In view of those events additional measures should be implemented to protect key facilities and places where people gather in large numbers, he said.
Earlier this week, the chief of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) General Kirill Budanov was asked about attacks on prominent Russian public figures and replied that his agency has “already gotten many” of them. However, he declined to mention any names. In an earlier interview, Budanov vowed to “keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine.”
Journalist and activist Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, died after her car exploded on a highway outside Moscow last summer. Russia’s Security Service (FSB) said the murder of the 29-year-old was carried out by Ukrainian nationals, who managed to flee the country.
In late April, Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in St Petersburg after a statue that had been handed to him during an event with his followers exploded. A dozen people were also wounded. The FSB has blamed the blast on “Ukrainian special services and their agents, including fugitive members of the Russian opposition.”
Earlier this month, prominent Russian author and political activist Zakhar Prilepin was severely injured in a car bomb near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. His driver was killed. A suspect has admitted to Russian law enforcement that he’d been hired by an unspecified Ukrainian intelligence service.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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By Uriel Araujo | May 19, 2023
On May 16, Ukraine claimed its air defenses intercepted six Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and shot them down amid an “exceptionally dense” barrage fired – supposedly thanks to the arrival of Patriots, among other Western combat systems. Kinzhals are supposed to be able to overcome all existing air defense systems, and Moscow denies its Kinzhals were intercepted.
Kiev also claims to have shot down 29 of 30 Russian rockets on May 18, an obviously inflated number. However, a Ukrainian infrastructure facility in Khmelnytskyi has been hit by a missile, with no casualties reported. The barrage came as a response to Kiev’s advancements in Bakhmut. Ukrainian forces are reportedly preparing to launch a counteroffensive. Ukraine’s defense systems, however, should not be overestimated.
While Western powers are finally coming to realize that Kiev simply does not possess the necessary means to win the ongoing conflict, much is being written about Western air defenses supposedly being key for Western victory in its proxy war in Eastern Europe against Moscow. Despite Ukrainian denials, American officials have confirmed US-made Patriot was indeed damaged by Russian strikes. According to the Russian defense ministry, on 16 May Kinzhal destroyed a Patriot missile defense system (five launchers and a multifunctional radar). This is one of the most advanced US air defense systems. Albeit trying to minimize the damage, US authorities speaking to Reuters on the condition of anonymity said that they would have a better understanding of the situation “in the coming days” and that “information could change”.
In the past days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been busy touring different European countries and so far he has been promised billions of dollars in military equipment by allies such as the United Kingdom (UK) and France. How much different can those make?
The hard truth is that Kiev remains unable to create a single control system or an interface for the various Western air defense systems and their different components, as these possess a large range of functional features and thus are poorly integrated into the already existing systems. This means that they would operate ineffectively if included in a single circuit. NATO’s anti-aircraft systems can fully control one defined sector of airspace at a time, but cannot intercept operational-tactical missiles that move along an aeroballistic trajectory, such as the Russian hypersonic Kinzhais. For Ukraine, it would therefore be necessary to construct a whole new system, which is no simple task during a confrontation – not to mention doing so quickly enough.
Moreover, according to defense and IR journalist S. Tiwari of the EurAsian Times, the Patriot, IRIS-T and NASAMS systems cannot protect Ukrainian troops from guided bombs, such as the ones massively used by Russian forces. Ukrainian Lieutenant Colonel Denis Smazhny, an aerial defense specialist, in turn has confirmed the low effectiveness of the US-sent NASAMS and IRIS-T complexes (supplied by Germany) to face Russian ballistic missiles such as the Iskanders and Kinzhals. The Russian weapons, unlike cruise missiles, are capable of rising to very high altitudes to fall almost vertically onto the target at great speeds. Thus, targeting them in flight is very difficult. How can one make them fall when they are in fact “already falling”?
Thus, in Colonel Smazhny’s words, “Western air defense systems will not be able to protect us.” Even with the Western systems, quickly creating an integrated and effective system for airspace defense is a challenge for Ukraine, to say the least. This is why Kiev has been eyeing an Israeli system called Iron Dome, which could suit its needs better. However, military and technical issues are often entangled with political and diplomatic matters.
