MOSCOW – The unmanned boats used in Ukraine’s failed attack on the ship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet “Ivan Khurs” were launched from a naval operations center in Ochakov opened with US support in 2018, an informed source told Sputnik.
“These devices were launched from the naval operations center, opened with the participation of the United States in Ochakov back in 2018. They were controlled using built-in Starlink satellite internet modules received by Kiev from the United States,” the source said, adding that target designation for these drone boats was provided by American reconnaissance equipment.
The source further indicated that Ukraine has received a batch of new marine drones of Western production for carrying out naval attacks and provocations in the Black Sea.
“Despite the boasting of Kiev representatives about the use of drones of their own, that is, Ukrainian production, their profile suggests otherwise,” the source said. “The appearance of Ukrainian Mikola-type naval drones assembled from components supplied to Kiev by NATO does not correspond to the profile of those that attacked the Ivan Khurs.”
The new drones were likely produced by the United Kingdom “which has extensive experience in the creation and combat use of such systems in various regions of the world ocean,” the source said.
It was also pointed out that the location of the attack points toward an escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the expansion of its geography.
“The sabotage against the Russian Navy in the exclusive maritime economic zone of Turkey, more than 200 nautical miles from the area of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, is a continuation of the provocative course of the Anglo-Saxons to escalate and expand its geography,” the source said.
Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Ukraine had unsuccessfully tried to attack the Ivan Khurs, which ensured the safety of the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream gas pipelines, using unmanned boats.
The Russian Defense Ministry indicated the foiled attack ended with all of the offending boats being destroyed by the Russian military 140 kilometers (87 miles) northeast of the Bosphorus Strait.
The “Ivan Khurs” vessel has since continued to execute its duties despite the earlier sabotage attempt.
May 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | UK, Ukraine, United States |
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The ostensible goal of the operation is to provide “support and assistance to the Special Operations of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces and National Police of Peru,” including in regions recently engulfed in violence.
Unbeknown, it seems, to most people in Peru and the US (considering the paucity of media coverage in both countries), US military personnel will soon be landing in Peru. The plenary session of Peru’s Congress last Thursday (May 18) authorised the entry of US troops onto Peruvian soil with the ostensible purpose of carrying out “cooperation activities” with Peru’s armed forces and national police. Passed with 70 votes in favour, 33 against and four abstentions, resolution 4766 stipulates that the troops are welcome to stay any time between June 1 and December 31, 2023.
The number of US soldiers involved has not been officially disclosed, at least as far as I can tell, though a recent statement by Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, who is currently person non grata in Peru, suggests it could be around 700. The cooperation and training activities will take place across a wide swathe of territory including Lima, Callao, Loreto, San Martín, Huánuco, Ucayali, Pasco, Junín, Huancavelica, Iquitos, Pucusana, Apurímac, Cusco and Ayacucho.
The last three regions, in the south of Peru, together with Arequipa and Puno, were the epicentre of huge political protests, strikes and road blocks from December to February after Peru’s elected President Pedro Castillo was toppled, imprisoned and replaced by his vice-president Dina Boluarte. The protesters’ demands included:
- The release of Castillo
- New elections
- A national referendum on forming a Constitutional Assembly to replace Peru’s current constitution, which was imposed by former dictator Alberto Fujimori following his self-imposed coup of 1992
Brutal Crackdown on Protests
Needless to say, none of these demands have been met. Instead, Peru’s security forces, including 140,000 mobilised soldiers, unleashed a brutal crackdown that culminated in the deaths of approximately 70 people. A report released by international human rights organization Amnesty International in February drew the following assessment:
“Since the beginning of the massive protests in different areas of the country in December 2022, the Army and National Police of Peru (PNP) have unlawfully fired lethal weapons and used other less lethal weapons indiscriminately against the population, especially against Indigenous people and campesinos (rural farmworkers) during the repression of protests, constituting widespread attacks.”
As soon as possibly next week, an indeterminate number of US military personnel could be joining the fracas. According to the news website La Lupa, the purported goal of their visit is to provide “support and assistance to the Special Operations of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces and National Police of Peru” during two periods spanning a total of seven months: from June 1 to September 30, and from October 1 to December 30, 2023.
The secretary of the Commission for National Defence, Internal Order, Alternative Development and the Fight Against Drugs, Alfredo Azurín, was at pains to stress that there are no plans for the US to set up a military base in Peru and that the entry of US forces “will not affect national sovereignty.” Some opposition congressmen and women begged to differ, arguing that the entry of foreign forces does indeed pose a threat to national sovereignty. They also lambasted the government for passing the resolution without prior debate or consultation with the indigenous communities.
The de facto Boluarte government and Congress are treating the arrival of US troops as a perfectly routine event. And it is true that the US military has long held a presence in Peru. For example, in 2017, U.S. personnel took part in military exercises held jointly with Colombia, Peru and Brazil in the “triple borderland” of the Amazon region. Also, the US Navy operates a biosafety-level 3 biomedical research laboratory close to Lima as well as two other (biosafety-level 2) laboratories in Puerto Maldonado.
But the timing of the operation raising serious questions. After all, Peru is currently under the control of an unelected government that is heavily supported by Washington but overwhelmingly rejected by the Peruvian people. The crackdown on protests in the south of the Peru by the country’s security forces — the same security forces that US military personnel will soon be joining — has led to dozens of deaths. Peru’s Congress is refusing to call new elections in total defiance of public opinion. Just a few days ago, the country’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that some legal scholars have interpreted as essentially criminalising political protest.
As Peru’s civilian institutions fight among themselves, Peru’s armed forces — the last remaining “backbone” in the country, according to Mexican geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife — has taken firm control. And lest we forget, Peru is home to some of the very same minerals that the US military has identified as strategically important to US national security interests, including lithium. Also, as I noted in my June 22, 2021 piece, Is Another Military Coup Brewing in Peru, After Historic Electoral Victory for Leftist Candidate?, while Peru’s largest trading partner is China, its political institutions — like those of Colombia and Chile — remain tethered to US policy interests:
Together with Chile, it’s the only country in South America that was invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was later renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership after Donald Trump withdrew US participation.
