The Washington scenario in phase two is to fight Russia to the last European
By Gilbert Doctorow | March 12, 2023
My latest essay on the wrongheadedness of Belgian and French labor leaders fiddling while Rome burns elicited a number of Contact messages that are too important to keep to myself. What is at issue is how we read the scenario for the further course of the ongoing war in and over Ukraine: will it go on for years at the present level of intensity or is some devastating escalation to be feared in the coming months when the long-promised Ukrainian counter-offensive gets under way.
Allow me to say up front that no one knows for sure. But some observers point to schisms within the Washington establishment, in particular within the State Department, over how determined Russia is to react to violation of its red lines.
One can blame Vladimir Putin all one wishes for the restraint in prosecuting this war that is misinterpreted as cowardice or indecisiveness in the halls of power in Washington. Assigning blame for the misreading of Russia’s intentions changes nothing. The result is that the more hawkish side of the Washington establishment is urging upon the President measures that risk the onset of a full-blown war between Russia and the European powers in the immediate future.
I say “European powers” rather than NATO, because nearly all commentators agree that the U.S. has no intention of putting its own soldiers and homeland at risk when it can play with self-sacrificing proxies. The incredible acceptance of such rules by European leaders has been demonstrated manifestly by German Chancellor Schulz’s silence over the U.S. planned and executed destruction of the Nord Stream II pipelines.
Stage one of the Ukraine war as scripted by the USA was to fight against Russia to the last Ukrainian. Stage two is to fight against Russia to the last European.
In the past few weeks, the USA has delivered to Bremerhaven in Germany and to Gdansk in Poland vast quantities of military hardware that is not going to Kiev but is being prepared for a war with Russia to be fought by either of those states with or without NATO backing. A week ago, one of the US “Doomsday Planes” that coordinate action in a nuclear war came to Europe via Iceland. Smart observers noted this could be an exercise to prepare nuclear attacks on Russia using warheads and delivery systems already on European soil.
Let us remember that Victoria Nuland remains the most important personality in the State Department, head and shoulders above her nominal boss, Blinken. This is the lady who famously, while planning the coup d’etat of February 2014 that overthrew Ukrainian President Yanukovich, was recorded as telling the then U.S. ambassador to Kiev “fuck the EU.” Well, according to information in the public domain that is exactly what she is cooking up today and we, Europeans, are in the soup.
Nuland is said to be the loudest mouth calling for provision to Kiev of long range precision missiles for a summer attack on Crimea which will surely elicit a game-changing level of violence in the response from Russia, possibly entailing strikes against the logistical centers in Poland, Romania and Germany which are delivering the new weapons systems to Ukraine. There are ways this can happen which will make invocation of NATO’s ‘one for all and all for one’ Article 5 problematic.
This is not to say that the United States is not at the same time preparing a back-up scenario in case the Russians go for the principal villain and not for the European implementers. In the past week, a nuclear capable B-52 bomber of the U.S. Air Force is said to have been rehearsing an attack on St Petersburg.
In conclusion, I ask those of my European readers who are leaders in financial institutions, in wealth management, in manufacturing industry, in global shipping, in universities and in widely respected think tanks (from my LinkedIn account I know that some of you are daily followers of these essays), I ask you to use your voices, in public and in private to save Europe from the disaster that may befall us in a matter of months. Salvation will come only when several more European heads of state join Viktor Orban in voting against further arms to Kiev and for an immediate cease-fire. What we need now is definitive peace negotiations between Moscow and Kiev based on the principle of a neutral Ukraine.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
‘Almost Like You Want to Find Nothing’: Experts Slam Norfolk Southern ‘Air Tests’ in East Palestine
By Wyatt Reed – Sputnik – 12.03.2023
Public health experts are warning that the ‘air testing’ being carried out in East Palestine by a for-profit company hired by Norfolk Southern is “almost like smoke and mirrors.”
