RT | March 11, 2023
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has accused the ethnic Albanian authorities in the breakaway province of Kosovo of attempting to provoke a war in which NATO would once again take their side.
“They want to drag Serbia into a conflict with NATO. Kurti wants to be like [Vladimir] Zelensky, and I would be some kind of [Vladimir] Putin,” Vucic said on Friday, referring to Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and the presidents of Ukraine and Russia.
“It’s what they’re after, what they’ve been doing all along. And in this, they have the support of a significant part of the international community, because [Kosovo] is their child,” he added.
Vucic was commenting on the recent arrest of an ethnic Serb on charges of “war crimes” dating back to the 1998-99 conflict, which ended with NATO bombing Serbia on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists. The provisional government in Pristina declared independence in 2008, with Western support, which Belgrade has refused to recognize.
“They don’t want normalization, they want to humiliate Serbia,” argued Vucic. “But I’m telling you, that won’t happen. There will be no humiliation, no capitulation.”
The proposal for “normalization of relations” between Pristina and Belgrade, made public last month by the EU, amounts to a de facto recognition of the breakaway province, which would have the right to join NATO, the EU, and the UN. Vucic insists he did not sign anything and will never agree to those terms.
“We are preparing for talks on Monday or Tuesday,” he said, referring to the EU-sponsored talks in neighboring North Macedonia. “But it’s not clear to me why. They said they wouldn’t agree to a deal. Well, why are you coming then? For us to recognize Kosovo?”
Vucic insists that before anything else can happen, the EU needs to enforce the 2013 Brussels Agreement, which among other things envisioned political autonomy for ethnic Serbs in the province. The ethnic Albanian authorities have refused to implement that part of the deal for ten years now, insisting it clashes with the ‘constitution’ of Kosovo. Neither the EU nor the US has done anything to influence Pristina to change its mind, Vucic noted.
Instead, the EU has just granted Kosovo visa-free travel to the bloc, while threatening an economic boycott against Serbia unless it joins the Western sanctions against Russia.
By Andrew Korybko | March 11, 2023
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov remarked that the US hypocritically wants regime change in comparatively neutral Georgia while opposing it in Western-aligned Moldova, after which his spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that it supports Bosnia’s territorial integrity but violates Serbia’s. Calling that declining unipolar hegemon out for its double standards towards these two pairs of countries in similar situations is meant to raise wider awareness of the US’ self-interested policies.
Its infamous “rules-based order” has nothing to do with the UN Charter like its proponents falsely claim and everything to do with the arbitrary implementation of selective standards designed to advance the US’ zero-sum interests. In the first pair of Georgia and Moldova, both are experiencing very intense protests at the moment, but the former are Western-backed and designed to pressure Russia while the second are purely indigenous and designed to restore this country’s neutrality in the New Cold War.
As for the second pair of Bosnia and Serbia, the US has feigned worry that the former’s Serb region might separate from the federation that it was forced into in 1994 while doing everything in its power to support the separatist claims of the latter’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo & Metohija. In this example, the double standards are applied because retaining Bosnian “unity” is integral to upholding Western hegemony in the Balkans, the outcome of which is further advanced by splitting Serbia.
Pointing out the US’ hypocritical approach towards each pair of countries, which is objectively existing and easily verifiable, discredits its soft power by exposing just how unprincipled its foreign policy truly is. The only constant is that it always aims to advance US zero-sum interests as was previously explained, to which end it’ll employ whichever double standards are necessary. Morals, ethics, international law, and principles will never stand in the way of the US maximizing its power.
Awareness of this “politically incorrect” reality in turn extends credence to what Russia has always claimed since the onset of its special operation last year, namely that it was forced to resort to military means for defending its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them. For whatever the most gung-ho Western readers might think about the preceding explanation, there’s no denying that the Kremlin has retained narrative consistency over the years compared to the US.
Moscow began warning about NATO’s eastward expansion earlier this century, most famously during President Putin’s keynote speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. By contrast, Washington gaslit by claiming that there’s no credible reason for that country to be concerned by this, yet at the same time also alleging that Russia’s military presence in the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Moldova that was agreed to per deals for ending their civil wars destabilizes their respective regions.
It was always the US and not Russia that obstructed peace efforts in those two countries unlike what the Mainstream Media claimed, all with a view towards indefinitely perpetuating their “frozen conflicts” in order to more effectively divide-and-rule them. Instead of encouraging their Western-aligned authorities to pragmatically compromise with their ethnic rebels, Washington fully supported their absolutist demands that made a political solution impossible.
The same modus operandi was at play when it came to the Minsk Accords that were agreed to for ending the then-Ukrainian Civil War. It’s now known from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own admission as well as that of her French and Ukrainian counterparts that these were just a ruse for duping President Putin so as to buy time ahead of a final NATO-backed offensive against Donbass. The US’ track record is thus indisputably one of double standards, warmongering, and dividing-and-ruling.
Observers therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s applying the exact same approach towards Georgia-Moldova and Bosnia-Serbia with regards to their protests and separatist problems respectively. The US will always promulgate the policy that stands the greatest chance of most effectively advancing its zero-sum interests irrespective of whatever stance it previously practiced towards a prior analogous situation. The pursuit of power, not political consistency, is the only constant in US policymaking.
