Who is delusional?
By Gilbert Doctorow | May 18, 2023
Over the past several months, I have seen the word “delusional” applied to those, like myself, who bring nonconformist, non-mainstream news and views about Russia and the Ukraine war to the reading public. Language is constantly evolving, and the shop-worn label “Putin stooge” has now been replaced by this more generalized but similarly derogatory ad hominem labeling.
Allow me then to ask whether it is not the accusers who are truly “delusional” by insisting on a Washington narrative that is daily being ground into the dirt, as are Germany’s Leopard tanks and America’s Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine by technically superior Russian military hardware.
This military come-uppance is a story in itself. I involuntarily think back over a chance meeting I had four years ago with Russian-Americans during a tourist visit I made to a small and picturesque town in the Schwaebisch region of southern Germany with its typical half-timbered houses on the main square. We struck up a conversation while shopping in a souvenir store and this dentist was glowing with pride for his new Fatherland. Somehow the discussion turned to the newly announced strategic weapons systems that the Kremlin claimed had passed testing and were on their way to serial production. The dentist was beside himself with chuckles, insisting that this was all pure fabrication, pure propaganda and that Russia was incapable of designing and manufacturing any weapon system that could pose a threat to the good old USA.
But that ridicule for things Russian is a subject for another day. I will speak here first about the delusional framing and implementation of U.S. foreign policy today that is costing the United States more dearly in prestige and influence globally than anything that Donald Trump and his ‘diamond in the rough’ Secretary of State Pompeo accomplished during his presidency. And I will direct attention to one face in the vast group portrait of world leaders, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
Tokayev is the president of Kazakhstan and in recent months was being courted by the U.S. State Department in the hope and expectation that Kazakhstan could be induced to split with Russia and join the American team of countries sanctioning Moscow over its ‘war of aggression’ in Ukraine. Indeed, Secretary of State Blinken paid him a visit to woo or threaten him to follow the U.S. lead and this was reported enthusiastically by American mainstream media.
This U.S. policy can only be described as “delusional” insofar as it takes no cognizance of who is Tokayev and what are the realities of the geopolitical environment of Kazakhstan. The policy is based on willful ignorance of the counselors who formulated it, and that in turn is based on the assumption of America’s superior strength and ability to get its way by hook or by crook wherever in the world and whenever it so wishes.
Russian diplomacy is more discerning.
On 9 May, Tokayev was on the Red Square reviewing stand along with all the other presidents of the Central Asian republics. Together with them and with President Vladimir Putin, he then walked to the Alexander Gardens to place a red carnation before the eternal flame monument to the Unknown Soldier. That may have been picked up accidentally by one or another Western television broadcaster. What was not shown in the West was the side trip arranged for Tokayev to the town of Rzhevsk where he could pay tribute to the memory of his uncle, for whom he is named, Kassym Tokayev, who died in the Battle of Rzhev as a Red Army soldier and is buried there. That visit was broadcast on Russian and on Kazakh state television. Tokayev had no choice but to go, and his people had no choice but to see the historical connection with Moscow in the fight against Nazi Germany.
Last night there was another video of Tokayev on Russian television. He was shown descending from his plane in Beijing, where he is joined by all the other heads of state of Central Asia in a group meeting with the Chinese leadership. We were shown his tête-à-tête meeting with a senior official of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, conducted in Mandarin, without translators. As anyone can easily learn from his Wikipedia entry, from 1970 Tokayev studied Chinese in his undergraduate years at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and in his final year there underwent training courses at the Soviet embassy in China for six months. He then served in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1983 continued his language training at the Beijing Language Institute. He was later posted to the Soviet embassy in Beijing and was promoted to successively higher responsibilities there.
My point is that Tokayev knows the map of his region very well. He and his country find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They do not have much wiggle room. Somehow these facts of life elude America’s delusional policy makers.
I could go on about how the ignorance and complacency of high officials in the Biden administration result in self-defeating policies elsewhere. One example of what I mean occurred just a couple of days ago when similarly delusional behavior was shown by America’s messenger boy within the European Commission. Josep Borrell succeeded in alienating his hosts in India and humiliating himself by insisting that India curtail its purchases of Russian oil lest the EU ban imports of refined petroleum products, mainly diesel fuel, from India. The consequence of his ignorant warning that contradicted EU law on the subject was Borrell’s exclusion from the trade talks that the EU delegation was in Delhi to conduct.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
NATO Is Panicking After Russia’s Kinzhal Hypersonic Missiles Smashed Kiev’s Patriots
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 18, 2023
The fake news that circulated earlier this month alleging that Kiev’s Patriots shot down one of Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles has become even more ridiculous in the days after since they’re now claiming that another six were supposedly downed during a recent strike. The Mainstream Media’s (MSM) laundering of these lies isn’t just due to them taking everything their Ukrainian proxies say at face value, but even includes their own military experts actively contributing to this disinformation campaign.
The US’ Patriots lack the technical capabilities to track and intercept hypersonic projectiles, but that isn’t anything for them to be embarrassed about since there doesn’t presently exist any air defense system in the world that could do this. The West’s problem is therefore one of perceptions, however, since the MSM hyped up their deployment to Ukraine to the point where the public expected that former Soviet Republic to become invulnerable to any Russian strikes.
The Kremlin was aware of the West’s soft power interests in transferring this equipment there, hence why it cleverly decided to include several hypersonic missiles in its latest spree of strikes against military targets, knowing that there was no way that they’d be intercepted and thus discrediting their opponents. Not only that, but they even managed to destroy five launchers and a multifunctional radar on 16 May according to the Russian Ministry of Defense’s report that was shared the day after.
Footage of that night’s strikes subsequently appeared on social media, after which those who shared such were detained by the Ukrainian secret police on the pretext that this could have helped Russia’s military-intelligence services. In reality, Kiev was left flustered after that same footage showed how many millions of dollars’ worth of air defense missiles were wasted in trying to shoot down the Kinzhals. The US also confirmed that the Patriots were indeed damaged but denied that any of them were destroyed.
Nevertheless, the public was able to see for themselves just how desperate Kiev was to intercept those hypersonic projectiles, and many interpreted America’s confirmation that the Patriots were damaged as a limited hangout to deflect from their suspicions that they were actually destroyed. 16 May will therefore be seen in hindsight as a pivotal turning point in popular perceptions since Russia’s claim that its Kinzhals smashed the Patriots is believed by a growing number of people after watching that footage.
This poses a major reputational problem for the West, which claims to be able to defend its people in the event of any contingency, especially the worst-case one of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine turning into a direct conventional conflict between those two. Nobody who saw Tuesday night’s footage and heard about Russia’s achievement the day after can say with confidence that they still believe in the viability of their side’s air defenses since they’ve now been exposed as worthless by the Kinzhals.
The Kremlin currently wields a monopoly on this game-changing military technology after being the first country in the world to produce these missiles and then use them in battle, which means that it can pierce NATO’s Patriot-centric air defenses with ease in the worst-case scenario described above. The preceding observation about the US’ struggle to compete with Russia in this respect isn’t so-called “propaganda” like skeptics might claim but was confirmed by The Hill two months ago.