The ‘air testing’ recently conducted in East Palestine residents’ homes was deficient in a number of key ways and was actually carried out by a company contracted by the rail company Norfolk Southern, a new report has revealed.
East Palestine, Ohio was smothered in toxic fumes last month when the authorities intentionally burned off huge quantities of vinyl chloride following a train derailment in the village.
Residents fled the area in the immediate aftermath. However, after an evacuation order was lifted, many have returned, with some reportedly citing ‘air testing’ results which apparently determined that they could return home without danger.
But on Saturday, an explosive new report seemed to confirm what many have come to suspect: “the air testing results did not prove their homes were truly safe.”
According to a major British outlet, “the air tests were inadequate in two ways: they were not designed to detect the full range of dangerous chemicals the derailment may have unleashed, and they did not sample the air long enough to accurately capture the levels of chemicals they were testing for.”
As University of Kentucky environmental health professor Erin Haynes reportedly put it, “it’s almost like if you want to find nothing, you run in and run out.”
Making matters even worse, “CTEH, the contractor that provided them, was hired by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the freight train that derailed,” the report detailed.
As another outlet previously explained, “the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) has a name that might sound like a state or federal agency, but in reality it is a private, for-profit corporation that has been present after hundreds of ecological disasters—from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to COVID-19.”
While the relevant section has since been deleted, the company previously explained on its website how the data it’s collecting now could be weaponized against the victims of the Norfolk Southern train derailment disaster in East Palestine:
“A carrier of chemicals may be subjected to legal claims as a result of a real or imagined release,” CTEH noted, adding, “should this happen, appropriate meteorological and chemical data, recorded and saved… may be presented as powerful evidence to assist in the litigation or potentially preclude litigation.”
But despite its alarming track record and apparent desire to go after those affected by the crisis, the company remains a major force in the campaign to assuage locals’ health fears.
“It was CTEH, not the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), that designed the testing protocol for the indoor air tests,” explains the British report, adding, “and it is CTEH, not the government, that runs the hotline residents are directed to call with concerns about odors, fumes or health problems.”
In a recently-published video, the controversial company insists that their ‘testing’ shows there’s no danger to East Palestine residents.
“All of our air monitoring and sampling data collectively do not indicate any short- or long-term risks,” a CTEH toxicologist claimed.
But CTEH’s failure to register so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in its tests doesn’t necessarily mean that people’s homes are actually safe, a number of experts noted. As Haynes reportedly explained, “VOCs are not the only chemicals that could have been in the air.”
And even a week after the derailment, she said it’s likely the compounds would have dissipated already.
“To keep the focus on the air is almost smoke and mirrors,” Haynes added. “Like, ‘Hey, the air is fine!’ Of course it’s going to be fine. Now you should be looking for where those chemicals went. They did not disappear. They are still in the environment.”
US House Passes Bill Prohibiting Government Workers From Censoring Speech in Official Role
Sputnik – 10.03.2023
WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives passed a bill to prevent federal government employees from censoring speech in their official capacity, amid hearings by congressional committees on the collusion between tech companies and the government to “moderate” content online.
House lawmakers passed the Protecting Speech From Government Interference Act along partisan lines on Thursday in a vote of 219-206.
The bill prohibits employees of executive agencies or those otherwise in the competitive service from using their official authority to influence or advocate for a third party, including private entities, to censor speech.
“Government agencies such as the FBI and the State Department have been working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to silence American citizens expressing conservative views online,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement on the bill. “Americans have the right to express themselves lawfully online without the government controlling the narrative.”
Earlier on Thursday, a House select subcommittee held a hearing with authors of the so-called Twitter Files to hear testimony on the collusion between Big Tech, government agencies and private organizations – dubbed the Censorship-Industrial Complex – to moderate, suppress and censor online content.
The Twitter Files have revealed how the US government collaborated with Big Tech companies such as Twitter to suppress information related to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story, among others.