Given as much, the rumours of another coup in Peru should hardly come as a surprise. Nor should the Biden administration’s recent appointment of a CIA veteran as US ambassador to Peru, as recently reported by Vijay Prashad and José Carlos Llerena Robles:
Her name is Lisa Kenna, a former adviser to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a nine-year veteran at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a US secretary of state official in Iraq. Just before the election, Ambassador Kenna released a video, in which she spoke of the close ties between the United States and Peru and of the need for a peaceful transition from one president to another.
It seems more than likely that Kenna played a direct role in the not-so-peaceful transition from President Castillo to de facto President Boluarte, having met with Peru’s then-Defence Minister Gustavo Bobbio Rosas on December 6, the day before Pedro Castillo was ousted, to tackle “issues of bilateral interest”.
On a Knife’s Edge
After decades of stumbling from crisis to crisis and government to government, Peru rests on a knife’s edge. When Castillo, a virtual nobody from an Andean backwater who had played an important role in the teachers’ strikes of 2017, rode to power on a crest of popular anger at Peru’s hyper-corrupt establishment parties in June 2021, Peru’s legions of poor and marginalised hoped that positive changes would follow. But it was not to be.
Castillo was always an outsider in Lima and was out of his depth from day one. He had zero control over Congress and failed miserably to overcome rabid right-wing opposition to his government. Even in his first year in office he faced two impeachment attempts. As Manolo De Los Santos wrote in People’s Dispatch, Peru’s largely Lima-based political and business elite could never accept that a former schoolteacher and farmer from the high Andean plains could become president.
On December 7, they finally got what they wanted: Castillo’s impeachment. Just hours before a third impeachment hearing, he declared on national television that he was dissolving Congress and launching an “exceptional emergency government” and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. It was a preemptive act of total desperation from a man who held no sway with the military or judiciary, had zero control over Congress, and had even lost the support of his own party. Hours later, he was impeached, arrested by his own security detail and taken to jail, where he remains to this day.
Castillo may be out of the picture but political instability continues to reign in Peru. The de facto Boluarte government and Congress are broadly despised by the Peruvian people. According to the latest poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP), 78% of Peruvians disapprove of Boluarte’s presidency while only 15% approve. Congress is even less popular, with a public disapproval rate of 91%. Forty-one percent believe that the protests will increase while 26% believe they will remain the same. In the meantime, Peru’s Congress continues to block general elections.
Peru’s “Strategic” Resources
As regular readers know, EU and US interest in Latin America is rising rapidly as the race for lithium, copper, cobalt and other elements essential for the so-called “clean” energy transition heats up. It is a race that China has been winning pretty handily up until now.
Peru is not only one of China’s biggest trade partners in Latin America; it is home to the only port in Latin America that is managed entirely by Chinese capital. And while Peru may not form part of the Lithium Triangle (Bolivia, Argentina and Chile), it does boast significant deposits of the white metal. By one estimate, it is home to the sixth largest deposits of hard-rock lithium in the world. It is also the world’s second largest producer of copper, zinc and silver, three metals that are also expected to play a major role in supporting renewable energy technologies.
In other words, there is a huge amount at stake in how Peru evolves politically as well as the economic and geopolitical alliances it forms. Also, its direct neighbour to the north, Ecuador, is undergoing a major political crisis that is likely to spell the end of the US-aligned Guillermo Lasso government and a handover of power to Rafael Correa’s party and its allies.
And the US government and military have made no secret of their interest in the mineral deposits that countries like Peru hold in their subsoil. In an address to the Washington-based Atlantic Council on Jan 19, Gen. Laura Richardson, head of the U.S. Southern Command, spoke gushingly of Latin America’s rich deposits of “rare earth elements,” “the lithium triangle — Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,” the “largest oil reserves [and] light, sweet crude discovered off Guyana,” Venezuela’s “oil, copper, gold” and the fact that Latin America is home to “31% of the world’s fresh water in this region.”
She also detailed how Washington, together with US Southern Command, is actively negotiating the sale of lithium in the lithium triangle to US companies through its web of embassies, with the goal of “box[ing] out” US adversaries (i.e. China and Russia), concluding with the ominous words: “This region matters. It has a lot to do with national security. And we need to step up our game.”
Which begs the question: is this the first step of the US government and military’s stepping-up-the-game process?
The former president of Bolivia Evo Morales, who knows a thing or two about US interventions in the region, having been on the sharp end of a US-backed right-wing coup in 2019, certainly seems to think so. A few days ago, he tweeted the following message:
The Peruvian Congress’ authorisation for the entry and stationing of US troops for 7 months confirms that Peru is governed from Washington, under the tutelage of the Southern Command.
The Peruvian people are subject to powerful foreign interests mediated by illegitimate powers lacking popular representation.
The greatest challenge for working people and indigenous peoples is to recover their self-determination, their sovereignty and their natural resources.
With this authorization from the Peruvian right, we warn that the criminalization of protest and the occupation of US military forces will consolidate a repressive state that will affect sovereignty and regional peace in Latin America.
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, who refuses to acknowledge Boluarte (whom he calls the “great usurper”) as Peru’s president and has recently faced threats of direct US military intervention in Mexico’s drug wars from US Republican lawmakers, had a message for the US government this week: “[Sending soldiers to Peru] merely maintains an interventionist policy that does not help at all in building fraternal bonds among the peoples of the American continent.”
Unfortunately, the US government does not seem interested, if indeed it ever has been, in building fraternal bonds with the peoples of the American continent. Instead, it is set on upgrading the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century. Its strategic rivals this time around are not Western European nations, which are now little more than US vassals (as a recent paper by the European Council of Foreign Relations, titled “The Art of Vassalisation”, all but admitted), but rather China and Russia.
May 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Illegal Occupation | Latin America, Peru, United States |
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White House Tells Social Media Platforms To Take A “Zero-Tolerance” Stance Against “Hate Speech”
The White House unveiled a strategy to fight antisemitism that involves telling Congress to push social media platforms to be held “accountable” for hate speech.
The 60-page document details four pillars of the strategy which are raising awareness, improving safety for Jewish communities, reversing what they call the normalization of antisemitism, and countering antisemitic discrimination and hate speech.
In a pre-recorded message before the unveiling of the strategy, President Joe Biden described it “a historic step forward” and the “most ambitious and comprehensive US government-led effort to fight antisemitism in American history.”
The document contains over 100 calls to action for legislators and others in society to fight antisemitism, including calling on online platforms to have “zero-tolerance” for hate speech.