In their piece on 14 March explaining “Why the US is going full throttle on hypersonic missiles”, they wrote that “The United States is opening the throttle in its push to develop and procure hypersonic missiles after falling behind key foreign adversaries China and Russia in the race to field a potentially game-changing defense system”, adding that “the Defense Department has not fielded the weapons yet, and there remain challenges in the industrial production base and with testing infrastructure.”
Most damning of all, The Hill also informed their audience that “Not even the U.S. currently has an adequate defense system to take down hypersonic missiles. Air defense systems, such as Patriots and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, are capable of taking down ballistic missiles that reach hypersonic speeds, but only over small areas.” That “politically inconvenient” fact not only discredits this month’s disinformation campaign, but also reaffirms Russia’s military dominance in the hypersonic domain.
Simply put, the Kremlin has full confidence that its Kinzhals would successfully reach all their targets in the worst-case scenario of a conventional NATO-Russian war, thus meaning that Moscow could in theory destroy the West’s nuclear second-strike capabilities if it carried out a first strike to preempt its enemies’. Its achievement the other day in Kiev where it destroyed five Patriot launchers and a multifunctional radar sent shivers down the spines of NATO’s warmongers and sobered them up to what they’re facing.
Any thoughts they might have had of trying to “Balkanize” Russia by conventional military means as a last resort upon the failure of their Ukrainian-fronted Hybrid War to this end instantly evaporated since they realized that it could provoke the Kremlin into destroying the West out of self-defense. To be sure, some of their second-strike capabilities would likely remain intact and thus be used against Russia, but the point is that Moscow could first inflict unacceptable damage to them if it’s pushed to do so.
Despite popular claims to the contrary from many of the Alt-Media Community’s top influencers, NATO isn’t “insane” in the sense of its leaders being willing to sacrifice themselves as long as their deaths resulted in dismembering Russia. Like all elites, they want to live as long as possible, hence why they’ll now think twice about indulging in the neoconservative fantasy of resorting to conventional means to “Balkanize” that targeted Great Power upon the failure of their proxy war on it through Ukraine to that end.
In practical terms, this suggests that they might be more amenable to a ceasefire once Kiev’s NATO-backed counteroffensive ends by this winter, thus raising the prospects that the upcoming African-led peace mission to Russia and Ukraine could earn their approval and lead to Kiev agreeing to these terms. The leading Anglo-American Axis within NATO could never endorse the parallel Chinese-led initiative so it therefore follows that the African-led one could give them a “face-saving” way to support a ceasefire.
It’s premature to predict this latest initiative’s success or lack therefore, but the relevance of this development to the present piece is that it can help give NATO an “exit strategy” from this proxy war after its leaders just realized how suicidal it would be to escalate it to a conventional one. Russia’s Kinzhals smashed their Patriots in Kiev, which proved that the Kremlin can pierce the West’s air defenses with ease, thus representing both a military game-changer and possibly even a diplomatic one soon too.
The Putrid Underbelly of Woke Capitalism
By Michael Rectenwald – Mises Wire – 05/16/2023
Corporate intrigue reached a fevered pitch on May 6, 2023, in Omaha, Nebraska, when a shareholder was arrested during the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. The shareholder challenged the affiliation of Warren Buffett with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bill Gates’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, and who reportedly committed suicide in a New York jail while facing charges for sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking.
Peter Flaherty, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), stood to offer proposal number eight, which called for the roles of Berkshire CEO and chair to be separated and held by two persons. Flaherty argued that the separation of roles was necessary so that Berkshire “would be less identified with Mr. Buffett’s personal political activities.” Speaking of Buffett, Flaherty stated:
He’s donated tens of billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Bill Gates explained when the couple was still together, “although the foundation bears our names, basically half our resources have come from Warren Buffett.”
If “woke” culture is a disease, then philanthropy is the virus.
The Gates Foundation bankrolls the teaching of Critical Race Theory around the country, including that math is inherently racist.
The Gates Foundation offers a Gender Identity Toolbox which asserts that gender is the result of “socially and culturally constructed ideas.”
This is a lie. Gender is not a cultural construct. It is a genetic and biological fact. (emphasis mine)
Flaherty was interrupted by a Berkshire representative and pleaded to the chair (Buffett) to be allowed to continue. Buffett agreed that Flaherty could continue but warned him of the three-minute time limit for shareholder proposals. Flaherty then proceeded to throw down the gauntlet, until his microphone was shut off:
We know how much Bill Gates cares about children. He met and traveled with Jeffrey Epstein many times after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.
The Gates Foundation had a huge influence over the COVID response fiasco.
Bill Gates defended China’s COVID policies and still discounts the possibility that the virus originated from a lab, even though U.S. intelligence agencies disagree. The Gates Foundation may be the largest single donor to the “dark money” machine known as Arabella Associates. . . .
It funds causes like defunding the police that are making American cities unlivable.
Money goes, too, to groups conducting—
At this point, Buffett declared from the stage: “You crossed the boundary.” Two security guards grabbed Flaherty by either arm and escorted him from the room. Flaherty was arrested and charged with trespassing.
The arrest of the Berkshire shareholder, apparently for merely mentioning Jeffrey Epstein in connection with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, coincided with a series of Wall Street Journal articles exploring Epstein’s calendar and a trove of Epstein emails and other documents. The Wall Street Journal revealed numerous Epstein meetings with high-profile contacts, long after Epstein served time for soliciting a child prostitute and was registered as a sex offender. Represented in Epstein’s calendar and emails are such notables as William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021; Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and philanthropist; Jess Staley, former Barclay’s CEO; Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn; Larry Summers, professor and former Harvard University president; Woody Allen, filmmaker; and Noam Chomsky, leftist MIT linguistics professor, among others. These and other meetings may reveal that many businesspersons and woke philanthropists were ensnared by a child sex trafficker.
The scene at the Berkshire annual meeting also followed on the heels of the lawsuit filed against JPMorgan Chase by the US Virgin Islands. Attorneys for the US Virgin Islands claim that the bank materially aided Epstein in his child sex trafficking scheme and is seeking damages for their clients. Four billionaires have been subpoenaed in the case so far, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin; Hyatt Hotels CEO Thomas Pritzker; real estate tycoon and owner of U.S. News and World Report Mortimer Zuckerman; and venture capitalist and Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz. Curiously, the US Virgin Islands has also attempted, without success, to serve a subpoena to Google’s other cofounder, Larry Page, whose whereabouts remain unknown and who obviously does not want to be found.
It should be remembered here that Google has represented the leading edge of woke capitalism, with its leftist ranking algorithms and its employment of “machine learning fairness” that corrects for so-called algorithmic unfairness by misrepresenting reality with affirmative action results. Clearly, Google’s founders did not rely on algorithms to identify and eliminate pedophiles from their list of business contacts.
While the US Virgin Islands asserts that JP Morgan Chase facilitated and possibly bankrolled Epstein’s pedophilia ring, US Republican lawmakers have claimed that the US’s largest bank has a penchant for cancelling the accounts of conservative and religious groups. The bank maintained its financial relationship with Epstein until 2013, long after he was convicted of sex crimes, yet recently cancelled the accounts of such groups as the National Committee for Religious Freedom. The bank’s touted “diversity and inclusion” policy has apparently included pedophiles but excluded avowedly Christian groups.
Much more has and could be said about why high-profile businesspersons, philanthropists, academics, and even intelligence officers had relationships with Jeffrey Epstein. For example, some have claimed that Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell were Israeli spies who ran a honey-trap operation to steer US policies in Israel’s favor and against US interests.