Aspen Institute’s Censorship Commission
Katie Couric, Prince Harry, et al. recommended restrictions on free speech
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 10, 2023
Matt Taibbi continues his Twitter reporting on what he calls the CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. His report yesterday on the Aspen Institute’s activities caught my eye. As he put it:
14. The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute – which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID – held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
In other words, a group of extremely wealthy, privileged, half-educated, self-important people assemble in North America’s swankiest mountain retreat, at an institution heavily financed by taxpayer money, to discuss censoring and correcting the plebs’ “information disorder.” A naive outsider might wonder if this sort of activity was conceived as an intentional insult of the middle class, taxpaying citizenry.
The mental habits of the participants are perhaps best expressed by their choice of Prince Harry—a descendent of King George III, who once publicly characterized the U.S. First Amendment protection of free speech as “bonkers”—as a Commissioner. How strange that a young man who seems unable to manage his personal and family affairs was commissioned with making recommendations to U.S. policymakers about governing the American people.
Matt Taibbi’s Twitter reporting on censorship is very interesting and illuminating.
What Would Happen If American Elites Told the Truth?
By Will Blakely | Mises Wire | March 8, 2023
What if America’s elite told the truth?
It seems a ridiculous question to ask. It’s obvious to most of us here that our politicians, bureaucratic managers, and state-associated business leaders hardly ever tell the truth. What use is it for us to ask, “What if?”
There seems to be a considerable amount of social pressure urging us to abandon our better judgment, not for the sake of reason, but for cooperation. If we don’t, the uncritical mob will label us “conspiracy theorists,” placing us in a box with schizophrenics in tinfoil hats who babble on about aliens and flat earth.
Any mature person notices the obvious discrepancy between what we see with our own eyes and what our country’s elites tell us.
When covid-19 hit, we knew from the beginning that “fifteen days to slow the spread” was fraudulent, yet the masses blindly expected us to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. When the feds churned out as much as 80 percent of the money supply in a matter of two years and they said inflation was merely “transitory,” we again knew better yet were expected to remain silent.
Sure, we might not always know exactly what the truth is, but we can generally get an idea about what it isn’t. Something is telling us that the truth is not what the people in charge say it is.
The proper thing to do is to accept what we can’t know and home in upon what we do. We should take what our public officials do and say and ask ourselves, “How does this compare to what they would say and do if they were telling the truth?” By performing this thought experiment, we can be sure our skepticism is well guided.
When we ask ourselves this question, let’s place ourselves in the shoes of the elite: our legislatures, judges, executives, and bureaucrats, particularly those on the federal level. Let’s also consider the state-sponsored business leaders, the spokespeople of the corporate press, and established celebrities.
Let’s assume (against our strongest inclinations) we are incorrect in thinking what they tell us is dishonest. We can even take at face value that they are acting in good faith in everything they say and do, intending wholeheartedly to be completely honest both in their words and their actions.
What would they say and what would they do?
They Would Be Transparent
First of all, an honest elite would be completely transparent, and they certainly wouldn’t silence their opponents. Why hide something if there is nothing to hide? Wouldn’t an honest person be open to an honest investigation? If being transparent provided an answer to us pesky skeptics, what would be the cost?
Yet, this is not what they do. The very leaders who claim to be the bastions of progress and virtue seem to keep plenty of secrets.
After over half a century of questions, President Biden continued to withhold documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Nearly every edition of the Twitter Files exposed how public officials intentionally colluded with a so-called private company to silence particular narratives, some of which turned out to be likely true, such as the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the lab-origin theory of covid-19. Moreover, the federal government is consistently predatory toward whistleblowers and investigative journalists like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
They Would Avoid Ambiguity
If they were honest, the elites would also speak as clearly as possible. Their PR professionals would advise them to avoid all ambiguity and maintain clear and simple language.
After all, the goal of honest communication is to deliver a message, not to obscure it. If a subject is complicated—such as that of economics, warfare, or virology—that is all the more reason to simplify it.