The outline involves working with social media platforms heavily.
“We also call on Congress to hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hate-fueled violence, including antisemitism; impose much stronger transparency requirements on online platforms,” the White House said in a statement.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
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The Biden administration has been accused of using a grant program initially created to combat terrorism to crackdown on the speech of conservatives, the Republican Party, and Christians, according to documents obtained by MRC Free Speech America through freedom of information requests.
Under the Biden administration, the Targeted Violence & Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) has awarded public and private institutions almost $40 million to fight “all forms of terrorism and targeted violence.” However, the program has not been targeting actual terrorism. Instead, it has focused on targeting right-leaning organizations through “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives” and other similar seminars.
Source: MRC
The program was created under the Obama administration in 2011. Its plan was titled “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States. The Trump administration paused it for about three years, before the DHS revamped it and renamed it the “Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.”
During his campaign, Biden promised to disband the program. However, the DHS, led by Alejandro Mayorkas, has repurposed it to target specific organizations.
The DHS itself has refused to provide documents revealing details about the program. However, the organizations that received the grants did provide documents.
One of the recipients of the grants was the University of Dayton, which received $352,109 to create the PREVENTS-OH program to combat “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.
A chart used by the grantee and the DHS in a training program puts conservative organizations like the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Republican National Committee, the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and the National Rifle Association in the same category as organizations like The Base and websites like The Daily Stormer.
In the same seminar, President Trump was compared to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, who was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people.
It was also suggested that Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis wanted to start a second Holocaust because in 2021 he proposed a civilian military force to assist the National Guard during emergencies.
In another seminar, Michael Loadentahl, a self-proclaimed member of the organization Antifa, the report alleges, explained how to create fake accounts on social media platforms like Gab, Rumble, and Telegram to infiltrate and destabilize conservative political movements.
In total, the TVTP program has awarded 80 grants, totaling $39,611,999.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | DHS, Obama, United States |
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On the 19th of May, the Financial Times quoted the British Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, stating that the West could face the threat of full-scale war with Russia and China by the end of the decade and proclaimed defence preparation a paramount task for Western countries.
One has to wonder what universe Mr. Wallace and his boss, Rishi Sunak, are living in since Britain is engaged in war with Russia right now, has, with every step, every hostile action, set itself up for a full-scale war, a full-scale catastrophe, which they cannot prevent. Why Britain would go to war with China as well as Russia when China has not threatened it and is oceans away, no one can explain in rational terms. Yet, this is the British rhetoric, the fetishistic parroting of the words of their lord and master, the USA.
Many argue that statements, a war is not happening, that it is something that exits only in the future, are desperate attempts to fool the British people, to lie to them about their government’s intentions and what is coming. Others argue that they are signs that the British government has no sense of reality. But, in the end, one has to conclude that they are both at the same time.
Worse, these statements speak of a government, that seems to think it is untouchable, that the war with Russia will be limited in geographic space to Ukraine, that Britain’s participation in the war against Russia will have no direct consequences for Britain and its people, that Russia will not dare to follow military and political logic and conduct military strikes against Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the British establishment, dreaming of its past, is unable to accept reality, is leading the British people towards disaster, as the gathering storm of war edges ever closer to their shores.
The deluded thinking in Britain is an extension of the same psychosis that grips all the halls of power in the western world, a psychosis that has its roots in the deeply troubled societies which have developed in the west and whose causes will be the subject of study of future social scientists and historians if there are any. In fact, these governments display observable and classical symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders, leading to the complete break with reality that constitutes psychosis. This is a very dangerous state of affairs because someone who is delusional, who has no grip on reality, who cannot make distinctions between reality and imagination or wishful thinking, will make decisions and take actions that are dangerous to everyone around them, in this case, Russia, and beyond, the whole world.
Just after Russia began its Special Military Operation, Britain declared its support for Ukraine along with the rest of NATO and announced it would supply it with weapons and munitions to fight Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, in response, stated that NATO states providing weapons to Ukraine could be hit in strikes.
Ms Zakharova said:
“Do we understand correctly that for the sake of disrupting the logistics of military supplies, Russia can strike military targets on the territory of those NATO countries that supply arms to the Kyiv regime?
“After all, this directly leads to deaths and bloodshed on Ukrainian territory. As far as I understand, Britain is one of those countries.”
The Russian defence ministry, after several attacks inside Russia backed by NATO, has repeatedly said:
“We would like to stress that the direct provoking by London of the Kyiv regime into such activities attacking Russian territory, should there be an attempt to realise them, will immediately lead to our proportional response.”
In April, when the UK announced it was sending depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine, Russia said it would respond and did so, destroying those munitions in Ukraine just after they arrived, and now a radioactive cloud is drifting west towards Europe and the UK. Russian warnings of the danger of this happening were ignored.
On May 11, Ben Wallace announced a further act of aggression against Russia with the decision to send Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, which have since been used to attack civilian centres in Russia. Again, Russia stated clearly that there would be a military response to this action.
On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued another warning, on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region, an openly terrorist action backed by the UK and the other NATO states. From Vientiane, he stated,
“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”
Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,
“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”
But Russia can strike using its conventional weapons as well, against which the UK has no defence whatsoever.
Still, the British attitude towards these warnings is to call on the magic of “legality” as if they can weave a protective cloak around the island with incantations. Yet, everyone knows that to use incantations to ward off danger, the formula used must have mojo or force; otherwise the words have no effect.
In 2022, for example, then Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, hit back, after Russia suggested it could target British military installations over its support for Ukraine, by branding the Kremlin’s claim “unlawful.” Wallace, Sunak, and others have repeated this claim multiple times.
Raab, and the rest, can only be right if Britain had maintained its neutrality in the war between Ukraine and Russia. But, as we know, this is really a war by the USA, Britain and their NATO mafia against Russia and has been all along. Ukraine is the present battlefield. So, for Britain to claim that it has maintained neutrality is an absurdity.
A neutral state violates neutrality by breaching its obligation to remain impartial, to not participate in the conflict. It violates neutrality by supplying warships, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, either directly or indirectly, to a belligerent, by engaging its own military forces, or by supplying military advisors to a party to the armed conflict, by allowing belligerent use of neutral territory as a military base, or for the storage of war material or passage of belligerent troops or munitions in neutral territory, by furnishing troops to a belligerent, or providing or transmitting military intelligence on behalf of a belligerent are also examples of violations of neutrality.