As the Wall Street Journal asked:
Epstein was a former schoolteacher. How did he become a billionaire? What was the source of his wealth? Was he paid for providing women or girls to his friends? Was he a blackmailer? Were women or girls an enticement to invest in his projects?
Finally, there’s the ridiculous, implausible matter of Epstein’s death in federal custody on Aug. 10, 2019, which 3½ years later remains under investigation by the Justice Department inspector general, only feeding conspiracy theories.
But the main question for our purposes is: How is that nearly all major corporate heads and influential members of society have simultaneously gone woke? Could it be that whoever controlled Jeffrey Epstein sets the agenda through the use of blackmail, directing these corporate heads and other leaders to convert to wokeness, while steering their philanthropy to designated ends, including the funding of critical race theory and the LGBTQIA+ agenda? In other words, is our capitalist class controlled by whoever oversaw Epstein’s thirty-year entrapment operation?
In addition to revealing the moral rot that has permeated the US establishment, the Epstein connections also show that those who claim the woke moral high ground, and impose woke policies on the rest of us, are perhaps the most corrupted people on the face of the earth.
Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes.
FDA not fit for purpose – the Makena® fiasco
For years, the FDA allowed a drug to be injected into pregnant women that was neither safe, nor effective. Finally, it has been withdrawn.
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | MAY 15, 2023
Previously, I wrote about Makena, a synthetic hormone given to millions of pregnant woman, to prevent premature birth. It was highly controversial because there was no robust proof that it was safe or effective, despite having FDA-approval.
Last month, after many years of use, the FDA finally decided to withdraw Makena from the market.
Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts welcomed the decision, but said it took the FDA far too long.
“I cannot believe we’ve been injecting this hormone into pregnant women for 20 years, all the leading medical organisations recommended it, the FDA approved it – and it took this long to finally acknowledge the drug did not work,” he said.
Urato opposed the use of Makena from the start. He testified before the FDA, he wrote in the media and in medical journals, and helped petition the FDA to withdraw the drug from the market.
Adam Urato, maternal-foetal medicine specialist, MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts.
Preterm birth is a major issue in obstetrics. In the US, one in 10 babies are born prematurely, and accounts for most of the neonatal morbidity and mortality.
Physicians were desperate for a solution, and Makena seemed to hold promise.
It wasn’t cheap though. Makena was 5,200% more expensive than generic versions of the same medication.
Large amounts of public money in the Medicaid program and other health insurance dollars were used to pay for the weekly shots at a total cost of $30,000 per pregnancy.
How it began
The drug maker sought fast-track approval of Makena, citing a 2003 study that was so flawed, the FDA’s own statistical reviewer commented that the drug was not worth approving.
The FDA approved it anyway on the basis that the drugmaker conduct more in-depth research into the medication’s effectiveness.
Then, in 2019 a confirmatory trial found the drug did not work. And by this stage, there were documented harms including gestational diabetes, depression, blood clots and a non-statistical doubling in stillbirths.
But instead of pulling the drug off the market, the FDA allowed Makena to be licensed for another four years.
“It should’ve been pulled immediately,” said Urato. “There were substantial profits for the drug company even after a confirmatory trial found it did not work, so it’s no wonder it was dragging its feet.”
It begs the question…
How is it even possible that a drug, which was neither safe nor effective for pregnant women, was allowed to be on the market for so long?
Urato says it’s a direct symptom of the medical-industrial complex – an entanglement of big pharma, medical organisations, and regulatory agencies – that creates an underlying motive to bolster profits, over health.
“For two decades the drug brought in billions in profits, and that money was used to fund physicians, researchers, professional medical societies, and academic institutions,” said Urato.
This makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for patients to navigate the healthcare system and know who to trust.
“We need elected officials that are going to put the interests of patients and the public first, and not be tainted, or corrupted by industry. We need to separate our politics and our regulatory bodies from industry funding,” he added.
Lesson learned?
Urato feels vindicated for his work, but says it’s no time for a victory lap. Instead, the Makena fiasco should provide us with tangible lessons to safeguard us against such scientific transgressions in the future.
“We must ‘first do no harm’ and follow the precautionary principle,” insisted Urato.
“When you’re exposing developing babies to synthetic chemical compounds, you can’t just assume it’s safe, until harm is proven. You must assume that the chemicals are having chemical effects on the foetus, because that’s what chemicals do.”
The Diethylstilbestrol (DES) disaster should have been a reminder to all obstetricians about the harms of giving synthetic hormones to pregnant women without sufficient data. But once Makena was rolled out, Urato said, “it was like everyone forgot the past.”
“I counselled my patients on my concerns about exposing them and their babies to a synthetic hormone with unknown short and long-term effects, so I guess I could have been accused of peddling ‘misinformation’,” said Urato cognisant that he was going against medical consensus.
“But what is considered misinformation today, may be scientific fact tomorrow. I helped to prevent a generation of mums and babies in my community from being exposed to a useless drug. That’s why it’s so important that doctors have freedom of speech to express their views,” said Urato.
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of pregnant mothers and babies were exposed to the ineffective and risky synthetic hormone over the past 2 decades.
“Time and time again, drugs and devices are pulled off the market for safety issues. If the FDA approves a drug, it does not mean that it will be proven to be safe and effective over time. The FDA has lost the public’s trust,” Urato said.
Missed Bacterial Pneumonia Cases Left Untreated Were the Majority of COVID-19 Hospital Deaths
In April 2020, I warned about that the false positive-prone non-quantitative RT-PCR was deadly. Now we know, again, I was (sadly) correct.
By James Lyons-Weiler | Popular Rationalism | May 17, 2023
Hospital protocolists sticking to the strict hand-me-down highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of institutional failure.
I first warned FDA in early 2020 that because the commercial kits did not use internal negative controls there would be arbitrarily high COVID-19 false positive rates due to the abuse of non-quantitative PCR. The majority of “cases”, I pointed out, would be false because the test was to be used as a screening device – and when you screen with an imperfect test when prevalence is low, you end up with more false positives than negatives in the set of positives.
Knowing that people who were symptomatic for respiratory infections would be among the most tested population and that Fauci’s medical approach to COVID-19 was to tell people to go home and get as sick as possible, it was readily clear that people would be dying due to lack of treatment for treatable conditions, like bacterial pneumonia and fungal infections in the lung.
Now a study from NIH-funded researchers in Chicago, IL has found that unresolved respiratory infections – not necessarily those involved in SARS-CoV-2 – were present in people who failed to “respond” to mechanical ventilation.
The authors wrote:
“Recent data suggest that secondary pneumonia is present in up to 40% and pneumonia or diffuse alveolar damage is present in over 90% of autopsy specimens obtained from patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (18). Consistent with these observations, we and others found high rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation, suggesting that bacterial superinfections such as VAP may contribute to mortality in patients with COVID-19 (7, 19–22). These findings prompt an alternative hypothesis that a relatively low mortality rate directly attributable to primary SARS-CoV-2 infection is offset by a greater risk of death attributable to unresolving VAP (23).”
They concluded:
“These data suggest mortality associated with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia is more often associated with respiratory failure that increases the risk of unresolving VAP and is less frequently associated with multiple-organ dysfunction.”