By Drago Bosnic | March 10, 2023
It’s certainly no secret that the United States has been trying to foment yet another conflict in the immediate vicinity of its geopolitical adversaries. This is particularly true in regards to Russia and China, the only near-peer rivals capable of not only resisting, but also challenging Washington DC’s disastrous hegemony. It is precisely this that makes both superpowers prime targets for encirclement and destabilization, with the end goal being either their complete dismantlement or, at the very least, weakening to a point where they would be forced to accept US dominance without much (or any) opposition. To accomplish this, the belligerent thalassocracy has been using everything at its disposal, from false narratives disseminated by the massive mainstream propaganda machine to more “hard power” schemes such as weapons deliveries and (in)direct military involvement.
Most observers have always seen the connection between Russia and China or, more specifically, between their interests in Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively. These legitimate interests (primarily relating to, but not limited to security) have been targeted by the US and its numerous vassals. Both Moscow and Beijing are perfectly aware of this and are working towards building closer ties, especially on a strategic level, to counter escalating US aggression while maintaining their respective foreign policy frameworks, which aren’t always 100% convergent in every aspect. However, this does not impede their growing cooperation in any way, as can only be expected from truly sovereign nations. This is causing a tremendous amount of frustration in Washington DC, prompting it to mobilize its propaganda machine to try and tarnish the (Eur)Asian giants’ reputation.
A recent piece published by the infamous CNN perfectly illustrates the thinking behind US attempts to use the aforementioned crises against both Russia and China. Authored by Brad Lendon and titled “Ukraine war has made it easier for US to isolate China in the Pacific”, the analysis is an admission of sorts that Washington DC is pushing both conflicts.
Expectedly, the author claims that China is supposedly “backing” Russia just by virtue of Beijing’s continued refusal to join the political West’s siege of Moscow. Lendon claims that this perceived support has pushed Japan to double military spending and acquire long-range weapons from the US, while entirely ignoring the enormous pressure Tokyo has been exposed to in the last 12 months to “up the ante” and commit more of its increasingly depleted resources to the “defense of shared values”.
And while the author praised the new Japanese $320 billion remilitarization program, he harshly criticized China’s own regular military activities as “destabilizing”. This is just further proof that the incessant hypocrisy and double standards are the mainstays of US foreign policy. Lendon claims that “China’s actions are pushing the Asia-Pacific allies closer than ever before”, openly admitting that the Ukraine conflict is “very useful” for Washington DC in this regard. He then quoted the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang as saying: “The [Chinese] armed forces should intensify military training and preparedness across the board, develop new military strategic guidance, devote greater energy to training under combat conditions and make well-coordinated efforts to strengthen military work in all directions and domains.”
The CNN insists that the outgoing Chinese premier stated this as part of a government work report. Either way, the US is surprisingly open about its plans, with the recently revealed National Security Strategy (NSS) envisioning a greater strategic role for America’s numerous satellite states. While Donald Trump’s approach was more isolationist and focused on economic warfare, the Biden administration is showing much more belligerence, as well as a tendency to relegate portions of its power projection to allies and vassals such as the UK, Australia, Japan, etc. Somewhat surprisingly, Lendon claims that South Korea is now also joining the fray.
“Peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is essential for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and it’s indispensable for security and prosperity of the region as a whole,” South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin told CNN recently.
This is somewhat uncommon for Seoul, which has previously been careful not to antagonize Beijing, with which it has extensive economic cooperation. If CNN’s claims are true, this would signal a dramatic strategic shift in the Asia-Pacific, further splitting the region along geopolitical fault lines and eroding decades of essentially unlimited economic cooperation. Perhaps this might be exactly what the US wants, as per CNN itself, but it might also backfire into yet another spectacular US foreign policy failure. Lendon insists that South Korea is worried about Pyongyang and that this is the main reason it is further integrating with the US-brokered anti-Chinese coalition.
However, it could be argued that it is precisely this action by Seoul that could escalate tensions between the North and the South, particularly if the latter further antagonizes and alienates Beijing, which has been playing quite a constructive role in defusing tensions in the Korean peninsula. The destabilization could also be exacerbated by South Korea repeatedly floating the idea of potentially acquiring its own nuclear weapons, a course of action the US has not shown any opposition to while still insisting the North should disarm. Needless to say, Pyongyang is not only refusing to comply with such a suicidal request, but is even expanding its strategic capabilities, much to the chagrin of Washington.
In conclusion, Lendon laments that the Ukrainian crisis “has not been helpful in one key American partnership in the Indo-Pacific, the informal Quad alliance linking the US, Japan, Australia and India”, as New Delhi, “unlike the other three members”, has not condemned Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe. “When the US, Australia, and Japan tried to condemn Russia through a joint statement, India refused…
India claimed that the Quad only tackles Indo-Pacific challenges, and since Russia isn’t in the region, this topic cannot be broached,” the piece quoted Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the infamous RAND Corporation. However, he added that “the split in the Quad doesn’t really distract from its focus, as the Quad is all about how to deal with China”, essentially admitting that America is still trying to compartmentalize its geopolitical approach in the region.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
RT | March 10, 2023
Russia intends to share with the UN Security Council the exchanges it had with Germany, Denmark, and Sweden regarding the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, a senior Russian diplomat has revealed. Moscow is seeking to press its case for an impartial, UN-backed investigation of the incident.