During a US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces session (about missile-defense matters), last week, American Senator Angus King asked why Iron Dome had not been deployed in the Eastern European nation. The answer is quite simple: the main producer of such systems is Israel and thus it would have to grant Washington permission to send it to any other country, such as Ukraine. Despite several requests, this has not happened.
Tel Aviv sees Russia as a regional great power with which it must engage in a number of issues in the Middle East. For one thing, Moscow and Tel Aviv currently have a working relationship in the Levant, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has stated he has no reason to damage bilateral relations. Moreover, even if Israeli approval were to happen, which remains unlikely, this would still not necessarily make a great difference other than a symbolic one: Russian weapons are indeed more sophisticated than the Palestinian rockets the Iron Dome routinely shoots down. To have a huge impact, Ukraine would need dozens of Iron Domes, which do not currently exist.
Besides these military issues, Ukraine is struggling with a domestic political crisis amid several corruption scandals. This week, for instance, the chair of its Supreme Court, chief justice Vsevolod Knyazev was removed from his post over bribery accusations amounting to $2.7 million. In addition, former US President Donald Trump stated last week he will not commit to backing Kiev, should he win the Republican presidential nomination and the upcoming elections. Despite legal controversies, Trump remains a clear Republican favorite, while Republican senators are increasingly opposing advancing aid for Ukraine and some, like Senator JD Vance, are calling for investigating a possible Democrat money laundering scheme in Ukraine.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | France, Russia, UK, Ukraine, United States |
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One of two Israeli-manufactured Iron Dome batteries owned by the Pentagon is ready to be deployed to Ukraine, a US general told the Senate on Thursday. Tel Aviv has so far refused to supply the anti-missile system to Kiev, for fear of provoking Russia and risking its ability to freely bomb Moscow’s ally Syria.
During a Senate Strategic Forces subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Senator Angus King pressed a senior Pentagon official on why Ukraine has not yet received the Iron Dome, noting the US role in creating the air defense system.
“We sent something like $3 billion to Israel to develop it… Wouldn’t this be a very important resource for the Ukrainians since their principal problem right now is missile defense?” the lawmaker asked.
Army Space and Missile Defense Command chief General Daniel Karbler replied that there are currently two Iron Dome batteries in US inventories, one of which is now ready for transfer to Kiev.
“Once completed new equipment training, new equipment fielding. It is prepared for deployment. The other one is wrapping up its new equipment training right now. So the army does have one available for deployment if we get a request,” he said.
While the US has spent some $2.6 billion to fund the Iron Dome since 2011, it is produced in Israel, and Washington must seek Tel Aviv’s approval before any transfer to a third country. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly urged Israel to supply the system since Russia’s invasion commenced last year, but Tel Aviv has been reluctant to fulfill the requests, which could jeopardize its delicate relations with Moscow.
For years, Israel has dropped bombs on Syria – a key Russian ally in the Middle East – on a near-weekly basis. Tel Aviv claims its constant airstrikes are needed to counter Iranian proxies in the country, though they routinely kill Syrian soldiers and civilians and have damaged civil infrastructure such as airports.
Russia still maintains a significant military presence in Syria, having intervened at the request of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015 to help beat back al-Qaeda affiliated militants and Islamic State fighters waging a dirty war on Damascus. The terrorist forces that carried out the failed regime change attempt were supported often by the CIA and its allies, including Israel.
Moscow has provided air defense systems to Syria but still permits Tel Aviv’s weekly attacks. The Israelis have launched hundreds of air raids in the country since its civil war began, and would prefer to maintain its “freedom of action” in the region rather than risk provoking the Kremlin with military aid to Ukraine.
Last year, Kiev attempted to appeal to Israel’s hawkishness to obtain the Iron Dome and other military hardware. In a letter to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Ukrainian embassy officials warned that Russia’s use of Iranian drones could “significantly contribute in strengthening Iran’s potential of producing offensive weapons and, as a result, … increase the security threats for the State of Israel.”
Tel Aviv refused to bite, however, seeing little benefit in providing the Iron Dome to Ukraine while also fearing that Russia could retaliate by providing Iran with advanced weaponry. Additionally, Tehran has repeatedly denied providing its drones to Moscow since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine, claiming it has made no deliveries since fighting began.