But we know the elites don’t do this either. Perhaps there’s a reason. In his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell explains how politicians can use meaningless words to cover up their real actions and intentions. As an example, he cites the use of the word “democracy”:
In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
This sounds familiar to us. It wasn’t so long ago when scripted corporate news anchors around the country repeated “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” to warn us about what they deemed to be “disinformation.”
How many times have we heard other meaningless buzzwords—“unity,” “equality,” “equity,” and even “patriotism”—repeated time and time again as justifications for things like war, taxation, and mass surveillance?
They Would Admit Their Mistakes
Though this experiment requires us to assume that our elites are never ill willed or intentionally incorrect, we don’t have to assume they’re always right. We can and should explore how they deal with honest mistakes.
Of course, an honest person admits he’s wrong when he makes a mistake. He would never ask other people to accept a contradiction by forcing them to pretend like a mistake was never made, like the draconian Ingsoc regime does to Winston Smith in the book 1984, another one of Orwell’s great works.
When have the public officials who botched their response to covid-19 apologized for being wrong about “gain-of-function” research or suggesting that the covid-19 vaccines would prevent the spread of the disease? Did Bush or Cheney ever apologize for completely missing the mark about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Limitations
There certainly are limitations to our experiment. Our public officials could act irrationally. They could, at heart, be good, good people but act out of fear of being falsely discredited.
But shouldn’t we want leaders with some degree of fortitude? Either way, it seems they are in the wrong and it seems we’re in the right to take what they say with a grain of salt.
The elite could also simply believe that society isn’t intelligent enough to handle the truth, which, though perhaps false, isn’t such an unreasonable opinion. After all, a large part of our society is stupid enough to believe everything they say.
However, many of us are catching on. Plenty know they are being misled but care more to avoid conflict than to point out the discrepancies. The truth is good in its own right. Justice can’t be rooted in falsehood.
We know that our nation’s elites aren’t acting like people who are both honest and rational. Therefore, it’s safe to say that our public officials are either dishonest, irrational, or both. Regardless, they shouldn’t be blindly trusted, and anyone who tells us we are delusional for thinking so is wrong.
Out of respect for the truth, we ought to think critically about what our elites say and do, and we shouldn’t feel guilty at all for doing so.
Will Blakely is a Christian, Southerner and a journalist.
Over $250 billion swindled from US pandemic fund – report
RT | March 11, 2023
More than $250 billion in Covid-19 relief funds were lost to “fraud” and “waste,” the directors of three US government agencies testified before the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee on Thursday.
Compounding what Deputy Inspector General Sheldon Shoemaker of the Small Business Administration (SBA) called “the biggest fraud in a generation,” the officials stressed that the figures they gave represented an extremely conservative estimate of the total amount lost as they did not include the amount defrauded from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
According to a statement submitted by Shoemaker ahead of the hearing, the SBA has already uncovered $190.7 billion in potential fraud across relief programs under its jurisdiction. Specifically, it expects to find upwards of $100 billion within the scandal-plagued Paycheck Protection Program. Acting Treasury Inspector General Richard Delmar admitted to just $2.6 billion in dubious charges confirmed at his agency, pleading that ongoing audits precluded making an estimate of the full cost.
Larry Turner, inspector general of the Department of Labor, blamed the massive losses on a lack of preparation, insufficient oversight, and even the government’s generosity, making a “highly conservative” estimate of $76 billion in fraudulent spending. With no functioning system in place to verify applicants’ qualifying details in a reasonable time frame, the “unprecedented infusion of federal funds” into the program made it irresistible to fraudsters, he told the subcommittee.
Rep. Keith Mfume (D-Maryland) expressed shock that no one had predicted that requiring only “self-certification” to access such a prodigious cash hoard would lead to “a lot of hanky-panky,” while Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) pointed out that the agencies did not even use existing checks and balances to vet applicants, and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) highlighted that state unemployment systems were hopelessly outdated even before the pandemic placed them under unprecedented stress. Of $45.6 billion in potential fraud lent out in association with one Labor Department program, Turner acknowledged upon questioning that $267 million had gone to dead people.