Dmitry Polyansky, the deputy head of the Russian mission to the UN, told US political commentator Jackson Hinkle on Thursday that Moscow is not participating in investigations conducted by the three European countries, “not because we don’t want to, but because they keep us at bay.”
The diplomat claimed that, in a nutshell, the message from the three nations was: “We are doing what we are doing, mind your own business.” The Russian mission will distribute the exchanges among members of the UN Security Council in an effort to initiate an “independent, unbiased international investigation with all parties concerned,” Polyansky added.
Moscow wants the UNSC to authorize Secretary General Antonio Guterres to launch a probe into the attack on the undersea energy links, which were built to pump Russian natural gas directly to Germany. Three of the four pipes were ruptured by explosions in September last year in the territorial waters of Denmark and Sweden. According to Polyansky, Russia intends to put its proposal to a vote by the end of March, although Western powers will inevitably object.
Veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported last month that the sabotage was a clandestine US-Norwegian operation meant to prevent Germany from straying from the American-led campaign of sanctions against Russia. Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, called the revelation “more than a smoking gun.”
The US and Norway have denied Hersh’s allegations. A series of publications in American and German media suggested this week that a Ukrainian oligarch had sponsored the operation, which was said to have been conducted by a small team of private divers from a rented yacht. Polyansky claimed the reports were an obvious attempt to distract the public.
The diplomat insisted that the Nord Stream incident was “an extreme act of sabotage” and that the perpetrators should face accountability. Should that not happen, it would open a dangerous new chapter in international relations where attacks on civilian infrastructure are condoned, Polyansky argued.
Sputnik – 10.03.2023
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cautioned on Friday that if the Nord Stream investigation gets stonewalled, then Moscow will contemplate how to respond to the West for its direct attack on Russian property.
“This gross terrorist attack will not remain uninvestigated. If an investigation — an objective, impartial, which will be transparent, of course — is blocked, we will think about how to respond to the West on this direct attack, a direct attack on our property,” Lavrov said.
Earlier in the day, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov vowed that Moscow won’t let the international investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage be swept under the rug, and the US must stop undermining the probe.
“The road taken here is to cover this all up. But we will not allow what is happening to be swept under the rug, we call on the United States and its European satellites to stop sabotaging what is overdue, namely the launch of an independent international investigation of this event,” Ryabkov insisted.
Ryabkov added that the responsibility for the Nord Stream blasts lies squarely with the United States and castigated the media leaks as a ploy to put the probe on the wrong track.
On March 7, US media reported, citing US officials, that new intelligence suggested involvement of a “pro-Ukrainian group” in the Nord Stream incidents. At the same time, US officials reportedly said there was no proof of the Ukrainian leadership being involved in the operation.
The Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, built to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, have been out of action since they were hit by explosions last September. Nord Stream’s operator, Nord Stream AG, said that the damage was unprecedented and it was impossible to estimate the time repairs might take.
Russia deems the explosions of the two pipelines to be an act of international terrorism. There are no official results of the investigation yet, but Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report in February 2023 saying that US Navy divers, operating under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercise last summer, planted remotely triggered explosives which Norway activated a few months later. The report added that US President Joe Biden had decided to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines after more than nine months of secret discussions with his national security team.
RT | March 10, 2023
The US opposed Georgia’s “foreign agents” bill because Washington does not want the country to have political sovereignty, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, said on Friday.
He argued that the legislation, which was withdrawn after protests and clashes with police in Tbilisi, was aimed at limiting Washington’s ability to meddle in Georgia’s affairs.
“Washington has used the tools of soft power to lead people to the streets. The Georgian authorities were forced to submit – not to the will of the people, but to the United States,” Volodin claimed in a post in his Telegram channel.
The politician said the bill was “unacceptable for the US” because it would have “restricted Washington’s influence on the country’s internal political affairs.”
“With its withdrawal by the parliament, Georgia has lost the chance for sovereignty,” Volodin said.
On Friday, Georgian Dream and People’s Power, two of the country’s ruling parties, withdrew the Transparency of Foreign Influence Bill, also dubbed the ‘Foreign Agents Law.’ They said the bill had led to “divisions in society” and that its intent and purpose has been distorted by “a machine of lies.”
The proposed law would have required individuals, NGOs and media outlets that receive 20% or more of their funding from abroad to register as “an agent of foreign influence” with the Georgian Justice Ministry, according to Reuters. Offenders would have faced fines and up to five years in prison for failing to comply.
The bill was condemned by Washington, the EU and NATO. US State Department spokesman Ned Price voiced concerns about “the potential implications of this law for freedom of speech and democracy in Georgia” and warned that its adoption “could potentially undermine Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Price later welcomed the decision to withdraw the draft law and urged MPs to “officially retract this bill and not to further this type of legislation.”
Proponents of the bill argued that it resembled the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law that requires individuals and organizations to register as “foreign agents.” Opponents, however, claimed that the bill was inspired by a similar law in Russia that was passed in 2012.
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 9, 2023
The New York Times recently carried an interesting article about the death in 1973 of Pablo Neruda, one of the most renowned poets in the world. Neruda was a Chilean citizen. He was also a strong supporter of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who the Chilean national-security establishment, with the encouragement of the U.S. national-security state, ousted from power in a violent coup in that year. The coup was headed by Chilean conservative military strongman General Augusto Pinochet.