The transfer proposed by General Karbler also makes little strategic sense, particularly given Ukraine’s vast territory. The Israelis typically use the Iron Dome to shoot down low-tech rockets fired by Palestinian resistance factions in the besieged Gaza Strip, an open-air concentration camp which has been blockaded by the air, land and sea for more than 15 years. A single Iron Dome battery would be of scant use in defending against Russia’s long-range missiles.
According to a Jerusalem Post analysis published this week, “If Israel needs 10 or more Iron Domes to properly defend itself, Ukraine would need dozens or more, which simply do not exist. ” The outlet added that ”One or two Iron Domes from the US would make no difference tactically, and at this point, probably would not even make much of a symbolic difference. And even then, the Iron Dome might fail to shoot down Putin’s more sophisticated missiles.”
Assistant US Defense Secretary for Space Policy John Plumb has said Washington is “not aware” of any Israeli offer to make the transfer anyway. His statements came as Kiev blasted Israel for carrying on “business as usual with the Russian war criminals.” Tel Aviv recently sent senior diplomats to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials.
Sources told Israel Hayom that Ukrainian troops have almost finished training on an Israeli early alert system used to predict missile trajectories, ”although it is unclear if this is related to a possible deployment of the interceptor.” The sources refused to respond to Karbler’s remarks on Thursday, but noted that Israel ”will not get into a fight with the US over the Iron Dome, and stressed that the general’s comments did not specifically say that the system will be delivered to Ukraine.”
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Israel, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, United States |
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China has urged against Ukraine joining NATO, saying it would not improve security in the European region, after veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger claimed membership would serve the interests of both Kiev and Moscow.
Asked about Kissinger’s comments during a Thursday press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin argued that Ukrainian NATO membership would only further inflame tensions.
“Ukraine should not become the frontier in a major power confrontation,” he said, adding that “to strengthen or even expand military groups is not a viable way to ensure the security of a region. One country’s security should not be achieved at the expense of the security of other countries.”
In an interview with the Economist published on Wednesday, Kissinger said European powers were pursuing a “madly dangerous” strategy by keeping Kiev out of the US-led military bloc, insisting Ukraine must not “become a solitary state just looking out for itself.” He claimed NATO membership would not only benefit Ukraine, but Russia as well.
“If I talked to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, I would tell him that he, too, is safer with Ukraine in NATO,” the 99-year-old added, saying the move would prevent Kiev from making rash “national decisions on territorial claims.”
The Chinese spokesman went on to state that a “durable European security architecture” could only be created through dialogue. During a visit to Ukraine this week, special envoy Li Hui met with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba and other senior officials to discuss Beijing’s views on a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.
Beijing unveiled a 12-point roadmap for peace in February which urged both Moscow and Kiev to resume direct negotiations. President Putin later said the Chinese plan was “in tune” with Russia’s position and hoped the proposal could serve as the basis for a future political settlement.
Western powers have dismissed the 12-point plan, with the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell dubbing it “wishful thinking,” while the top advisor to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky argued that it heavily favors Russia.
Direct Turkish-brokered talks between the two sides broke down in the spring of 2022. Since then, President Zelensky has ruled out any direct talks with Russia as long as Putin remains in power, and Moscow has rejected the terms for negotiations put forward by Kiev. Among other things, Ukraine’s proposal calls for Russia to withdraw its forces from all territories within Ukraine’s 1991 borders, to pay reparations, and to submit to war crime tribunals. Moscow has rejected the plan as “unacceptable,” pointing out that it ignores the reality on the ground and merely shows Kiev’s unwillingness to resolve the crisis through talks.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | China, NATO, Ukraine, United States |
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Two new narratives were introduced into the West’s information ecosystem over the past week. The first concerns the need to adapt to multipolar processes by engaging more with the Global South, which was expressed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former US National Security Council member Fiona Hill, and Goldman Sachs’ President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen all on the exact same day last Monday. The next narrative complemented this one and came two days later on Wednesday.
Global affairs guru Henry Kissinger’s lengthy interview with The Economist from late April was published on that day, in which he devoted considerable time explaining why the US should revive its talks with China on a New Détente that were unexpectedly derailed by February’s balloon incident. CNN then reported on that same day that “Biden administration looking at arranging high-profile visits to China by senior officials,” which suggests that it was briefed earlier about his proposal and heeded his advice.