Unsurprisingly, the study found that people with bacterial pneumonia who were on ventilators had the highest mortality. Although their analysis restricted consideration to bacterial pneumonia cases detected 48 hours after ventilation, they did not distinguish between undiagnosed cases of bacterial pneumonia upon admission and those acquired in-hospital (nosocomial infection). The rate of co-infection is not clear either, due to insufficient testing for bacterial pneumonia in patients once diagnosed with COVID-19.
The study leads to the stunning potential that perhaps 58% of “COVID” cases were respiratory issues other than COVID (43% bacterial pneumonia, 16% non-pathogen causes of respiratory failure). Treated as “COVID”, these patients were doomed to a fate of non-treatment due to mis- or under-diagnosis.
It is unclear what percentage of deaths attributed to COVID-19 could have been prevented via a standard therapy for bacterial pneumonia, but it is potentially very high. Fauci’s prescription – sending patients home to do nothing – no corticosteroids, no antibiotics just in case it was bacterial – drove the COVID-19 death rate up far higher than it had to be.
Gao et al., 2023. Machine learning links unresolving secondary pneumonia to mortality in patients with severe pneumonia, including COVID-19, Journal of Clinical Investigation (2023). DOI: 10.1172/JCI170682
Hang All the Members of the Liars’ Club?
By Victor Davis Hanson | American Greatness | May 15, 2023
Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.
Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre.
But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor.
Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos.
New Federal Standards?
Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue.
Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos?
Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security.
So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).
Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.
Then we come to James Clapper, the former director of the Office of National Intelligence. Like Santos, he lied. But unlike Santos, Clapper was under oath to Congress. And further unlike Santos, Clapper was not a small fish, but a whale in charge of coordinating the nation’s intelligence bureaus.
Clapper’s lies mattered a great deal, especially when he swore to Congress that the National Security Agency did not spy on Americans. (“No, sir. Not wittingly.”) When caught, Clapper confessed that he gave “the least untruthful answer.” (“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no.’”). He faced zero consequences for his perjury. And like Brennan, he marketed his anti-Trump phobias into a comfortable cable news gig.
Note well that both Clapper and Brennan likely lied again when they signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, with a wink and nod suggesting it was a hallmark example of “Russian disinformation.”
Then we come to the former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He is also currently working as a cable news commentator. McCabe admitted to lying—according to the inspector general, “done knowingly and intentionally”—four separate times to federal investigators, three times under oath. McCabe misled the country in matters that concerned a national election, more specifically lying that he had not leaked to the media to massage media narratives about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
Then there is James Comey, another former FBI head, who confirmed McCabe had lied. He simply claimed on 245 occasions to House investigators and members that he either had no memory or had no knowledge, when asked under oath to explain some of the wrongdoing of the FBI during his directorship. Remember, Comey and the FBI signed off on the authenticity of Steele document material to obtain a FISA warrant, when they knew it was unreliable and Steele was not credible. Comey also likely leaked to the media a confidential memo officially memorializing a private conversation with the president of the United States.
Should we include yet another former FBI director? Robert Mueller swore under oath to Congress that he knew little about Fusion GPS (“I’m not familiar with that”) and more or less had ignored the Steele dossier. (“It’s not my purview.”) Mueller’s claims cannot be true because revelations about both were the very catalysts that prompted his own special counsel appointment.
Will the Santos prosecutors go after Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases?
Fauci seemingly lied under oath to the Senate when he preposterously claimed the money he channeled through a third party to the Wuhan virology lab did not entail support for gain-of-function virology research. (“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”) Many virologists were aghast at Fauci’s claims, since they knew gain-of-function research conducted in China—the point being to skirt U.S. laws—was precisely what the U.S.-subsidized researchers in China were doing.
The Bidens
Prosecutors are currently looking at the various shenanigans of Hunter Biden, whose lies may even be a match for those of George Santos. Joe Biden’s son apparently lied on his firearms background check affidavit when applying for a handgun purchase—so far, with impunity.
When asked point blank on national television whether his lost laptop was his own—he had signed a receipt for it at the repair shop—Biden refused to give a yes or no answer.
Hunter Biden has apparently de facto lied for years when he purportedly did not report either his entire income or his real business expenses accurately, or that he was the father of a child he conceived with an ex-stripper in Arkansas.
If Hunter’s lies do not match the number of Santos’ prevarications, his were at least far more significant. His lie that the laptop was not his prompted current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a former top Biden 2020 campaign aide, to call up Mike Morell, former interim CIA director. Morell’s mission was to round up as many intelligence authorities as he could to lie on the eve of a presidential election that the laptop had “all the hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” He found 51, including himself. Apparently, some active members of the CIA pitched in as well to lend the letter additional authenticity.
Note that Morell swears Blinken called him to solicit signers of the bogus letter, while Blinken claims he did not. So either the current secretary of state or the former interim director of the CIA is lying—or they both are. Again, among the first to sign the fraudulent intelligence letter were Brennan and Clapper. They apparently had earned a reputation as team players, given that both men had been willing to lie under oath to Congress. Misleading the nation again about the laptop to aid Joe Biden’s campaign was small potatoes.
Biden, on spec, promulgated the lie when he said in his second debate with Trump, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it, except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
A subsequent poll suggested the Bidens’ concocted laptop lies may have influenced voters to side with Biden in the election. If true, that was a lie that should be of far more interest to current federal prosecutors than Santos’ crazy fairy tales.
The Lies of the “Big Guy”
So we come to the greatest prevaricator of all.
Joe Biden flat-out lied on numerous occasions, such as when he claimed that he never discussed the family shake-down business with Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden, in fact, turns up on the laptop as someone deeply connected to Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo companies (“10 [percent] for the Big Guy”). Tony Bobulinksi, a former business associate of Hunter’s, has sworn that Joe and his brother Jim Biden were deeply involved in their foreign leveraging efforts.
A photo shows Joe Biden with Hunter’s “business” associates. Will the current Santos prosecutors turn their attention to the Oval Office occupant’s financial records to determine whether his lavish private homes and lifestyle were viable under his reported stated income?
Biden lied to Americans dozens of times to get elected. The tragic death of his wife in a car accident was not due to the drunkenness and fault of a truck driver. That was a horrific smear designed to shift blame onto an innocent man and gain sympathy for himself.
He lied that his son, Beau, died while serving in Iraq.
Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after he was caught lying about his college records and plagiarizing a speech from a British politician.
So we know that in the past, Joe Biden’s lies have left a mark on history in a fashion that Santos’ never will.
When Biden prefaces his whoppers with “No joke!” or “This is the God’s honest truth!” and especially when he swears, “My word as a Biden!” then it is a fair bet that he is lying.
When Biden entered office, he lied about the number of Americans previously vaccinated under the Trump Administration and preposterously claimed there had been no COVID vaccine available.
He lied that his loan forgiveness amnesty passed Congress by two votes. In fact, Biden simply declared amnesty by fiat and never submitted the request to Congress at all.
He repeatedly lies that billionaires pay only three percent of their income in taxes on average. He lies about minor details, from giving his Uncle Frank a purple heart to matters of national concern, such as the price of gas when he entered office. It was most certainly not $5 a gallon!