At the time of the coup, Neruda was suffering from cancer and was hospitalized. He died during the coup. The Chilean military-intelligence establishment claimed that he died from his cancer. There were always suspicions, however, that he had been murdered by the Chilean national-security establishment.
The Times article describes a report from a team that examined Neruda’s remains. The team found bacteria within his body that could be deadly. But they could not determine for sure whether it was, in fact, a toxic strain of bacteria and whether it had been injected into him.
One thing is for certain though: It certainly would not have been unusual for Pinochet and his henchmen to murder Neruda, with the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, both of which had agents on the ground in Chile during the coup.
Remember: This was 1973, when the Pentagon’s and CIA’s Cold War racket was still going strong. As part of that racket, the Pentagon and the CIA had carte blanche to murder communists wherever they found them.
In 1970, the Chilean people democratically elected Allende to be their president. Allende was a socialist, one who immediately established a friendly relationship with the communist world. He even invited Cuban president Fidel Castro to visit Chile. Their parade in downtown Santiago was met with throngs of enthusiastic supporters.
The U.S. national-security establishment deemed Allende to be a grave threat to national-security. That made him subject to being assassinated by the CIA. Don’t forget that the CIA had already repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro for being a communist.
Rather than assassinate Allende, however, the Pentagon and the CIA instead decided to encourage the Chilean national-security establishment to initiate a violent coup against him. When the coup took place in 1973, the Chilean military tried to assassinate Allende with missiles fired at him from military planes. Allende fought back but was no match for the power of the Chilean national-security establishment. At the end of the battle, Allende lay dead, supposedly having decided to commit suicide.
But even if Allende didn’t commit suicide, the outcome was never in doubt. The Chilean military-intelligence establishment was going to kill him, either during the coup or after the coup. That’s because it, like the Pentagon and the CIA, deemed him to be a communist. Like their counterparts in the Pentagon and the CIA, as far as they were concerned they had the omnipotent authority to kill communists, especially those within their own country.
In fact, after the coup Pinochet and his goons routed up more than 50,000 of Allende’s supporters, including women. They murdered or disappeared around 3,000 of them. They tortured most of them. They raped or violently sexually abused many of the women.
None of this was considered to be any big deal for the killers, the kidnappers, the rapists, and the abusers because the victims were all considered to be communists or communist sympathizers. In the minds of the Chilean national-security establishment, the only good communist was a dead communist, a tortured communist, a raped communist, or a sexually abused communist.
All of this met with the fervent approval of the Pentagon and the CIA. U.S. taxpayer-funded money flooded into the Pinochet regime. In the eyes of the Pentagon and the CIA, Pinochet was helping win the worldwide war on communism, even if the U.S. was losing to the communists in Vietnam.
During the coup, the Chilean military took two young Americans into custody, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. They too were supporters of Allende. They were also opponents of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Chilean officials murdered both men. There is no way that Pinochet would have killed two Americans without first having received a green light from U.S. officials. But it was easy to secure that green light because Horman and Teruggi were considered to be unpatriotic, treasonous American communist sympathizers.
In 1970, U.S. officials first began planning their coup against Allende. Standing in their way, however, was Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. The CIA orchestrated his violent kidnaping to remove him as an obstacle to the coup. Schneider was murdered by the CIA-employed thugs during the kidnapping attempt.
No one in the CIA was ever brought to justice for Schneider’s murder. For that matter, no one in the CIA or the Pentagon was ever brought to justice for Horman’s and Teruggi’s murder.
Many years later, when the Schneider sons sued in federal court for the murder of their father, the federal judiciary made it clear that it would never interfere with any of the CIA’s or Pentagon’s state-sponsored assassinations.
So, given all this, it certainly should not surprise anyone if Pablo Neruda was, in fact, one of the murder victims during the Chilean coup. In fact, what would be surprising is if he wasn’t.
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.03.2023
Protesters spilled into the streets of Tbilisi this week to protest a draft law requiring NGOs to register as “agents of foreign influence” if 20% or more of their funds come from foreign sources. What are the protesters looking to achieve? How have Georgia’s Western “partners” responded? What role, if any, has Russia played? Sputnik investigates.
Georgia’s governing coalition “unconditionally” withdrew its foreign agents law from parliament on Thursday morning, folding to protesters after two nights of violent confrontations with police in the Caucasus nation’s capital, and growing pressure from the European Union and the United States to scrap the draft legislation.
“As a party of government responsible to every member of society, we have decided to unconditionally withdraw this bill that we supported,” the Georgian Dream Party, which has 74 of 150 seats in the republic’s parliament, said in a statement Thursday morning.
Giga Lemonjala, a member of the opposition Droa party, responded to the government’s announcement by demanding that the bill be formally denounced, and that all protesters detained over the past two nights be released.
Georgia’s opposition and Western media covering the protests have characterized the foreign agents legislation as a “Russian,” “Russia-stylem” or “Putin-style” law, citing the 2012 Russian law requiring media, non-governmental organizations, and others to register as foreign agents and make their funding sources known to the public if they include contributions from foreign entities. Some media went so far as to claim the Georgian legislation signaled Tbilisi’s drift away from the European Union and toward Russia, with one article going so far as to call the social democratic, pro-EU Georgian ruling party “Putin’s Georgian Dream.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price characterized the draft law as “Kremlin-inspired” and said Washington was “deeply troubled” by it, with the legislation deemed to be “incompatible with the people of Georgia’s clear desire for European integration and its democratic development.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell echoed these sentiments, calling the bill a “very bad development” and saying it is “incompatible with EU values and standards,” and “goes against Georgia’s stated objective of joining the European Union.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also waded in to commenting on the crisis, praising Ukrainian flag-wielding protesters and saying Kiev expects Georgia and Moldova to join Ukraine in the EU.