A State’s neutrality ends when the State becomes a party to an armed conflict, or, in other words, a belligerent. A State becomes a belligerent under the law of neutrality by either declaring war; or participating in hostilities to a significant extent, or engages in systematic or substantial violations of its duties of impartiality and non-participation.
Britain meets all the requirements of a co-belligerent, that is, of a party to the war with Russia; it not only supplies munitions and weapon systems to Ukraine with the objective of attacking Russia and Russian forces in Ukraine it has a direct role in directing the war against Russia, including sending military officers and soldiers to advise and operate with the Ukrainian forces, by preventing any peace negotiations – we remember the action of Boris Johnson just as Ukraine and Russia were about to conclude a peace settlement – by the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Britain and transporting them to the front, by supplying the Ukrainian forces with reconnaissance and intelligence data, actively sending aircraft close to the war zone for this purpose, by providing communications systems, by providing financial aid to Ukraine at the same imposing economic warfare measure on Russia, euphemistically termed “sanctions. These conditions apply to all the NATO allies, of course, but Britain’s role is an especially egregious one.
In fact, Britain’s aggression against Russia began much earlier than 2022. Britain, as part of NATO, supported the insurgency in the Caucasus region in the mid-1990s. Britain took part in the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, part of the strategy to attack Russia, eliminating a potential Russian ally, just as Hitler did in 1941. The Georgian attack on Russian forces in 2008 was also supported by NATO.
All through this period, the UK government and media put out a constant stream of propaganda against Russia, culminating in the wild claims by the British that Russia tried to use novichok nerve poison to kill two Russian citizens, the Skripals, in the UK. That incident had one objective, to prepare the minds of the British people for war with Russia. That no one has seen or heard from the Skripals for several years now, that Britain rejects Russia’s right to meet with them to see if they are all right, is never mentioned in the West. They have disappeared, their fate unknown, two expendable pieces on the chessboard of war.
Lastly, Russia claims, with some evidence to back up their claims, that the UK was involved, with the US and other NATO nations, in the attack on the NordStream Pipeline, an act of war against both Russia and Germany, though the Germans, still occupied by US forces, are required to accept this humiliation and keep quiet.
So British claims that Russia has no legal right to retaliate against it are absurd. Britain, as with all the NATO countries, cannot claim to have a neutral status in the war. It has become in law and in fact a party to the war.
It follows that any action taken by Russia against the UK to force the UK to stop its assistance to Ukraine and end its participation in the war against Russia will be legitimate under international law and justified under the ancient military doctrine that a nation cannot suffer the attack of another without retaliating to stop the attack and making sure that another attack will not follow.
The NATO gang’s claim of acting in “collective self defence,” a phrase Ben Wallace likes to use a lot, so that they can claim to maintain a neutral status, is not a valid or logical one and does not apply. It is clear that the USA and NATO have been planning an attack on Russia for a long time, and the Ukraine war is a part of this attack. The conspiracy to commit aggression has been developed over decades. Part of the preparation for the war was the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine and the installation in its place of a puppet government that was then used to attack the Donbass and Russia itself. They now openly admit that the Minsk Accords were a ruse to stall Russia while they prepared the Ukrainian forces for war against Russia.
Further, they cannot rely on Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, since that clause can only be invoked if there is an unprovoked Russian attack on a NATO country. But when a NATO country attacks Russia, and here we have them all joining in the attack, it is the aggressor and therefore cannot claim to be are acting in self-defence. It is also important to bear in mind Article I of the NATO Treaty, since it requires NATO to act in conformity with the UN Charter. It states
Article 1
The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
But the NATO nations have done the exact opposite. They have blocked peace at every turn and push Ukraine to keep the war going. Their forces are directly involved. They have even attempted to expand their military bloc by inviting Finland and Sweden to join the war alliance, in order to increase the forces available to them, with one purpose, to prosecute the war against Russia. They now openly state their objective is to destroy Russia. So, the NATO nations are not only active co-belligerents in the war, they are, in fact, the main protagonists of the enemy camp that Russia faces. They are, therefore, all legitimate targets.
But is an attack likely, and what will its nature be, and what will be the consequences? These are questions only the Russian General Staff can know and foresee. We can only speculate. But speculation can be useful, especially for the British people to realise the danger their criminal government is putting them in.
Medvedev warns again of the dangers of nuclear war, but Russia has no need to resort to that to retaliate against Britain. Conventional stand-off weapons will be more effective, and what can the UK do if a strike on military airfields takes place, on port facilities, to stop the shipment of weapons, on army bases where Ukrainian soldiers are trained, on warehouses storing munitions and weapons marked for shipment to Ukraine, or eliminating the UK Trident nuclear submarine force in Scotland, or any number of other targets they could select? They can do nothing.
The National and Defence Strategies Research Group based in the UK stated in a report on Britain’s air defences in 2016, that,
“Since the withdrawal from service of the Bloodhound missile system in the 1980s, the UK’s Air Defence posture has diminished to mainly a homeland benign airspace policing and point defence posture for deployed forces. The UK no longer has a comprehensive, integrated, or robustly layered short to long-range Air Defence capability, nor a credible or enduring operational capacity.”
Nothing has changed since then, except to get worse. In other words, the UK is defenceless against modern Russian stand-off weapons.
I can remember, as a boy, my mother taking me several times on a bus through London. It must have been 1955 or so and I can remember mile upon mile of burnt-out blackened buildings, as far as the eye could see, especially in east London where entire districts were levelled by German bombs. The country, despite its heroic RAF fighter pilots, could not stop the bombing and then missile attacks which went on for five years.
The British government assured the people before that war, that all would be well, that they would have peace in their time. But they lied to the people then, as they are lying to them now. Britain was never the same after that war. It never really recovered from it. Once again, the British government, ever saluting the masters in Washington, leads the British people into a dangerous war, which they were never asked about, and which they do not want. It lies to them about the causes, it lies to them about the fighting, and it lies to them about the dangers they face, placing them in a distant future, and hides from them the consequences of its actions. The British people must be warned. Britain is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. They are predictable and they will be catastrophic.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | NATO, UK, United States |
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Leaked secret US documents have revealed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been planning to escalate the current confrontation with Moscow by invading Russian villages, targeting Russia beyond the Donbass and the current conflict zone with longe-range missiles and even blowing up the Druzhba pipeline which provides NATO member Hungary with Russian oil, according to the Washington Post. Kiev’s plans for further exacerbating the crisis cross a number of red lines and should be a problem for Washington too, as US President Biden has already made clear to Zelensky that he and his Western allies want neither “to go to war with Russia” nor “a third world war”. However, paradoxically, the US seems to be pushing for precisely such escalation.