Asked about the possibility of recovering the money, Turner said that hunting down the perpetrators was financially unrewarding, as “once money goes out the door, it is hard to get it back.” Even in cases where the government has been able to track down Covid-19 benefit fraudsters and claw back some of the funds, the inspectors general were unable to tell subcommittee members what had become of some of the money.
More than $5 trillion in pandemic relief funds have been distributed since 2020. By some estimates, as much as $400 billion was stolen from the unemployment relief program alone.
China steps up, a new era has dawned in world politics
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 11, 2023
The agreement announced on Friday in Beijing regarding the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the reopening of their embassies is a historic event. It goes way beyond an issue of Saudi-Iranian relations. China’s mediation signifies that we are witnessing a profound shift of the tectonic plates in the geopolitics of the 21st century.
The joint statement issued on Friday in Beijing begins by saying that the Saudi-Iranian agreement was reached “in response to the noble initiative of President Xi Jinping.” The dramatic beginning goes on to state that Saudi Arabia and Iran have expressed their “appreciation and gratitude” to Xi Jinping and the Chinese government “for hosting and sponsoring the talks, and the efforts it placed towards its success.”
The joint communique also mentioned Iraq and Oman for fostering the Saudi-Iranian dialogue during 2021-2022. But the salience is that the United States, which has been traditionally the dominant power in West Asian politics for close to eight decades, is nowhere in the picture.
Yet, this is about the reconciliation between the two biggest regional powers in the Persian Gulf region. The US retrenchment denotes a colossal breakdown of American diplomacy. It will remain a black mark in President Biden’s foreign policy legacy.
But Biden must take the blame for it. Such a cataclysmic failure is largely to be traced to his fervour to impose his neoconservative dogmas as an adjunct of America’s military might and Biden’s own frequent insistence that the fate of humankind hinges on the outcome of a cosmic struggle between democracy and autocracy.
China has shown that Biden’s hyperbole is delusional and it grates against realities. If Biden’s moralistic, ill-considered rhetoric alienated Saudi Arabia, his attempts to suppress Iran met with stubborn resistance from Tehran. And, in the final analysis, Biden literally drove both Riyadh and Tehran to search for countervailing forces that would help them to push back his oppressive, overbearing attitude.
The US’ humiliating exclusion from the centre stage of West Asian politics constitutes a “Suez moment” for the superpower, comparable to the crisis experienced by the UK in 1956, which obliged the British to sense that their imperial project had reached a dead end and the old way of doing things—whipping weaker nations into line as ostensible obligations of global leadership —was no longer going to work and would only lead to disastrous reckoning.
The stunning part here is the sheer brain power and intellectual resources and ‘soft power’ that China has brought into play to outwit the US. The US has at least 30 military bases in West Asia — five in Saudi Arabia alone — but it has lost the mantle of leadership. Come to think of it, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China made their landmark announcement on the very same day Xi Jinping got elected for a third term as president.
What we are seeing is a new China under the leadership of Xi Jinping trotting over the high knoll. Yet, it is adopting a self-effacing posture claiming no laurels for itself. There is no sign of the ‘Middle Kingdom syndrome,’ which the US propagandists had warned against.
On the contrary, for the world audience — especially countries like India or Vietnam, Turkey, Brazil or South Africa — China has presented a salutary example of how a democratised multipolar world can work in future — how it is possible to anchor big power diplomacy on consensual, conciliatory politics, trade and interdependence and advance a ‘win-win’ outcome.
Implicit in this is another huge message here: China as a factor of global balance and stability. It is not only Asia-Pacific and West Asia who are watching. The audience also includes Africa and Latin America — in fact, the entire non-Western world that forms the big majority of world community who are known as the Global South.
What the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis have brought to the surface is the latent geopolitical reality that the Global South rejects the policies of neo-mercantalism pursued by the West in the garb of ‘liberal internationalism.’