Moscow has for the most part stayed out of commenting on the Georgian unrest, absent Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s remarks Wednesday pointing out that the draft law looked similar to US legislation passed in 1938 known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s statement Thursday encouraging Russian nationals in Georgia to stay out of the streets.
Rules for Me But Not For Thee
Russia’s role has effectively been that of a boogieman, designed to discredit the Georgian government and foment discontent, both in Georgia and among Tbilisi’s Western partners, says Shota Apkhaidze, a political scientist serving as director of the Caucasus Center of Islamic Studies. The reality, the Tbilisi-based observer points out, is that the now-scrapped legislation bears much more resemblance to FARA than it does to Russian legislation.
“This is literally double standards, a mockery. The US brazenly adopted this same law 80 years ago, in 1938, and tightened it up repeatedly. Similar laws are in force in several countries in Europe. They tell us this law is ‘Russian,’ even though it has nothing to do with Russia. These are absolutely different things. In other words, we adopted a draft law modeled on American legislation, that’s in accordance with the Georgian Constitution and the law on non-governmental organizations. What does Russia have to do with it? What does Putin have to do with anything?” Apkhaidze asked. “This is just another reason to completely undermine the political system and bring the country to a change of power. That’s what the Americans are after,” the observer said.
Inconvenient Law
International affairs expert Viktoria Fedosova says US and EU consternation over the Georgian draft law is understandable, since it threatens to undermine their immense political power in the Caucasus nation.
“The passage of such a law in Georgia was risky for the US and the EU, since they’ve become used to engaging in their own financing, introducing their own leaders of public opinion, and working [in the country] through non-governmental organizations. This is their typical umbrella-like scheme of operations familiar to them,” Fedosova, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts at the Russian People’s Friendship University, told Sputnik in an interview.
“The Americans have spent about $1 billion on our non-governmental organizations since 1993, with the US declaring that these funds were spent on developing civil society, human rights, etc.” Apkhaidze pointed out. “That’s not the case. On the contrary, these funds have consistently been spent on fomenting a coup d’état, on the financing of some destructive elements in Georgia,” he said.
US and European “democracy promotion” assistance to Georgia has come in various forms over the decades, from the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic Institute to US hedge fund billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Each of these groups provide millions or tens of millions of dollars to Georgian NGOs annually, and wield tremendous power beyond the realm of traditional party politics, Apkhaidze says.
“The NGO sector is the strongest structure of civil institutions in Georgia, because they have massive funding. Everyone, even the current leadership of Georgia, comes from precisely these kinds of organizations and foundations,” he said. “They have immense influence.”
Cynical Approach
The US and EU’s record and history of violating Georgia’s sovereignty is no secret to anyone, but their behavior and response to this week’s violence constitutes outright “mockery” of Tbilisi, Apkhaidze says.
“Why is it that in Georgia, a person who throws a Molotov cocktail at a police officer and sets a police car on fire, hits a special forces agent in the head with a rebar and smashes the parliament building, why is he deemed ‘peaceful’ – and his protest a ‘peaceful protest’?” the observer asked, alluding to the dozens of police officers who have been injured, some hospitalized, over the past two days in clashes with demonstrators.
Fedosova thinks the answer is obvious – while the US is able to pass laws like FARA and use them liberally to monitor their media, politics, and social groups for signs of foreign influence and meddling, the same luxury is not afforded to countries like Georgia.
“The United States cannot allow this kind of sovereignty be enjoyed by tiny Georgia, which, moreover, has already been used as a destabilizing factor against Russia (we remember the situation in 2008),” she said.
‘Second Front’
The irony of the crisis over the foreign agents draft law is that the Georgian Dream government is broadly pro-European, with stated aims including entry into both the EU and NATO. Accordingly, both Apkhaidze and Fedosova believe that the crisis is related to the pragmatic foreign policy approach that Tbilisi has taken in relation to its northern neighbor, especially after the escalation of the Ukraine crisis last year.
“The Americans have spent a whole year now since the start of Russia’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine destabilizing the situation,” trying to get Georgia to join anti-Russian sanctions and “open a second front” against Moscow, Apkhaidze said.
“The Americans know that if they manage to quickly remove Georgian Dream, a second front would be opened immediately, because those flakes who came out to protest want this war, many of them unconsciously, of course; they have no idea what such a conflict would bring. But they are so short-sighted (I mean the majority of young people involved) that they don’t understand what a war with Russia would bring. Others have the concrete goal of opening a second front. The Americans are leading the country precisely in this direction,” he said.
The Georgian government and lawmakers’ attempts to prevent Tbilisi from being pulled into a direct conflict against Russia, notwithstanding the not always rosy relations with Moscow, is precisely the reason the foreign agents law was put together in the first place, Fedosova believes, citing the fact that a handful of NGOs have garnered more financial support over the past year than all the country’s political parties combined.
“The main thing [for the government] is the guarantee of peace, some kind of fair compromise-based dialogue with Russia, without attempts to include the country in a new conflict on Russia’s borders. The main thing for them is to convey this idea of preserving sovereignty and not losing new territories, and to communicate this to their citizens,” the observer said.