The possible scenarios are quite worrisome. In addition to the aforementioned developments, according to the same leaks, Ukraine was also planning to attack Russian forces in Syria, which would mean making the Eastern European conflict spill into the Middle East and thus risk spiraling out of control across Western Asia and subsequently maybe even the Caucasus, too. Some analysts have already pointed out that the Russian-Ukraine confrontation potentially intersects with the South Caucasus, which is already the stage for today’s Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
According to Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’ report, countries in the region such as Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, led by Poland are pressuring Zelensky to find a compromise and end the crisis, even by resigning himself if needed.
The conflict had been transitioning into a protracted phase and the US seems to be encouraging Kiev to intensify its hostilities along the whole front line. However any kind of trench warfare or proxy attrition war is extremely harmful for Ukraine – and would not be such bad news for Russia, who can go on with a minimal offensive strategy further exhausting Ukrainian forces.
A major problem, from an American perspective, is that the Ukrainian political elite and its military leaders seem to be increasingly inclined to ignore the advice and instructions of their Western benefactors. Besides the aforementioned bold plans against Russia, there have been other signs of it: Zelensky refused to withdraw troops from Artemovsk, for example, which resulted in Ukrainian defeat there. Kiev’s political and military elite itself are divided however, and a rising number of voices are reconsidering Zelensky’s ideas about “reconquering Crimea” and openly talking about compromising.
Moreover, in the US itself, according to Hersh’s intelligence sources, “some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president” and he “is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence”, while CIA Director William Burns “has come around in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies.” This indicates that there is division within Washington’s “deep state” also over the issue.
Calls for escalation, both in Kiev and in Washington, might also be a sign of desperation. There clearly is no consensus in the United States’ own establishment regarding the matter of aid to Ukraine itself – Republican lawmakers are opposing it also due to the debt ceiling now and former President Donald Trump, who is still a Republican favorite, has promised to end it if re-elected. Corruption scandals abound in both US and Ukraine and recent reports about a $3 billion Ukraine aid “error” are part of the latest one. The truth is that American weapons’s manufacturers as well as Western ones have been profiting from prolonging the conflict while also selling obsolete military equipment. Moreover, Zelensky’s rebellious “stubbornness” can only increase such division within Washington and across the transatlantic alliance, as seems to be already happening in Eastern and Central Europe. All of that creates a very dangerous and unstable situation which is quite unpredictable.
Harvard political scientist Graham Ellison has warned that Western countries are trying to solve their own problems by escalating the Eastern European crisis and should it spiral out of control this could lead to dangerous war between the great powers involved.
The Western air defense systems Kiev is getting are in itself, for a number of reasons, not enough to protect Ukraine’s airspace, as I wrote. Neither are F-16s, for that matter. So far, Washington has been showing itself to be really willing to fight “to the last Ukrainian” (as in the cruel joke which Biden almost paraphrased in a December statement). Further escalation would show a willingness to fight if not literally to “the last European”, at least to something quite near it in terms of the damage to local economies and the migration/refugee crisis. It remains to be seen whether Europe in general and particularly Poland, Hungary and other nations in the region happen to also have a similar inclination – and for how long.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine, United States |
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The stability of oil supplies from Kazakhstan to the global market relies on transit through Russia, the country’s ambassador to the US, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, has stated. He added that any disruption to flows caused by sanctions could trigger a dire scenario.
“We proceed from the mutual interest of all parties, the interest in the stability of the global market, in the stability of supplies. This is vital both for the functioning of our [Kazakh] economy and for the entire global economy,” the envoy told RIA Novosti on Thursday on the sidelines of the Trans-Caspian Forum in Washington.
When asked whether he sees any risk that sanctions could make it difficult or impossible for Kazakhstan to transit oil, the diplomat described it as “some kind of apocalyptic scenario.”
Kazakhstan supplies oil to the global market via one of the world’s largest pipelines, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).
A multinational project, the CPC involves Russia, Kazakhstan and a consortium of leading oil companies. The pipeline system mainly collects crude from the large oil fields of western Kazakhstan, but also from Russia. Its total capacity is over 1 million barrels of oil per day, which is 2.3% of global seaborne crude trade.
The CPC delivers around 1.2 million barrels of crude oil daily from Kazakhstan to Europe, and for subsequent shipment to the US. The pipeline’s operations were interrupted last year by storm damage to equipment at a Black Sea terminal, with the disruption sparking concerns of a global supply crisis.
According to Ashikbayev, the CPC remains an important project for Kazakhstan, accounting for 80% of the country’s crude oil exports.
Kazakhstan has strengthened its oil and gas ties with Russia despite the threat of secondary sanctions from the US and EU.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Kazakhstan, United States |
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By Ahmed Adel | May 26, 2023
On May 22, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the country may be unable to service its debt by June 1 unless Congress raises its ceiling or suspends it. In turn, President Joe Biden ruled out the declaration of default. At the same time, despite all the predictions of doom and gloom, the US could benefit from a default, especially to wreak havoc on the international economy and competitors.
In the US, the amount of public debt is limited by law. Currently, it has reached $31.4 trillion. It is up to the US Congress to raise the national debt ceiling, but this year the issue became a major contention between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican party, with a majority in the House of Representatives, set a condition: it will vote to raise the ceiling if the Democratic government accepts significant cuts in budget spending.
Specifically, the Republicans propose cutting tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and the installation of solar panels, as well as reducing public spending on the repayment of educational loans. For Democrats, if they want to win the 2024 presidential election on their terms, these conditions are unacceptable.
No economic reasons for default prevent raising the public debt ceiling. Still, there are political reasons. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives want to bring greater accountability to the Biden Administration, which has been making economic decisions without consulting Congress. The Republicans hope to catch the Biden Administration, the Federal Treasury, the State Department, and the Defense Department violating American law.