The first narrative about engaging more with the Global South complements the second one about reviving talks with China on a New Détente in the sense that the former is one of the three prerequisites for successfully accomplishing the latter, at least according to how American policymakers likely view it. They want to signal that the US won’t voluntarily cede influence in the Global South to China, but instead plans to compete with it there via economic and diplomatic means.
This goal will be greatly advanced through a combination of pragmatic engagement with the Global South’s informal Indian leader, whose Prime Minister visits the US late next month, and coordinating between America’s “Build Back Better World” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” development initiatives. These subgoals also align with Kissinger’s suggestions about cooperating more closely with India as well as crafting an inspirational vision for this century (i.e. merging the West’s development initiatives).
The second prerequisite for successfully negotiating a New Détente with China upon the seemingly impending resumption of this process is to diplomatically displace its envisaged role in the Russian-Ukrainian peace process. In pursuit of this, the US wants to “de-Sinify” the scenario of a ceasefire after the end of Kiev’s NATO-backed counteroffensive, which explains its support of the African-led peace mission that was announced on Tuesday in between Monday and Wednesday’s new narratives.
What’s most interesting about this initiative is that it’s organized by the Brazzaville Foundation, whose French chairman Jean-Yves Olivier is known for his shadow diplomacy over the decades that was documented by Wikipedia. This suggests that their peace mission is secretly organized by France with the US’ tacit approval, if not jointly coordinated with it, which would advance their goal of diplomatically engaging with the Global South in parallel with “de-Sinifying” the Russian-Ukrainian peace process.
Both’s prospects would be bolstered by India’s participation in these efforts, which has its own interests in presenting itself to the world as a peace broker, especially throughout the course of its G20 chairmanship. These two prerequisites for enhancing the odds that the US successfully negotiates a New Détente with China concern the economic and diplomatic spheres respectively, while the third that’ll now be described deals with the military one.
“The US Is Rounding Up Allies Ahead Of A Possible War With China”, while “NATO’s Planned Liaison Office In Japan Will Accelerate The Expansion Of AUKUS+”, both of which will contribute to more effectively containing China in the Asia-Pacific. American policymakers apparently expect that the People’s Republic will accept this emerging regional military reality instead of it serving to preclude the resumption of their talks on a New Détente.
Not only that, but they seem to think that it could even give their side an edge of some sort in those negotiations too, or at least enable the US to speak to China “from a position of strength” as they see it. The message would be that this containment noose could tighten even more if Beijing doesn’t agree to resume such talks, not to mention if they fail to achieve anything tangible, thus making it a form of military blackmail when viewed from this perspective.
Altogether, the introduction of this week’s two complementary narratives into the West’s information ecosystem suggest that this de facto New Cold War bloc’s American leader is recalibrating its grand strategy. Policymakers appear to have concluded that their side can’t restore unipolarity, instead settling for managing multipolar processes in the direction of their interests as much as is realistically possible, to which end they must engage more with the Global South and revive talks with China on a New Détente.
The observations shared in this analysis shouldn’t be interpreted as predicting the success of these policies, but simply as arguments that this approach is indeed being attempted and was almost certainly influenced by Kissinger’s suggestions that he shared in his interview. He and The Economist are close to American policymakers so they likely passed his ideas along to relevant figures, after which they agreed with the gist thereof and subsequently began implementing them this week as proven in this piece.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Africa, China, Ukraine, United States |
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The decline of civic life in the US is primarily down to the de-facto absence of the freedom of press. This freedom is only proclaimed in words, but in reality, a single point of view is imposed on everyone. This has furthermore exacerbated the divisions in American society.
The highly acclaimed primetime TV host, Tucker Carlson, who was recently fired, alleged that the American media is prohibited from discussing important topics that affect the future of the United States and the whole world: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.”
The reporter has repeatedly criticized the conduct of American officials; for instance, he spoke about the consequences for the United States of the conflict in Ukraine and also affirmed the allegations Russia made regarding the terrorist attack on Nord Stream, claiming “it is the West’s biggest lie.”