Maidan Danger
Fedosova observed parallels between the footage coming out of Tbilisi this week and the Euromaidan in Kiev before the 2014 coup. “We are watching footage now from Tbilisi where young people jump and dance, where the [psychological] mechanisms for creating this kind of emotional bond of the crowd are used. We’re seeing everything we saw on the Maidan. But here the presence of external forces hasn’t yet reached the point where the American ambassador comes out and distributes cookies, for example. So far, we are seeing the manifestation of the Americans in this conflict only in the form of their official statements.”
If the situation heats up, more parallels to the Ukrainian coup could appear, she noted, including radicals in crowds, agent provocateurs, mysterious snipers, culminating in a coup and the appointment of a new puppet government and “the installation of an authoritarian president who will be called a liberal.”
“We see how this happened with Zelensky – how ‘liberal’ his regime turned out to be, and what laws were adopted when everything goes according to the American scenario, and the country is integrated into a full-fledged military confrontation with Russia…They need Georgia as another means to prick Russia, just from another flank,” Fedosova said.
President vs Parliament
In the course of her official visit to the US this week, Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili appeared against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty to express support for the protesters. “I am by your side. Today you represent free Georgia. Georgia, which sees its future in Europe, will not allow anyone to take away this future,” Zourabichvili said.
Apkhaidze doesn’t find anything surprising about the Georgian president’s behavior, saying the French-born politician is simply serving the interests of her masters, and that her sympathies for the opposition have long been evident.
“Georgia is a parliamentary republic. I don’t think that will change. This is not the first time she has opposed various decisions of the Georgian leadership and parliament… As far as Zourabichvili is concerned, she, of course serves the interests, first of fall, of her masters. I can’t figure out whether she’s the president of Georgia or the governor of some American state. But it is a fact that she wants more power, and sees herself in the place of [Georgian Prime Minister Irakli] Garibashvili,” Apkhaidze summed up.
Again, another statistical illusion of efficacy was manufactured by simple miscategorisation
By Norman Fenton | Where are the numbers? | March 7, 2023
By late 2021 it was already clear in the UK that the covid vaccines did not stop infection or transmission. And there were also already plenty of concerning safety signals. So, even though the “vaccine pass” was then required in the UK to participate in daily life, ‘vaccine hesitancy’ was on the increase.
Switching narrative to counter vaccine ‘hesitancy’
Given this increasing resistance against the vaccine programme, the official messaging was changed from “vaccines stop you getting covid” to “vaccines stop you being hospitalised and dying from covid”.
To push this new narrative the Government started pumping out ‘data’ to support the claim that almost all of those ill in hospital with covid were unvaccinated. Here is an NHS text that was sent to everybody registered with a GP in the UK in November 2021:
At the time the text was sent out, “fully vaccinated” in the UK was defined as: “at least 14 days since 3rd jab” or “between at least 14 days and less than 6 months of 2nd jab”. So, the official figure of 8 out of 10 “not fully vaccinated” might have been right but was totally misleading since almost ALL of those who were vaccinated (i.e., had at least one jab) at that time were “not fully vaccinated”.
This creates a false semantic equivalence between ‘unvaccinated’ and ‘not fully vaccinated’.
Many media sources, including the BBC, pushed the 80% unvaccinated claim without even mentioning the ‘fully vaccinated’ criteria:
Similar claims were made about covid deaths among the vaccinated such as this one in the Independent :
and this one in the Guardian :
With respect to patients in ICU claims that high proportions of those with covid were unvaccinated were widely cited – and never challenged – in the mainstream media:
A particularly serious example was the ludicrous claim made in the BBC documentary “Unvaccinated” by Dr Mehool Patel (Consultant, University Hospital Lewisham). His statement – unchallenged in the programme – was:
“We looked at about 550 patients that were admitted in our trust between the 15th December and 15th January 2022, which in effect would mean that most if not all of them were through due to Omicron variant, and of that there were unfortunately 21 patients who had to be admitted to intensive care who were the most severe patients due to COVID. Of the 21 I’m afraid 20 of them were unvaccinated, that’s 95%.
Just one person was vaccinated. And of the 21 who were on the unit, I’m afraid unfortunately seven of them didn’t make it, all of them were unvaccinated, 100%. So that’s one figure to just illustrate the point.”
This was one of the many specific pieces of misinformation that I raised in my formal complaint to the BBC about the programme. I asked the BBC to provide the verified data to support this claim. When I eventually received a response from the BBC’s Complaints Director Jeremy Hayes he said:
“You maintain that this claim was “either false/exaggerated or an unbelievable outlier”.
I have approached the programme makers for information about the data which were quoted by Dr Patel. I have been advised that the figures were compiled by Dr Patel himself for the purposes of research.
“Lewisham and Greenwich Hospital Trust does not record the vaccination status of patients in ICU so Dr Patel’s figures cannot independently be verified.”
But the scam was based on something even more ludicrous than classifying “not fully vaccinated” as “unvaccinated”.