There is a low chance of default in Washington, but this does not rule it out entirely because a default can be used as a financial weapon capable of unleashing a global economic crisis which will also affect the US’s main competitors. It is much easier and more politically legitimate to default in the context of increasing global military and political tensions. For this reason, it cannot be entirely ruled out that Biden will pursue such a path.
Likewise, the US could use default to influence other countries. Despite the enormous debt figure of $31.4 trillion, the external debt is only $7 trillion. Consequently, some countries —which Washington will want to target economically and geopolitically— may be the victims of this default.
Even so, the main thing for the US is not to let doubts about the sustainability of its economy and debt loom. If a default occurs, it will be more difficult for the US to obtain loans.
For this reason, the probability of default is low because many tools exist to avoid it. Article 14 of the Constitution could be invoked, which states that the US debt cannot be called into question. Also, the Federal Reserve could easily double its balance sheet and buy all foreign debt.
On May 24, the US House of Representatives speaker, Kevin McCarthy, acknowledged that the Republicans and the White House maintain substantial discrepancies on the increase in the public debt limit requested by the Biden administration. The senior official expects to negotiate with the president daily until an agreement is reached.
Even if Republicans and Democrats overcome the impasse, it is recalled that in 2011, the last time the two parties had such fiscal odds, the most severe turmoil happened after a deal was struck, which saw shares fall the most steeply since the 2008 financial crisis. This was also amid worries about the impact of the spending cuts made to get the agreement and the implications of a downgrade in America’s bond rating by one credit rating agency.
Fitch Ratings on May 24 put the US on a negative watch – the first step toward a downgrade in the country’s rating by the major credit ratings firm. The credit agency cited “increased political partisanship” and weak governance compared to other countries that hold its top rating.
“The brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, failure of the US authorities to meaningfully tackle medium-term fiscal challenges that will lead to rising budget deficits and a growing debt burden signal downside risks to US creditworthiness,” the company said.
All this signals that the US is on the economic brink. What is most alarming, though, is that if the US was to default, it might not do so quietly and calmly but instead use an opportunity to bring down the world economy to hurt enemies and partners alike.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics | United States |
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examined independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s 2018 tax returns on December 24, 2022, which was a Saturday and Christmas Eve. It was soon after Taibbi published the first batch of Twitter Files, internal Twitter documents exposing how federal government agencies pressured Twitter to censor content.
The timing raised eyebrows and many believed it to be an act of retaliation for sounding the alarm on government-backed censorship.
The House Judiciary Committee obtained the details after the IRS was criticized for visiting Taibbi’s home in March about the tax filing, on the same day the journalist testified before Congress about the Twitter Files.
In a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, chair of the Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said the documents the agency provided “raise more questions than they answer.”
The IRS defended the review by saying it was trying to determine that Taibbi was not the victim of identity fraud. It further claimed that in 2019, it wrote to Taibbi to explain that there was a discrepancy in his 2018 tax return. However, the documents obtained by the committee show that the IRS opened a review of the tax return on Christmas Eve last year.
Additionally, Taibbi did not owe the IRS. In fact, he was owed a refund, according to the documents obtained by the Committee.
“The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019 — nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return — asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed,” Jordan wrote.
“The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020.
“However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return — that is until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later.
“The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.”
Jordan added: “The IRS’s production shows that the IRS opened its examination of Mr. Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on December 24, 2022. Not only was this date Christmas Eve and a Saturday, but it also happened to be three weeks after he published the first Twitter Files detailing government abuses and the same day that Mr. Taibbi published the ninth segment of the Twitter Files, detailing how federal government agencies ‘from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA’ coordinated to censor and coerce speech on various social media platforms.”
In March, Taibbi said that an IRS agent visited his home in New Jersey and left a note telling him to contact the agency.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, IRS, United States |
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Rep. Chris Smith wants an investigation into the World Health Organizations plans to surveil speech and more
If you’ve been following our reporting on the issue, you’ll already know that the new World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic prevention initiative, the Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET), recommends using “social listening surveillance systems” to identify “misinformation.” But as more people are learning about how unelected bodies are being used to suppress speech and potentially override sovereignty, it’s starting to get more pushback.
According to documents from the UN agency, PRET aims to “guide countries in pandemic planning” and work to “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The PRET document describes misinformation as a “health threat,” and refers to it as an “infodemic.”
“Infodemic is the overabundance of information – accurate or not – which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities. The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness,” the document states.
However, it continues to recommend invasive methods of countering the spread of misinformation.
“Establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation,” the WHO wrote in the PRET document.
“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs in risk communications principles and encourage their application.
Communication should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups.
“New tools and approaches for social listening have been developed using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media (such as the Platform EARS developed by WHO).”
The document also recommends testing these tactics during “acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.”
“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza. This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies,” it explains.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is holding a Congressional hearing on the WHO’s pandemic accord.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently met with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, to discuss the accord and the “critical role” of the US “in global health security.”
In his opening remarks at the World Health Assembly, Ghebreyesus said: “I urge you to deliver the pandemic accord on time, as a generational commitment. The next pandemic will not wait for us. We must be ready.”
The Accord’s preliminary document, zero draft, was first published in February.
In March, the Biden administration’s envoy at the negotiations, Pamela Hamamoto, said that the administration is “committed to the Pandemic Accord, to form a major component of the global health architecture for generations to come.”
“The American people have a right to know exactly what the Biden Administration is negotiating at the WHO, especially as the President remains silent and fails to reassure us that he will protect our Constitution from bureaucrats at this troubled United Nations body,” Rep. Smith said.
Smith is particularly concerned that the Accord could undermine the sovereignty of the US over its healthcare infrastructure.
“The zero-draft WHO pandemic treaty starts off with very harsh criticism of the United States and the international community by calling it a ‘catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic,’” Rep. Smith noted. “Article 4 of the treaty pays lip service to sovereignty and then completely overcomes that lip service by saying, ‘provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries,’ which empowers the WHO to step in and prescribe what each country would do.”
During the hearing, Smith plans to ask Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the contents of the accord’s zero draft.
“Under absolutely no circumstances should the Biden Administration surrender American sovereignty to the World Health Organization and allow the voice of the American people and consent of the governed to be subjugated to dictates of an agenda-driven global administrative bureaucracy,” Smith insisted.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States, WHO |
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Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering U.S. intelligence assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can’t win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed several dozen U.S. soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known to be calling missile and artillery strikes in the war.