Faisal J. Abbas, editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Arab News, emphasized that the biggest threat facing the United States today is polarization – the media has been used by politicians to cultivate their own audiences and create ideology: politicians only think from one election cycle to the next, so they take ideological positions that are not really essential to the daily life of the average American citizen. Issues such as gender identity and abortion are central to public discourse; on the other hand, issues affecting the daily lives of ordinary Americans, such as deteriorating living standards, increasing homelessness, unaffordable rents, and college education, are not being addressed.
Virtually no one talks about the real problems faced by the average American; their attention is focused on secondary issues that benefit politicians. Meanwhile, domestic social, ethnic and racial contradictions in the US are becoming more and more acute. A global financial “storm” in the event of a default on US government debt payments is not out of the question. The US Treasury Secretary spoke about this possibility just recently. A banking crisis also looms on the horizon.
The New York Times in March 2023 published an article about the serious danger of a “national divorce.”
This topic began to be more often raised in the American press in connection with the actual beginning of the presidential campaign of 2024 – as you know, the current President Joe Biden announced it at the end of April.
In response, the Republican Party released their video, created using “AI-generated imagery”: a realistic-looking news summary announcing Biden’s victory in 2024, followed by a long list of hypothetical disasters – Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the collapse of financial markets, immigrants taking over the southern border and the closure of San Francisco due to escalating crime.
One American newspaper called the conflict between Biden and Trump not so much a confrontation between Democrats and Republicans as a confrontation of essentially moral and immoral worldviews, a rivalry between decency and its opposite.
Much has been said in this regard about how the unregulated deployment of artificial intelligence can create social chaos – people wonder what will happen when a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average person at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing pictures, writing laws, scriptures. And yet all this can be used to propagate fake news and form new cults.
At the same time, the Democratic Party does not hide the fact that they see the danger of the current moment in the likelihood of Trump becoming a nominee in the 2024 elections – and all means are good here.
Driven by immediate interests, they are organizing a lawsuit against the former president, trying not only to discredit him, but also to block his way to participate in the upcoming elections. The fact that the former president of the United States is about to be indicted in a criminal court sets a dangerous precedent – there is no guarantee that another American president won’t also be arrested after leaving his official office.
Republicans, for their part, are intensifying investigations into Hunter Biden, the President’s son: he is being charged with providing false information when purchasing weapons, withholding treatment for drug addiction. Tax evasion in transactions abroad became the main point of the charges, with Republicans wanting to go after Biden’s entire family as well.
In this regard, the well-known columnist Nicholas Christophe mentions a bunch of closely intertwined problems that hold the country back: childhood trauma, drug addiction, mental health problems, homelessness, loneliness, family breakdown, unemployment. More than a quarter of a million Americans die each year from drugs, alcohol and suicide.
“To alleviate our chronic pain,” Christoph writes, “we must do a better job of healing deeper wounds in our economy and society.”
In this regard, it is not surprising that an Arab newspaper compared the situation in America to the current civil strife in Israel, where society is divided into roughly the same two halves. The same newspaper also spoke about the possibility of an openly fascist regime in Israel.
The famous American philosopher Noam Chomsky said in an interview with Al Jazeera on 09.04.23: “The United States is increasingly collapsing like Israel.”
According to a recent poll, more than 50% of Americans now expect a new civil war “in the next couple of years,” with several predictions about the end of America.
In one, in the event that Trump, or any other Republican, occupies the White House, Californians take serious steps toward secession from the United States.
The other scenario, which is being seriously discussed, says that if the Democratic Party wins, including a second term for Biden, the reds, i.e., Republican states, begin a movement for independence.
Meanwhile, a December 12, 2022 article on the Saudi Arabian television station Al Arabiya’s website, as if to summarize the many musings of American political scientists, argues under the title “How America Will Divorce Itself” that a divorce agreement could take the following form: California, parts of Oregon, Washington and Nevada agree to become the new federal system.
But the greatest threat to America’s very existence is the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Bloomberg, reviewing the book “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay” by Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez on May 7, noted that the widening gap between the rich and the poor could lead to a revolution.
Veniamin Popov is Director of the Center for the Partnership of Civilizations at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Candidate of Historical Sciences.
May 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | United States |
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