As a result of Freedom of Information Requests sent to some individual NHS trusts we now know that some hospitals were using the NIMS system to classify vaccine status of patients while others were using their own systems. This meant that, in many cases even if a patient had a vaccination record in NIMS, if the patient was not vaccinated in that particular hospital/Trust they were recorded as unvaccinated. Some hospitals were using a mixture of both systems (NIMS where a death was recorded and an internal system where a covid case was recorded). For those relying on NIMS, since it was not operational until June 2021, all deaths within the hospital would have had an unknown vaccination status between Jan-June 2021. The problem is that some hospitals were classifying “unknown” as “unvaccinated”.
So, deliberately murky record keeping was used to manipulate the data.
To see the implications of this, here are the data on hospital deaths (all deaths, not just covid) from the start of the vaccine programme until the end of 2021 from an undisclosed NHS trust who responded to an FOI request:
Note that every death up until 21 June 2021 was recorded as unvaccinated simply because hospitals in this Trust were using the NIMS system for classifying deaths which was not up and running until then. But, of course, an unknown number (probably most) of these 742 people were vaccinated.
There are plenty of other anomalies in the data. Note the improbable, sudden and dramatic trend changes:
Such changes can only be the result of changes in definition of who should be classified as unvaccinated.
It is easy to see how the Government could cherry pick this kind of data to present the narrative they wanted. When the text messages were being sent out in November 2021 it is reasonable to assume that they were using the cumulative data up to, say, mid-October. Then using the data in the table up to and including 18 Oct 2021 we count:
That gives 74% of all hospital deaths classified as “unvaccinated”.
But this is all an illusion. In fact, counting just the final three weeks of the data (6-20 Dec), just 18 out of the 144 deaths (12.5%) were unvaccinated.
It is also worth noting that the same NHS Trust provided the following information on “new COVID positives” in its hospitals between 19th Jan 2021 and 19th Jan 2022.
Given what we know about national vaccination take-up rates, and this Trust’s own death data, it is likely that the majority of those classified as ‘unvaccinated’ here would have been vaccinated (with the exception of those in the 0-20 age categories the vast majority of whom would not have been eligible for vaccination).
So, instead of the ‘50% of new covid cases’ being among the unvaccinated – the ‘official’ narrative pushed from this data – the true narrative should have been that the vast majority of new covid cases were vaccinated.
It matters a lot because, despite being completely bogus, these kinds of ludicrous figures were so consistently repeated that the message “vaccines stop you being hospitalised and dying from covid (even if they don’t stop infection and transmission)” was almost universally accepted. Even the strongest critics of the Government’s covid response consistently repeated this mantra:
The figures were also used as the basis for the bogus studies claiming millions of lives were saved by the vaccine.
So, yet again, we can see that statistical data was used to create an illusion of vaccine hospitalisation and mortality efficacy by the simplest of means: deliberately murky record keeping ensuring that the vaccinated get recategorized as unvaccinated when they die or are hospitalised.
Update 9 March 2023: Here is a video I made covering this article:
Postscript: A commenter below reports that the USA “was far worse”:
Patients who were vaccinated at pharmacies didn’t show up on the state records. The CDC admitted on a web page that ‘unvaccinated’ just meant they couldn’t find a vax on record. There was no requirement for hospitals to update records and why would they? This bias was described by hospital PA Deborah Conrad in the Highwire episode 233 https://thehighwire.com/videos/episode-233-the-vaers-scandal/ Alex Berenson reports evidence that the rate of overcounting of ‘unvaccinated’ patients was as high as 20x. “More evidence that American data may badly overstate the protection mRNA shots offer against hospitalization from Covid” – Jan 13
RT | March 9, 2023
Social media platforms colluded with non-governmental organizations and the US government to suppress information they did not like in the name of fighting “disinformation,” journalist Matt Taibbi testified at a congressional hearing on Thursday.
Taibbi appeared alongside Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who has covered the “Twitter Files” for the past several months, before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio.
Taibbi described what he called the “censorship-industrial complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a free press envisioned in the US Constitution.
Right before his testimony, Taibbi also published a lengthy thread on Twitter, laying out the evidence he entered into the congressional record.
According to Taibbi, Twitter acted “more like a partner” to the government, censoring based on requests it received from federal agencies as well as taxpayer-backed NGOs. Intelligence agencies, dubious “disinformation researchers” and corporate executives effectively worked as a team, he argued.
Taibbi’s thread described an “incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back,” with the same agencies inviting the same “experts” funded by the same foundations and covered by the same reporters to every panel and every conference.
He identified the key players in the censorship-industrial complex as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, authors of the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard. Many of the NGOs involved received funding from the US government, while legacy media outlets acted as their proxies, demanding censorship.
Taibbi described the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and its “Election Integrity Partnership” – renamed the Virality Project after the 2020 election – as “perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” By its own admission, it labeled 22 million tweets during the 2020 election campaign, and was then given access to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, which is able to tackle 50 million tweets a day.
SIO is run by Renee DiResta, who helped design Hamilton68 and worked at New Knowledge – a group caught creating fake “Russian bots” to help Democrats in the 2017 Alabama special election for the US Senate. That did not stop them from advising the Senate Intelligence Committee on “Russian interference” in US elections, and the US legacy media from not questioning any of their conclusions.
“Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, [the CIC] is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality,” Taibbi wrote. “Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.”
During the hearing, multiple Democrats tried to pressure Taibbi into revealing his sources, insinuating Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, was behind the disclosures.