Just days after his April 13 arrest, local Boston television news stations were broadcasting Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record. He was suspended in high school for “threatening” language, don’t-cha know?
It’s like the old joke about the principal telling a kid that “this is going on your permanent record,” except it’s now reality. If only Teixeira could have cut a deal like Bart Simpson, we wouldn’t have to be having this discussion right now.
What does Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record have to do with his revelations about official lies and secrets about America’s involvement in a war with the world’s other nuclear superpower?
Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. A whole number between -1 and 1.
There’s no journalistic value in the story that Teixeira was suspended in high school for “threatening” language (he said he was describing a video game at the time). It has no relationship to the story about Ukrainian war lies, and has as much journalistic value as my own high school disciplinary record (or yours). Such dirty laundry in decades past used to be relegated to discussions of celebrity divorces in supermarket tabloids.
But it has a lot of value if your goal is to engage in a general character-assassination using compliant media.
So it brings up a couple of questions: Why is the news media reporting this? And how did they get this information?
The second question is the easiest to answer: The U.S. government’s executive branch careerists gave it directly to them. It was part of the official filing by (now former) U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins asking the federal district court to keep Teixeira in jail until trial.
And one must wonder how that made it into the official filing. How is this relevant to the legal need to deny Teixeira bail and keep him in jail until trial, if the worry was that he wouldn’t return to court for his trial or would publicly reveal more official state secrets?
Again, it doesn’t. At all.
The purpose of including Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record—one that was confidential and which could only be obtained through court warrants or Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance—in the filing was to engage in a deliberate and planned public character-assassination of Teixeira through compliant media organs.
Rollins—or more likely, her handlers in Washington—wanted to destroy this young man publicly by unnecessarily releasing his private sins to the press in an attempt to distract the media from exposing the official lies that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and that U.S. combat troops are not present on the ground. Plus, as a bonus, it serves the double-purpose of poisoning the available pool of unbiased jurors in advance of trial and making a public example to deter future whistle-blowers.
Say what you will about Rollins, the Feds assigned this role to someone who has hands-on experience in this specific task. Rollins resigned Friday, May 19 from her role as U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts because an Inspector-General Report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed she’d done the same thing to a candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney (an elected state position). According to the Inspector General report on Rollins, “Rollins assisted a candidate in a partisan political election and sought to influence the election by, among other things, disclosing non-public, sensitive DOJ information to the press.”
In other words, she conspired to engage in a media smear of a public person using confidential, non-public information.
Sound familiar?
But there’s an important difference between both the Teixeira case (and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax) and the local candidate Rollins was accused of smearing. Disclosing private information to defame a candidate in a local election is a no-no, unless he is an enemy of the Deep State. But if the Deep State wants to character-assassinate someone, whether holder of the highest office in the land or all the way down to some lowly Air National Guard private, then that’s just spiffy.
Rollins suffered no negative consequences from smearing Teixeira. Only when smearing someone who wasn’t an enemy of the Deep State did she face an inquiry.
Now back to the original question about CBS-Boston and other media reporting that Teixeira was suspended during high school. Why are they reporting something that has no news value? Because word was put out to destroy his character in order to distract from his revelations about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they used compliant media networks to do just that.
Some time after the defection of Soviet spy Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1962, the former KGB officer suggested to his CIA handler that National Review founder and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley help edit the book he was working on, and that it be serialized in Reader’s Digest. It was a logical request. Conservative icon Buckley was known to be a CIA veteran (and had formed National Review around his Langley friends), and with circulation in the millions Reader’s Digest was probably the highest circulation periodical with CIA assets on staff. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the height of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, where agents infiltrated and controlled hundreds of media corporations and journalists, respectively, toward the CIA’s stated goals of fighting the Cold War against the Soviet empire. Operation Mockingbird is a campaign still officially denied by the CIA, so its activities can be said to have never been completely shut down, even if they were suspended for a few years.
The reforms of the 1970s imposed some nominal restraints via executive order upon the rogue CIA (along with the FBI) in the reforms of the post-Vietnam era. After the contentious Church and Pike Committee hearings, CIA officials publicly promised they weren’t infiltrating media and poaching journalists as spies and influence-peddlers. But even by the mid-1980s, CIA chiefs were publicly stating they might have to do so again in the future.
The restraints came off the IC (“Intelligence Community”) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks with Congress passing the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s hard to say when the IC began to focus more upon the U.S. domestic media than foreign media, but it’s safe to say it was having a measurable impact upon domestic media by the early 2010s. It was at that point even media traditionally antagonistic to government power had been transformed from watchdogs into Deep State lapdogs.
The “Deep State” can be loosely defined as executive branch careerist bureaucrats and their nominally private sector but government-funded “NGO” contractors who don’t have to face elections or the voters, and who make policy outside of directives from elected officials in the legislative branch and the president.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government used to curate a list of the “Captive Nations” who were under the thrall of the Soviet empire based upon subservience to the Soviet imperial interests. Today, much of the U.S. corporate media is obviously captive to the American empire’s intelligence behemoth in its recent expansion of Operation Mockingbird. I’ve come to call it the “captive media,” in homage to the Cold War-era “Captive Nations” terminology.
The last hurrah of journalistic independence and antagonism to power for The Washington Post was the Edward Snowden affair in 2013. After Snowden’s revelations, the Post never seriously challenged the Deep State again, including its Big Pharma subsidiary, nor have they engaged in any significant actions against the government’s other alliances with giant corporations. The New York Times had been captured by the Deep State as early as 2002 when Judith Miller was acting as stenographer for lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Times and Post both became de facto state assets, along with the five giant U.S. media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Comcast, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and Fox-Newscorp), and all today routinely condemn enemies of the national security state and Big Pharma rather than expose the excesses of those powerful special interest groups within the executive branch of government. Likewise, many social media and tech corporations have been revealed by the #TwitterFiles to be adjuncts of what journalist Matt Taibbi accurately labels the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
One key “tell,” to use a poker term, to identify a likely captive media organ is to observe media character-assassination of a person threatening the primacy of the military-industrial complex. This label of captive media is all the more likely to be accurate when the character assassination doesn’t even address the newsworthy revelations or political positions of that person, and when all the other captive media organs are chiming in chorus with the same condemnation.