Biden constantly lies about his résumé. He was never a long-haul truck driver. Nor was he a star athlete almost headed for the Naval Academy on a sports scholarship if only Dallas Cowboys legend Roger Staubach had not beat him out. “I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972. I didn’t come to the academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named Staubach and Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”
His house was never almost destroyed by a fire. He was never raised “politically” as a Puerto Rican. Biden never pinned the Silver Star on a Navy Afghanistan war hero for bringing back the body of a fellow soldier from a deep ravine. He was never arrested, either in South Africa or in Atlanta, for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights.
No foreign leader can believe Biden. He never traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He lied about his own Amtrak travel. He lied about his record on inflation and economic growth. He lied about upping Social Security payments. (It was a larger-than-usual automatic cost-of-living increase spurred by his inflationary policies.) He lied about the nature of the Trump tax cuts.
Biden keeps lying that the southern border is “secure” even as nearly 2 million people have crossed illegally on his watch and tens of thousands more are massed to enter the country as Title 42 restrictions are lifted.
He insists that five police officers died at the hands of protestors on January 6, 2021. In truth, the one person we know for certain who died violently that day was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed protester who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant with a checkered record, whose identity was suppressed for months while Babbitt’s past was sullied by the press.
Biden’s defenders hint that either he is cognitively compromised and thus not responsible—as if he has told the truth the last 40 years when he was hale!—or his lies are mere “exaggerations” unlike the “lies” of Trump—as if lying about the death of one’s spouse or son or school record or resume or major legislation or his presidency is a mere “exaggeration.”
As a general rule, since 2015, if any federal bureaucrat or elected official lied in service of opposing Donald Trump, he was exempted from consequences. If not, he was properly held responsible for his lying. So the more that the fake Steele dossier, the Russian collusion hoax, and the Russian disinformation laptop lie warped the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the more the promulgators of those falsehoods never faced any consequences for their untruths.
So, yes, let federal prosecutors go after the lying George Santos to set a precedent that the lying of government officials has consequences.
But in the great scheme of lying things, Santos is a prevaricating minnow who was snagged to great acclaim because the lying sharks swim and circle with impunity.
The FBI Vetoed the 2016 Presidential Election
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 17, 2023
On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released his final report on the FBI and Justice Department’s abuse of power during the 2016 presidential election. His 316-page report proves that federal law enforcement was weaponized to rig American politics by shielding Hillary Clinton’s campaign and persecuting Donald Trump’s campaign.
Durham’s report is only the latest in a long pattern of abuses by the FBI. In 1945, President Harry Truman noted in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” In the 1948 presidential campaign, Hoover brazenly championed Republican candidate Thomas Dewey, leaking allegations that Truman was part of a corrupt Kansas City political machine. In 1952, Hoover sought to undermine Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson by spreading rumors that he was a closet homosexual. In 1964, the FBI illegally wiretapped Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s presidential headquarters and plane and conducted background checks on his campaign staff seeking evidence of homosexual activity. In 1972, acting FBI chief Patrick Gray burned incriminating evidence from the White House in his fireplace shortly after the Watergate break-in by Nixon White House “plumbers;” he was forced to resign in 1973 for that ignition.
But those interventions were child’s play compared to the FBI’s role in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for years before the primary, had used an insecure private email server to handle top-secret documents while she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. The server, located in a bathroom of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, mansion, exposed emails with classified information to detection by foreign sources and others.
Clinton’s private email server was not publicly disclosed until she received a congressional subpoena in 2015. A few months later, the FBI Counterintelligence Division opened a criminal investigation examining the “potential unauthorized storage of classified information on an unauthorized system.” Attorney General Lynch swayed FBI chief Comey to mislead the public by denying that a criminal investigation involving Clinton had commenced; instead, it was referred to simply as a “matter.”
The FBI treated Clinton and her coterie like royalty worthy of endless deference, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Department Inspector General. The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of top Clinton aides after a limited examination of their contents (including a promise not to examine any post-January 31, 2015, emails or content). When BleachBit software and hammers were used to destroy email evidence under congressional subpoena, the FBI treated it as a harmless error. A 2018 Inspector General report criticized FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence.
FBI investigators shrugged off every brazen deceit they encountered from Hillary’s staffers. The 2018 Inspector General report revealed that key FBI agents in the investigations were raving partisans. “We’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok texted his mistress/girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in August 2016. One FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as “retarded” and declared “I’m with her [Hillary Clinton]”. Another FBI employee texted that “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.”
The FBI delayed interviewing Clinton until the end of the investigation, after she had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and just before the Democratic National Convention. Comey decided before Clinton was interviewed by FBI agents that she would not be charged with criminal wrongdoing. FBI agents at that interview found Clinton’s answers claiming she didn’t realize she was handling classified documents “strained credulity;” one agent said he filed her responses in the “bucket of hard to impossible to believe.’” The FBI planned to absolve her “absent a confession from Clinton,” the Inspector General noted. There was no recording or transcript of that final interview. Minimizing the evidence and disclosures maximized the arbitrary power of Comey and other FBI officials in a landmark political case.
Shortly after that interview, FBI chief James Comey publicly announced that “no charges are appropriate” because Hillary didn’t intend to violate federal law. But that law is a strict liability statute; “intent” is irrelevant to the criminal violation.
FBI racketeering repeatedly rescued Hillary Clinton. The Clinton Foundation raked in hundreds of million dollars of squirrely foreign contributions while she was Secretary of State and revving up her presidential campaign. The Durham report found that “senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how [the Clinton Foundation investigation was] handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” On top of that dereliction, “the FBI appears to have made no effort to investigate…the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance of a [illegal] campaign contribution that was made by the FBI’s own long-term [confidential human source] on behalf of Insider-I and, ultimately, Foreign Government.”
A few weeks after an effective whitewash, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,” according to the Durham report. CIA chief John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top officials on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal…to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” There is no evidence that Obama and his policymakers had any objections to Hillary’s vilification proposal (referred to as the “Clinton Plan” in Durham’s report).
FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though “No FBI personnel who were interviewed by the Office recalled Crossfire Hurricane personnel taking any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the report noted. The Clinton campaign helped bankroll the notorious Steele dossier, which made sweeping, unsubstantiated, and salacious accusations against Trump. The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election. There was no proof—but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report noted. As FBI analysts began to recognize that the Steele dossier was a hoax, FBI bosses ordered “no more memorandums were to be written” analyzing its claims.
After the election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence that Russia massively intervened to help him win. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A federal prosecutor declared that the “resulting harm is immeasurable” from Clinesmith’s action. But federal judge James Boasberg conducted a “pity party” at the sentencing, noting that Clinesmith “went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane…Clinesmith has lost his job in government service—what has given his life much of its meaning.” Scorning the prosecutor’s recommendation for jail time, the judge gave Clinesmith a wrist slap—400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
Though the Durham report vivifies the extent of FBI meddling in the 2016 election, Americans remain in the dark about the full extent of the FBI’s efforts to rig the 2020 election. In December 2019, FBI agents came into possession of a laptop that Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. That laptop’s hard drive was a treasure trove of crimes, including evidence that Hunter and other family members had collected millions in payments from foreign sources for providing access in Washington and other favors. That laptop provided ample warnings of how Joe Biden could be compromised by foreign powers. But FBI bosses blocked their agents from investigating its contents until after the 2020 election. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) reported that FBI agents examining the evidence on Hunter Biden “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
When news finally leaked out about the Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials effectively torpedoed the story by claiming that the laptop was a Russian disinformation ploy. Their letter was orchestrated by Biden presidential campaign advisor—and current Secretary of State—Anthony Blinken. The FBI knew that the laptop was bona fide but said nothing to undercut the falsehoods made by the former spooks. Twitter and other social media outlets suppressed information on the Hunter Biden laptop until after the election. Matt Taibbi and other Twitter Files investigators have provided a torrent of evidence of how the FBI censored Americans prior to the 2020 election, almost always muzzling conservative voices.