The West is pursuing a hierarchical international order. None other than the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell blurted this out in an unguarded moment recently with a touch of racist overtone when he said from a public platform that ‘Europe Is a garden. The rest of the world Is a jungle, and the jungle could Invade the garden.’
Tomorrow, China could as well be challenging the US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The recent paper by the Chinese Foreign Ministry titled ‘US Hegemony and Its Perils’ tells us that Beijing will no longer be on the defensive.
Meanwhile, a realignment of forces on the world stage is taking place with China and Russia on one side and the US on the other. Doesn’t it convey a big message that on the very eve of the historic announcement in Beijing on Friday, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud landed suddenly in Moscow on a ‘working visit’ and went into a huddle with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who was visibly delighted? (here, here and here )
Of course, we will never know what role Moscow would have played behind the scenes in coordination with Beijing to build bridges between Riyadh and Tehran. All we know is that Russia and China actively coordinate their foreign policy moves. Interestingly, on March 6, President Putin had a telephone conversation with Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi.
Audacity of hope
To be sure, the geopolitics of West Asia will never be the same again. Realistically, the first sparrow of spring has appeared but the ice was melted for only three or four rods from the shore. Nonetheless, the sun’s rays give hope, signalling warmer days to come.
Conceivably, Riyadh won’t have any truck further with the diabolical plots hatched in Washington and Tel Aviv to resuscitate an anti-Iran alliance in West Asia. Nor is it in the realms of possibility that Saudi Arabia will be party to any US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
This badly isolates Israel in the region and renders the US toothless. In substantive terms, it scatters the Biden administration’s feverish efforts lately to cajole Riyadh to join Abraham Accords.
However, significantly, a commentary in Global Times noted somewhat audaciously that the Saudi-Iranian deal “set a positive example for other regional hotspot issues, such as the easing and settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in the future, China could play an important role in building a bridge for countries to solve long-standing thorny issues in the Middle East just as what it did this time.”
Indeed, the joint communique issued in Beijing says, “The three countries [Saudi Arabia, Iran and China] expressed their keenness to exert all efforts towards enhancing regional and international peace and security.” Can China pull a rabit out of the hat? Time will tell.
For the present, though, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement will certainly have positive fallouts on the efforts toward a negotiated settlement in Yemen and Syria as well as on the political instability in Lebanon.
Besides, the joint communique emphasises that Saudi Arabia and Iran intend to revive the 1998 General Agreement for Cooperation in the Fields of Economy, Trade, Investment, Technology, Science, Culture, Sports, and Youth. All in all, the Biden administration’s maximum pressure strategy toward Iran has crashed and the West’s sanctions against Iran are being rendered ineffectual. The US’ policy options on Iran have shrunk. Put differently, Iran gains strategic depth to negotiate with the US.
The cutting edge of the US sanctions lies in the restrictions on Iran’s oil trade and access to western banks. It is entirely conceivable that a backlash is about to begin as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia — three top oil/gas producing countries start accelerating their search for payment mechanisms bypassing the American dollar.
China is already discussing such an arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Iran. China-Russia trade and economic transactions no longer use American dollar for payments. It is well understood that any significant erosion in the status of the dollar as ‘world currency’ will not only spell doom for the American economy but will cripple the US’ capacity to wage ‘forever wars’ abroad and impose its global hegemony.
The bottom line is that the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran is also a precursor to their induction as BRICS members in a near future. To be sure, there is a Russian-Chinese understanding already on this score. The BRICS membership for Saudi Arabia and Iran will radically reset the power dynamic in the international system.
Pentagon seeks $300 billion to replenish depleted munitions sent to Ukraine
Press TV – March 11, 2023
The US Department of Defense has planned to seek a huge budget to replenish the arms and munitions the Pentagon sent to Ukraine, where Moscow says it’s fighting a proxy war against Russia.