The Teixeira case is instructive on the Deep State’s penetration of U.S. media. The modus operandi of the Deep State is to distract from their own corruption by smearing anyone who exposes them or opposes them, and to publicly ruin someone in a key government position who expresses intolerable levels of heterodoxy from the official narrative. The latter was the reason for smearing presidential candidate Donald Trump with the gamut of their arsenal: he was an apex-level racist, a Russian asset, probably an anti-Semite, a threat to democracy, etc.
All this is not to say that Donald Trump was a good president. He wasn’t, and his politics were seriously deficient from a libertarian perspective on many fronts. But he wasn’t enough on “Team Deep State” to avoid the careerists in the executive branch conspiring with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring him down with multiple lies, as the Durham Report makes eminently clear.
None of the Russia-collusion hoax lies against Trump were true, but truth—like the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth—was immaterial to the issue. One of my favorite podcasts used to be Unfilter, and one of the libertarian hosts revealingly noted back before the podcast went dark, “Trump is not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.” This distinction is highly significant. A liar expects you to believe his lies, but to a bullshitter both the truth and your level of belief in his lies are irrelevant. A bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe him; the only important thing is how you react to his lies. Trump was—and remains—an expert-level bullshitter. He can trigger the corporate media into giving him free press coverage constantly; the CNN Town Hall spectacle with Trump serves as the most recent hilarious example. Everything he says is to get a reaction, not to reveal some truth.
That’s the Deep State’s working model right now. They don’t care if you believe them. All that matters is your emotional reaction: to hate Donald Trump, to hate Jack Teixeira, and to hate anyone else they believe is a threat to their power and their agenda. They’re confident they can dig up dirt on every person with their surveillance panopticon, and can find enough sin on anyone to ruin any heterodox person publicly. They’ve taken the Orwellian “two minutes of hate” and perfected it, treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a roadmap rather than a warning.
That’s why my working thesis on media corporations is that any company which focuses upon personal attacks rather than the relevant issues to journalism and public policy, especially if the personal attacks coincide with the official Deep State narrative (and they usually do), they’re likely among the captive media.
This also works to some degree for individuals, even if they’re not explicit agents of the Deep State. Anyone who hates a political figure—whether Donald Trump, Ron Paul, or Joe Biden—based upon personal characteristics rather than public positions and routinely resorts to baseless smears of being a racist, an anti-Semite or a foreign agent is probably compromised (or at the very least, a toxic person) whose opinions are worth ignoring entirely.
It should go without saying Americans can’t trust the captive media, of whom it could be accurately said that truth and factual accuracy are irrelevant. The long-running Russia-collusion hoax is but the latest example exposed. There’s a long list of official lies: cloth masks stop transmission of COVID-19, the vaccine stops transmission of the virus, gas attacks in Syria, Ghaddafi’s imminent genocide in Libya, all the way back to Judith Miller. And those are just a handful of hundreds of examples.
The good news is that The New York Times and Washington Post‘s circulation reach new lows every month, as do the ratings of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. CNN’s ratings hilariously fell below NewsMax last week.
Lies don’t sell well.
So look for the Deep State to infiltrate ever-more media outlets in the future as their lies and captive media platforms lose audience and, as a result, the impact of the captive legacy media wanes. Those of us opposing the surveillance panopticon and the perpetual warfare state will need to use both the patterns described above and leaked truths to reveal the captive media, as they are taken over.
The Jack Teixeira and #TwitterFiles revelations are but the latest in a line of exposures of official lies beginning with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner. There will be others.
It’s also encouraging to hear the U.S. House of Representatives is holding at least some tentative hearings on the weaponization of the executive branch in the election cycle. Liberty-loving individuals need to encourage more of those hearings, and a much deeper-dive into revealing their secrets, followed by legislation that would (if not outright abolish) at least re-impose some limits upon the “Intelligence Community.”
Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer published in more than twenty periodicals, holds a master degree in economics from Boston College and is communications director for the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, CNN, FBI, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, United States |
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Black Lives Matter is spending money at double the rate it takes in revenue as donations to the activist group plummet and management costs rise, causing its asset base to shrink.
Donations to BLM’s Global Network Foundation tumbled to less than $9.3 million in its latest fiscal year, ended on June 30, down a staggering 88% from the preceding 12 months, according to state tax filings. Revenue was even lower, at $8.5 million, amid investment losses. The group’s spending totaled over $17 million, or twice as much as it took in.
The documents were first obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, showing that the financial bonanza that BLM reaped during its 2020 protests against police brutality is now dwindling. Net assets dropped 28% in the latest fiscal year, declining to $30.2 million.
Part of the problem is that even as the foundation throttles back its activities – expenses for “program services” plunged 65% from a year earlier, to $11.5 million – it’s spending even more on management. Those costs rose 36% last year to $5.1 million.
The group’s leaders have also been accused of siphoning off donations for their personal gain. A sister organization, Black Lives Matter Grassroots, claimed in a lawsuit that foundation leader Shalomyah Bowers diverted $10 million for his own use. His predecessor, co-founder Patrisse Cullors, resigned in May 2021 after being accused of living a lavish lifestyle on BLM’s wealth. She reportedly purchased four homes for a combined $3.2 million while heading the group.
The Cullors family continues to benefit financially from BLM. The documents showed that her brother, graffiti artist Paul Cullors, received $140,000 in compensation last year in his role as “head of security.” In addition, his security firm was paid more than $750,000. Filings for the previous fiscal year showed that the foundation paid a company owned by Damon Turner, father of Patrisse Cullors’ child, nearly $970,000 for “live production, design and media” services.
An auditors’ review of the group’s finances reportedly found that Bowers’ company had been paid nearly $1.7 million over the preceding two years for “management and consulting services.”
Cicley Gay was brought in as the BLM foundation’s chairwoman in April 2022, at least partly to help sort out the group’s finances. She reportedly had difficulties managing her own finances, filing for bankruptcy protection from creditors three times between 2005 and 2016.
Cullors and two other activists launched the BLM movement in 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed black teenager Trayvon Martin during a February 2012 scuffle while serving as a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida.
BLM raked in donations from Microsoft, Amazon and other corporations in the summer of 2020, after the killing of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd by police sparked a wave of protests around the country and overseas. Cullors referred to the huge cash influx as “white guilt money.” Many of the demonstrations escalated into riots, leaving many Americans injured and dead and causing billions of dollars in property damage.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | BLM, United States |
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