Special Counsel John Durham asserted that the FBI’s abuses in the Clinton and Trump investigations caused the agency “severe reputational harm.” But Congress just awarded the FBI a record budget, and that is the only “reputation” that matters inside the Beltway.
Democrats and other Biden allies are treating the Durham report as a nothing-burger. The Washington Post fretted that the Durham report “may fuel rather than end partisan debate about politicization within the Justice Department and FBI.” The FBI announced that it had taken “dozens of corrective actions” to prevent similar “missteps” in the future. Law professor Jonathan Turley scoffed that the FBI’s statement “is ample evidence of a lack of remorse by the FBI like a habitual offender giving a shrug in his court ‘allocution’ before a judge.”
When getting caught trying to steal an election is a mere “misstep,” it will happen again. How many years will it take until we learn all the details of how the FBI tampered with the 2020 election?
Unless Congress and federal courts rein in the FBI, there needs to be a change in inaugural festivities. Instead of invoking “the will of the people,” will future presidents candidly tout “the will of the FBI”? If that happened, a big swath of the Washington press corps would probably stand up and cheer for their favorite agency.
Jim Bovard is the Junior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. He is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
CIA Vet: Durham Report Exposes US Deep State Corruption
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 16.05.2023
Special Counsel John Durham’s report helped expose the FBI’s corruption, thus curtailing the intelligence community’s ability to interfere in US politics, according to Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism.
Special Counsel John Durham’s much-anticipated report about the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to “Russia” was released on Monday. The special counsel concluded that the bureau had no factual evidence to open a probe on Trump. The probe lasted from July 31, 2016, when Trump was the Republican nominee, to May 17, 2017, after he had taken presidential office.
“The FBI is totally corrupt,” Johnson told Sputnik. “It’s a totally politicized organization. It really has completely discredited itself. This report confirms that very top officials at the FBI were nothing but liars, liars and engaged in a coup to try to overthrow a democratically-elected president. (…) Trump represented a threat to the deep state policies that wanted to expand NATO, to provoke conflicts around the world. And to basically destroy Russia was one of the objectives. And because Trump was seen as someone who was not going to go along with those objectives, they had to destroy him, or try to destroy him.”
According to Johnson, the FBI and the CIA will not be able to engage in the kind of corrupt acts in 2024 that they did for 2020 and 2016; at least not to the same degree. The newly-released report exposes “everything that they said that Donald Trump was doing with respect to Russia was a complete and utter fabrication,” the CIA veteran underscored.
“[The FBI and CIA] credibility has now certainly been called into question,” Johnson continued. “Just the fact that they can no longer be trusted, that the CIA was so prominently damaged by the admission that the 51 people who signed that letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, that they were making it up, that they were lying, so none of these people have the credibility now that will allow them to be taken seriously going forward.”
The years-long probe resulted in the conviction of just one FBI operative, Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to doctoring an email to state that Trump aide Carter Page had never been a CIA asset, despite the evidence to the contrary. However, it’s unlikely that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a whole host of FBI personnel allegedly responsible for violations of the bureau’s rules and politically-motivated persecution of Team Trump would ever be brought to justice, according to the CIA veteran.
“The way to understand this, their motive in doing this in 2016, was they fully expected Hillary Clinton to be the president,” Johnson said. “And they felt that if they made any attempts to investigate and prosecute her, that she would punish them. So, therefore, they dropped that investigation and then fabricated the warning against Donald Trump in order to distract, to take away all attention from the substantive allegations against Hillary Clinton. (…) I think there are certainly grounds for a civil lawsuit by Donald Trump and others who are injured, damaged by these lies. Unfortunately, it does not look like the Department of Justice will undertake any prosecutions of these people. So that said, this complete exposure of their corruption, I think, does make it more difficult for them to be as active in 2024.”
Imran Khan and the independence of Pakistan
By Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Network | May 16, 2023
Pakistan has never been independent. It has always remained a toy in the hands of the United Kingdom and the United States. During the Western war against the Afghan communist regime, it became a rear base for Bin Laden’s mujahideen and Arab fighters. However, for the past decade, a cricket champion like no other has been trying to liberate it, make peace with India and create social services: Imran Khan.
Imran Khan, world cricket champion and former Prime Minister. He is fighting for a modern, more social and independent state.
The Pakistani population is rising up against its army and its political personnel. Everywhere, demonstrations are forming in support of the former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, who has just been released but is the subject of a hundred legal proceedings.
WHO IS IMRAN KHAN?
Imran Khan comes from an illustrious Pashtun family. His father is descended from an Indian general and governor of the Punjab, and his mother from a Sufi master who invented the Pashto alphabet. He was educated in Lahore, then in England at Oxford. He speaks Saraiki, Urdu, Pashto and English. He is a cricketer, the most important sport in Pakistan. He was captain of the national team in 1992 and managed to win the World Cup. During the years 1992-96, he devoted himself exclusively to philanthropic activities, opening a hospital for cancer patients and a university with his family’s money. In 1996, he entered politics and created the Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI). He obtained a seat in the National Assembly in 2018, but was the only one elected from his party.
Imran Khan is not a politician like the others. He recognizes himself in the approach of Mohamed Iqbal (1877-1938), the spiritual father of Pakistan. He intended to break with the religious immobility of Islam and to undertake an effort of interpretation, but he remained prisoner of a communal and legal vision of Islam. Imran Kahn only found his way when he discovered the Iranian philosopher and sociologist Ali Shariati, a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon [1]. Unknown in the West, Shariati proposed to his students to evaluate the precepts of Islam by applying them and to keep only those they found useful. He himself engaged in a reinterpretation of Islam that fascinated Iranian youth. He spoke out against the regime of Shah Reza Pahlevi and supported Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeiny, then in exile and considered a heretic by all Iranian clerics. He was assassinated by the shah’s secret police, the sawak, in England in 1977, just before Khomeini’s return to his country. So he was the one who instigated the Iranian revolution, but he never knew it.
Imran Khan is therefore a Sunni, an admirer of a Shiite philosopher. He proposes to modernize his country, not by eradicating its religious traditions, but on the contrary, by trying to sort them out to keep only the best. He shows himself to be extraordinarily open and tolerant in a country that was the first in the world to be governed by the Egyptian Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, a sectarian political party linked to the British MI6 [2]. Like Ali Shariati, he is a revolutionary in the noble sense of the word and an anti-imperialist. In his political life, he never ceased to denounce the Anglo-Saxon takeover of his country. He will therefore logically become the haunt of the British and American imperialists.