The Pentagon seeks more than $300 billion from the US government for weapons procurement and R & D (research and development) in the upcoming 2024 fiscal year, Bloomberg reported on Saturday citing confidential documents.
The requested budget will reportedly be allocated to replacing arms and munitions sent to the Kiev forces to fight Russia, as well as to enhance the ability of the American force to fight China.
According to an internal budget document reviewed by Bloomberg, to purchase new arms the Pentagon is requesting $76.8 billion for the Navy and Marines, $61 billion for the Air and Space Force, $15.7 billion for the Army, and $16.5 billion for other US military forces, in total $170 billion.
The Pentagon also requested $400 million to acquire a new version of the Stinger air defense system, $199 million to purchase 541 Javelin anti-armor missiles, and $179 million to procure 28 additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, Bloomberg reported.
In addition, the Pentagon also reportedly requested $145 billion for research and development projects. This includes $46 billion that would be earmarked for the Air Force, $27 billion for the Navy and $15.7 billion for the Army. The documents are scheduled to be released on Monday, according to Bloomberg.
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden unveiled the 2024 fiscal year starting in October, allocating one-fourth to the Pentagon.
The proposed budget shows an increase in military spending to a record $842 billion.
In the meantime, Russia has repeatedly warned Ukraine’s weapons suppliers that arming Kiev would only delay the restoration of peace in the region while turning those providing weapons providers to Kiev complicit in the Ukraine war.
The Empire of Lies Strikes Back… Extraordinary Cover-Up of Nord Stream Terrorism
Strategic Culture Foundation | March 10, 2023
The New York Times and other Western news media ran with clumsy and blatantly diversionary claims this week, which in the end only serve to draw even more attention to the guilt of the United States in blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Not only is the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden even more indictable over the criminal act; the absurd cover-up attempt this week exposes the Western media as nothing but a ministry of propaganda masquerading as journalism.
Four weeks ago, the eminent independent American journalist, Seymour Hersh, published a blockbuster investigative report that revealed how President Biden and senior White House staff ordered the explosive detonation of the natural gas pipelines connecting Russia to the European Union via the Baltic Sea and Germany. The legendary Hersh has an impeccable record of groundbreaking stories, from the My Lai massacre committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq under American occupation to the operation of ratlines to funnel weapons and mercenaries from Libya to Syria to fight Washington’s proxy war for regime change in Damascus.
In his seminal report on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, Hersh relied on insider Washington sources. He published claims that the United States carried out the covert operation using a team of U.S. Navy divers under the cover of NATO war maneuvers known as BALTOPS 22 last summer. Explosives were planted on the seabed during the exercises held in June 2022 and then later detonated on September 26 with the help of Norwegian military aircraft.
The convincing aspect of Hersh’s report was not just the credible detail of the operation, but that it confirmed what many independent observers had already concluded from strong circumstantial evidence about who had the motive and means to conduct the sabotage. Readers are referred to a recent editorial by Strategic Culture Foundation which compiles the background of why the United States is deemed to be the culprit.
Now here is a curious thing. While Hersh’s report provoked shockwaves around the world, Western governments and the mainstream media chose to ignore his report. In a weird parallel universe sort of way, they pretended that Hersh’s resounding revelations did not exist.
One would think that given Hersh’s reputation for world-news-breaking scoops, and given that his latest report revealed a rock-solid plausible account of how a major civilian infrastructure project was sabotaged, and further given that the implication of this report was the inculpation of the United States and its president and his senior staff in ordering an act of terrorism – one would think that, maybe, just maybe, the Western media would be obliged to give some reportage on that matter. No, far from it, they unanimously kept schtum. In a way that is quite shocking and a travesty.
The charade of silence was maintained for a month until this week when the New York Times published a report claiming an alternative explanation for the Nord Stream explosions. As if on cue, there then followed a rash of other Western media reports regurgitating or spinning the same story.
Laughably, the New York Times claimed its report was “the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines”. This after a month of pointedly ignoring and effectively censoring from the public any knowledge of the spellbinding Hersh article.