BY BRADLEY K. MARTIN | ASIA TIMES | MARCH 9, 2023
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said an odd thing on March 7 when TASS asked him to compare his version of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions (US Navy divers did it, he had reported February 8) with a newly released version from the New York Times and German media that points to non-governmental Ukrainians as culprits.
“I don’t want to get into it,” Hersh replied to the Russian wire service. “You should decide for yourself. It’s up to you.” The TASS reporter persisted, asking if Hersh thought the New York Times account had come in response to Hersh’s own investigation. He gave the same reply, saying people should come to their own conclusions.
That was pretty clever. Read both versions and you may conclude that they could fit together to point to a plausible account of how, as war raged over Ukraine, three pipelines supplying Germany’s gas supply from Russia were blown up before Vladimir Putin could use their existence to try to lure Germany out of the pro-Ukraine camp. Before the war, over half of Germany’s gas imports came from Russia.
Assemble a whole from the two versions and you might come up with this: On US President Joe Biden’s orders, US government covert types put together and with Norwegian help carried out the operation (that’s Hersh’s story); to avoid detection, they left some clues pointing elsewhere, to Ukrainians or “pro-Ukrainians” – the main clue mentioned so far being that the yacht from which the divers worked could be traced back to a yacht-rental company in Poland, a company owned by Ukrainians.
The German media account
What you might end up suspecting is a false flag.
Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper that is part of a media investigative consortium that talked with officials in several countries to put together its narrative, acknowledges the possibility thusly: “Even if traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators. In international security circles, it is not ruled out that it could also be a false flag operation.”
The paper hastens to add that investigators “have apparently not found evidence that confirms such a scenario.” But “the nationalities of the perpetrators are apparently unclear” since they used “professionally forged passports.”
Die Zeit narrows the gang down to “a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman.” Functionally, they were “a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor.”
Like the New York Times, the German media outlets suggest that the demolition crew consisted of Ukrainian civilians from a non-governmental “commando” force opposed to the Russian invasion.
There’s no point in asking for a smoking gun at this point. His critics point out that Hersh – who has acknowledged he opposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union and who is not known to be a fan of allied efforts to help Ukraine fight the war – based his own account on a single unnamed US government source. Likewise, the German media organizations that make up the investigative consortium name no sources.
Die Zeit reports that “a Western secret service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services in the autumn, shortly after the destruction,” talking about Ukrainian commando responsibility for the destruction. “After that, there are said to have been further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”
A Kremlin spokesperson on March 8 was having none of it, telling journalists that “Western media reports which exonerate NATO state actors from involvement in the explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have the hallmarks of a synchronized misinformation campaign.”
The Hersh version
Hersh’s version is that US Navy divers, “operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”
Remarkable for its detail, the Hersh account claims that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back-and-forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
The debate and preparations proceeded from December 2021 when Russia was marshaling its troops, preparing to strike Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea, Hersh writes. “As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he notes.
The interagency task force thus assembled “was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation,” Hersh writes.
“‘It would be a goat fuck,’ the agency was told. Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”’
“Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s interagency group: ‘We have a way to blow up the pipelines.’ What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, ‘If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’”
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a similar warning, Hersh says, and lower-ranking officials were concerned by what they viewed as their seniors’ indiscretion.
The operation was headquartered in Norway, whose navy, Hersh says,
was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
As cover, Hersh writes, the Americans had Sixth Fleet planners add to the annual naval maneuvers, already scheduled for that time and place, a research and development exercise involving “NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them… The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22.”
After a decent interval of three months,
on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission…
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House – but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution… No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Fact-checkers and Hersh
Critics found what they said were some errors in Hersh’s version. Here is Wikipedia on that:
Hersh wrote that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence services since the Vietnam War and has been cleared ever since. At the time the Vietnam War ended, Stoltenberg was 16 years old, and he had participated during the peak of the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Norway. In 1985, Stoltenberg was part of the Workers’ Youth League in Norway, when the Labor Party was working to withdraw Norway from NATO.
Hersh’s article said the US divers who planted the explosives had operated from a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper. The Norwegian Defence Forces said no Norwegian Alta-class mine sweepers had participated in BALTOPS 22 and were not in the vicinity of the explosions during the exercise.
Regarding Hersh’s allegations against the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, Lieutenant Colonel Vegard Norstad Finberg of the Norwegian armed forces said the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane is a brand new plane that has never been in an operational operation, and has only flown test flights in Norwegian airspace, and has never been over the Baltic Sea…
In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh’s credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh’s allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings.
If the divers’ platform wasn’t an Alta-class minesweeper, then was it a yacht rented from a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland – the vessel the German media/European intel account mentions?
The German account tells us that the saboteurs on their rented yacht proceeded to the dive location on September 6, 2022, from the German Baltic Sea port of Rostock after loading their equipment aboard there from a delivery truck. Rostok’s a long day’s sail (325 nautical miles) from Gdynia, the major Polish port on the Baltic (in case that’s where, in Poland, the Ukrainian-owned yacht rental company is situated).
The New York Times
Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.
That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version:
Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.
I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”
Would you credit “US officials who have reviewed the new intelligence” and who say that “the explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services”?
After all that Seymour Hersh has told you?
Well, at least they have a policy at the New York Times permitting them to emulate Seymour Hersh (born 1937, a real veteran with a record) and stick to anonymous sources:
Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Whew. What a relief.
Bradley K Martin is a veteran foreign correspondent.
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