When President Barack Obama claimed to have killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan [3], the Pakistani political class accused the army of having sheltered the United States’ public enemy number one. In theory, Pakistan has civilian rule, but it has been rocked by numerous military coups. The military is the only effective administration and has gradually gained control of many economic sectors. During the war in Afghanistan, it supported the Afghan mujahideen and of course Osama bin Laden’s Arab fighters on behalf of the CIA. To put her in her place, the civil power organized the “memorandum affair”. A secret document, echoed by the Wall Street Journal, was sent to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mike Mullen, to prevent a new coup in Pakistan. Imran Khan is not on the side of either the army or the political class. He calls for early elections. He does not believe a word of either the US, the army or the politicians’ version. He campaigns against both corruption and submission to the US, two themes that concern both Pakistani camps. In a few months, his party emerged from the shadows and his discourse won over his people. He formed a coalition and became Prime Minister in 2012.
A BREAKAWAY PRIME MINISTER
Inspired by the example of Muhammad when he was head of state, he created a free health care program in Punjab, opened shelters for the homeless and implemented a social protection and anti-poverty program.
He clashed with the Islamists of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan who demanded the death penalty for blasphemers. During the attack on the former premises of Charlie-Hebdo in Paris and the murder of a teacher Samuel Paty [4] in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, he attacked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who justified the attacks against Islam provoked by these crimes. In the end, after having negotiated a shaky agreement with the fanatics of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, he ended up banning this movement.
As a symbol of his open-mindedness, he built the Kartarpur Corridor which allows Indian Sikhs [5] to come on pilgrimage to the shrine of their founder Guru Nanak, 5 kilometers inside Pakistan. But the Indian government is not opening an equivalent corridor for Pakistani Sikhs to come on pilgrimage to Dera Baba Nanak in India.
Despite the advancement of the China-Pakistan economic corridor, the situation forces it to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help. As usual, the IMF demanded neo-liberal structural reforms. The result was a drop in living standards and a return to poverty. He went to Russia after the latter had just intervened militarily against the “integral nationalists” in Ukraine. Let us recall that Stepan Bandera was working at the beginning of the Cold War with the Muslim Brotherhood. Immediately, the United States intervened politically in Pakistan to bring down the government of Imran Khan. After a first attempt, parliamentarians passed a vote of no confidence and dismissed the Prime Minister.
AN UNPREDICTABLE OPPOSITION LEADER
Imran Khan, who was in a very small minority in the Assembly but had a huge majority among the population, became the leader of the popular opposition.
He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Shehbaz Sharif, brother of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The Sharif dynasty is involved in many of the financial affairs exposed in the Panama Papers. It has a number of offshore companies that it has used to organize tax evasion. Nawaz Sharif was sentenced to 10 years in prison, then to 7 years in prison in another case, before going into exile in London. As for Shehbaz Sharif, he was exiled in Saudi Arabia during the dictatorship of General Perwez Musharaf.
An attack was organized against him on November 3, 2022, killing one person and injuring three others, including Khan himself, who was wounded in the leg. He accused the Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, of having ordered the attack. According to a video, one of the two gunmen cited Khan’s playing music during prayers and his agreement to talk to Israel, a “kafir” (infidel) nation, as motives. This shooter is a member of the Tehrik-e- Labbaik Pakistan. In reality, Pakistan’s rapprochement with Israel under Imran Khan was the result of favorable pressure from Saudi Arabia.
The US-based journalist Ahmad Noorani accuses on his website General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who has just retired as Pakistan’s Chief of Staff. He claims that he and his family have become considerably richer over the past six years.
Imran Khan then demanded that what he had stolen be confiscated and raised the question of the power of the army: an institution that defends the country, but also plays a murky economic role.
The Sharif government launched an incredible number of legal proceedings, more than 100, against the most popular man in the country. None of them seemed to be very serious, but all of them had high legal stakes, so that Imran Khan could do nothing but answer to the police and the judiciary. At the same time, one of his followers, Senator Azam Khan Swati, who had criticized the attitude of senior officers, was arrested for insulting the army and imprisoned.
But the man did not react as expected. He denounced the instrumentalization of justice and asked his supporters to be voluntarily incarcerated to saturate the system and discredit it. In front of each prison, 500 members of his party gathered and ask to be arrested. Some of them were arrested, but the government quickly realized the trap and tried to disperse them.
Not knowing what to do, the Sharif government once again considered having Khan assassinated during an attempted arrest by the military. His party, the Justice Movement (PTI), surrounded his family palace and prevented the army and police from entering.
In the latest incident, as Imran Khan was on his way to court to answer charges against him, police surrounded the court to arrest him. As his supporters closed the doors of the courtroom, the police broke them down to seize him.
The Westerners, who presented themselves as defenders of human rights, did not lift a finger.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, “As we have said before, the United States does not have a position on one candidate or political party over another.
Within hours, spontaneous protests erupted across the country.
The EU commented: “Restraint and composure are needed (…) Pakistan’s challenges can only be met and its path determined by the Pakistanis themselves, through sincere dialogue and respect for the rule of law.
After a few days and several deaths, Imran Khan has just been released.
Translation by Roger Lagassé
Ukraine aid — and US stockpiles — are running out. What’s next?
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | May 17, 2023
There might be a massive new Ukraine aid budget debate on the horizon, as Uncle Sam is depleting the last one at a record pace and Pentagon stockpiles are, by all accounts, running low.
According to a new report by Defense One, some $36.4 billion of the $48.9 billion allocated for Ukraine-related military aid since February 2022 has been delivered, contracted, or “otherwise committed.” There is only $11.3 billion left, and it will “run out in four months.”
The most recent allocation ($1.2 billion last week) came under the U.S. Security Assistance Initiative, which means the additional air defense systems, artillery rounds, and ammunition that have been promised will be farmed out to U.S. defense contractors and won’t be ready for shipment right away. Alternatively, aid has come via the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine weapons directly from the Pentagon’s stockpiles. According to the Department of Defense, there have been 37 such drawdowns totaling over $21 billion in weapons and supplies since August 2021 when the U.S. first responded to Russian forces massing along the border with Ukraine.
But now reports indicate that American stockpiles of HIMARS, Javelins, Stinger missiles, and 155 mm artillery rounds have been shrinking since late last year, and arms manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up.
This has led the U.S. to go out on an ammo-raising spree, gathering pledges from allies and partners. Some, like South Korea, have resisted but found a way to comply. According to the Wall Street Journal, Washington has sent Ukraine more than one million rounds of 155 mm caliber ammunition, and allies and partners have contributed more on top of that. Moreover, NATO and European partners are being pressed to send whatever they have from their own stockpiles for Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.
So where does this leave us? It would seem that defense contractors need additional money and capacity to backfill the stores. Without more, Ukraine with be under-supplied for both its counteroffensive and whatever follows it. Meanwhile, American stockpiles are waning, which hurts readiness.
One congressional aide “who closely tracks the issue” told POLITICO this week that the money to draw down existing U.S. stockpiles will expire in July. According to the report, which speculated when and how big the next aid package will be, “that would mean the flow of equipment could be disrupted if Kyiv has to wait an extended period for a new tranche of funding.” Would it be included in the appropriations process, or a supplemental? “I expect there will need to be a supplemental at some point,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told POLITICO. “It’s also clear that it’s taken far too long to get munitions and tanks delivered to the Ukrainians.”