The thrust of this week’s “reports” (if they could be called that) are that the sabotage was carried out by “pro-Ukrainian groups” which may have involved Ukrainian or Russian nationals. The source of the claims was anonymous US officials citing purported “new intelligence”. It was also claimed that a private yacht owned by Ukrainians was used and that the CIA had tipped off German intelligence about the impending attack months before it happened.
The information reported is so vague as to be impossible to verify, or frankly to even merit credibility. We are led to believe that a sophisticated, highly technical military operation on the Baltic seabed was somehow carried off by a group of unknown paramilitaries. The New York Times and other Western media outlets published stories that on their face are outlandish. This is gutter press stuff.
Furthermore, from the way the reports are formulated it is obvious that they are meant to serve as a rebuttal to the Hersh report without actually properly acknowledging the Hersh report. Thus, the United States denies any involvement in a criminal act that it barely refuses to acknowledge. This double-think is itself indicative of guilt in the Empire of Lies.
The problem for the Western propaganda peddlers – besides sheer implausibility – is the further burden of having to provide an alibi for the Kiev regime. The U.S. and its NATO allies need to distract from Washington as the obvious author of the crime, but they also cannot afford to implicate the Kiev regime because that could inflame European and American public antipathy towards the NATO-sponsored junta. This is why the New York Times & Co appear to be involved in a tortuous balancing act of blaming Ukrainian militants for the Nord Stream blasts but also claiming that these intrepid militants managed to do so without the knowledge of President Vladimir Zelensky and his cabal. Which again makes the narrative doubly ridiculous.
There is also an important element of timing to all these Western media shenanigans. Last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was hosted in the White House by Joe Biden on March 3 in what was a bizarrely private meeting. Their conversations behind closed doors were not disclosed. Both leaders stonewalled reporters about their discussions. It can be fairly speculated that Scholz was pleading with Biden for some political cover because of the mounting anger among the German public about the economic consequences of America’s policy over Ukraine and Russia. Germany’s industry and export-led economy have been ravaged by the loss of Russia’s traditional natural gas supply. Scholz and his government are seen to be behaving treacherously by going along with what appears to be American vandalism of the German economy. For the Hersh report to go unanswered is causing massive public pressure on the Berlin government. Hence this week, we saw attempts to divert public attention with a concerted Western media campaign about who supposedly blew up Nord Stream. The aim is to absolve Washington and its lackeys in Berlin.
Another timing issue was the sudden appearance of Ukrainian and Russian fascist commandoes who carried out the terrorist attack in Russia’s Bryansk region on March 2 last week. Two adults were killed and a young boy was badly injured in what was a gratuitous atrocity that made international headlines. That daring raid, however, brought to public attention the existence of pro-Ukrainian militants who appear to act as lone wolves in international operations. This is the very kind of profile that the New York Times and other Western media outfits attributed to the Nord Stream sabotage. That begs the reasonable question: was the Bryansk terror attack enabled by Western military intelligence handlers in order to promote the subsequent media disinformation effort concerning the Nord Stream pipelines?
Let’s cut to the chase. The Western media disinformation campaign is a crude joke. It can’t distract from the glaring facts that the United States and its NATO allies carried out an act of international terrorism against European companies and governments, and an act of war against Russia as the main owner of the 1,200-kilometer Nord Stream pipelines worth at least $20 billion to construct. That criminal act was plausibly ordered by an American president and his White House aides. The geopolitical motives are overwhelming as are the self-indicting admissions by Biden and his aides before and after the odious event.
The cack-handed attempts this week to cover up by the Western media only serve to further incriminate the United States and its NATO crime partners. In addition, the Western media are exposed more than ever as being complicit in propagandizing war crimes. The New York Times and other Western news outlets pompously claim to be pinnacles of journalism and defenders of public interest and democracy. They are nothing but the propaganda ministry for Washington – the Empire of Lies.
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