But as Sam Skove points out in his Defense One report, there is the nagging issue of Republican members of Congress who have said they would not support another “blank check” to Ukraine and would expect not only greater oversight but also an articulation of a diplomatic strategy for ending the war before they would support another multi-billion-dollar package. Their position not only reflects a need for a full accounting for where the money is going, but also concern that the American economy right now cannot afford what has become the most expensive U.S.-war-that-is-not-a-U.S.-war in history.
In addition, Skove points out:
American public support for the war is also flagging. Both Democrat and Republican voters’ willingness to pay for the war has fallen, according to a recent poll by the Brookings Institution think tank. For example, the share of Democratic respondents willing to support Ukraine even if it meant higher energy prices at home dipped from 80% last October to 65% last month.
As the president ramps up for what should be a grueling 2024 re-election campaign, what happens on the battlefield in the next few months will no doubt signal how much more the U.S. will press on with such limitless assistance. There is certainly a constituency for continuing “for as long as it takes,” but it’s clear now that our stockpiles are not limitless, and neither is American patience, especially when their own economic security is at stake.
West fueling Ukrainian financial woes – Moscow
RT | May 17, 2023
Western financial measures are leading Kiev into a sovereign debt crisis, with the burden expected to exceed Ukraine’s GDP by the end of the year, the Russian ambassador to the UN has warned.
“We will hear a lot today about the solidarity of the Western community with Ukraine, the readiness to support it ‘as long as it takes.’ However, it is necessary to understand that this support is taking Ukraine to the brink,” Vassily Nebenzia told the UN Security Council on Monday. “Its foreign debt surged to a record $132 billion, or 89% of GDP in 2022. It’s estimated that by the end of this year it will exceed 100%.”
The Russian envoy added that the “enormous funds allocated to Ukraine by the IMF, the EU, and the US are driving that country into a debt pit,” cautioning that “ordinary Ukrainians will have to repay the debts.”
Commenting on Kiev’s agreement with US financial company BlackRock to launch the Ukraine Development Fund, Nebenzia noted that the American firm will be in charge of managing the finances.
“What essentially is happening under the guise of attracting private investment for large-scale projects in key areas of the economy, is a transfer of state sovereignty to external corporate management of the world’s largest investment fund headquartered in New York,” the diplomat stated.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has pushed Western leaders to provide more and more cash to sustain the economy and military. He previously told the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that the country would need $55 billion in 2023 to cover the estimated budget deficit and rebuild critical infrastructure amid the conflict with Russia.
Ukraine has already deferred payments until 2024 on more than $20 billion of debt held by international investors. It is set for foreign debt restructuring next year, with G7 creditors claiming they would only extend their grace period for Ukrainian debt if private creditors agree. The nation’s budgetary shortfall is estimated to surpass $43 billion in 2023 alone.
Russian ‘Kinzhal’ hypersonic missile destroys Kiev’s US-made ‘Patriot’ air defense system
By Drago Bosnic | May 17, 2023
For most of this month, the mainstream propaganda machine has been parroting the same story over and over again – a Russian 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” air-launched hypersonic missile was shot down by a US-made “Patriot” SAM (surface-to-air missile) system. The “conclusive” evidence cited by the political West is laughable at best, but it was enough to convince those without specific knowledge of how weapons actually work, which includes most of the population. Moscow didn’t really comment on the claims. Or to be exact, not until the early hours of May 16, when the actual response came in a very “non-rhetorical” form.
Namely, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) launched a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) mission over Kiev, with the operation including two “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles, which were used to neutralize at least one battery of the “Patriot” SAM system. While neither side commented on the variant of the destroyed US-made air defense system, video evidence shows that it was most likely one of the latest iterations, the PAC-3 MSE (Missile Segment Enhancement upgrade) that also includes the much-touted CRI (Cost Reduction Initiative) interceptors. The cost of a single CRI missile currently stands at close to $5,300,000, meaning that the 32 interceptors fired by the Kiev regime forces amounted to nearly $170,000,000.
Such a massive quantity of interceptors was still nowhere near enough to stop the Russian hypersonic weapons, although the Neo-Nazi junta announced that it shot down most of the missiles fired by the VKS, including the claim that it allegedly neutralized six “Kinzhals”, despite the fact that the Russian military used only two during this attack. Although Moscow didn’t publicly reveal this, the information is based on the comments from the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu himself. In response to the Kiev regime’s reverie, Shoigu stated laconically:
“The figures given by the Ukrainians about the interception of Russian missiles are [usually] three times higher than the amount [of weapons] we actually use.”
Several military experts estimate that the VKS used a lot of decoys of various types to bait the air defenses in and around Kiev, which would explain the claims of the local authorities that the Russian strike was “exceptional in density”. The Neo-Nazi junta officials stated that the attack also included cruise missiles and drones. Local air defense forces allegedly shot down 18 missiles and nine drones, including six “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles. The claims are widely ridiculed by military experts and numerous Telegram channels, with dozens of memes and practical jokes being posted by users and commenters.
Serhiy Popko, the head of the capital city’s military administration, stated: “The barrage was exceptional in its density, with the maximum number of missiles in the shortest time possible, but the vast majority of enemy targets in Kiev airspace were detected and destroyed.”
CNN, the flagship of the mainstream propaganda machine, immediately resorted to damage control to save the “Patriot’s” reputation, as it only arrived late last month and just recently entered service, claiming that “a US-made ‘Patriot’ air defense system was likely damaged, but not destroyed, as the result of a Russian missile barrage in and around Kiev early Tuesday morning local time”, citing a US official as its source. The report further claims that “the US is still assessing to what degree the system was damaged”, adding that “this will determine whether the system needs to be pulled back entirely or simply repaired on the spot by Ukrainian forces”. It also noted that “a US National Security Council spokesperson referred CNN to the Ukrainian government for comment”.
Such advice by the US government can only be interpreted by the fact that even Washington DC simply wants to avoid having to do anything with the Neo-Nazi junta’s ridiculous claims. The issue obviously lies in the fact that such laughable propaganda is not only completely unsubstantiated, but also makes the US itself look like a laughingstock of the world. This is particularly noticeable when looking at somewhat less propagandistic US media, such as The National Interest. Geoff LaMear, the author of one of the analyses recently published by the TNI, stated that “Patriot missiles won’t save Ukraine“, with the following assessment:
“‘Patriot’ systems are limited to pinpoint defense of major assets and are designed to operate in tandem with air defenses engaging targets at higher and lower altitudes. Without these additions, ‘Patriot’ will have too many threats to engage and the result will either be porous coverage that doesn’t protect its defended assets, or coverage that quickly subsides when ‘Patriot’ runs out of interceptors. Moreover, ‘Patriot’ systems are themselves vulnerable. Operating a ‘Patriot’ radar system gives away its location, making it an open target for Russian attacks. This means that ‘Patriot’ is not a one-stop-shop for defending Ukraine’s military assets or its people.”
Indeed, the “Patriot” is simply one segment of the US air defense/ABM (anti-ballistic missile) doctrine that also includes several other types of longer-range systems and interceptors. However, considering how lucrative air defense contracts are, the political West will surely continue suppressing any information about the destruction of its much-touted systems, while also parroting the ludicrous claims that Russian hypersonic weapons are being shot down by these same SAM systems. Such assertions come despite the fact that even top US officials repeatedly reiterated that there’s no viable defense against maneuvering hypersonic targets. This includes President Joe Biden himself, who stated last year that the “Kinzhal” cannot be intercepted.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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