Washington gives secret bailout to companies accused of war crimes in West Asia
The Cradle | March 6, 2023
US lawmakers last year secretly authorized a bailout for weapons makers for unproven inflation burden as part of the record-breaking 2023 annual defense budget, which allotted over $800 billion for defense spending.
The bailout provision, crafted behind closed doors and quietly added to the approved budget, allows for “extraordinary relief” via unchecked price hikes to Pentagon contracts in response to any alleged losses weapons makers experience “due solely to economic inflation.”
However, there are no requirements for defense contractors to prove their costs increased due to inflation alone. Earlier versions of the defense budget did not include this provision, and it was reportedly added by a handful of congressional negotiators without broader congressional input.
“The new law places no restrictions on when contractors may ask for increases in contract prices; the only requirement is that costs exceed the original agreed upon price,” Responsible Statecraft reports.
The bailout was approved despite the senate striking down a similar provision and defense contractors failing to demonstrate to the Pentagon that inflation was threatening their bottom line, as they have managed to report record profits despite the economic effects of the pandemic or the war in Ukraine.
As a result of this, US taxpayer money is now being earmarked to provide “profit insurance” to giant corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.
Their profits are also bolstered by US officials covertly deploying troops and waging secret wars over the past two decades in dozens of countries across the globe.
US defense contractors have repeatedly been accused of having responsibility for countless war crimes committed in West Asia and other regions of the world.
Last week, a group of Yemeni nationals filed a lawsuit against several US weapons makers for their role in the bombing of a wedding and a funeral in Yemen.
“Year after year, the bombs fell – on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats, and a school bus – killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” reads the lawsuit.
War and Propaganda in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 6, 2023
We recently passed the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy review of the twelve months of the conflict, summarizing what had happened and describing future prospects, an article that attracted more than 2,500 comments.
- Ukraine Is the West’s War Now
The initial reluctance of the U.S. and its allies to help Kyiv fight Russia has turned into a massive program of military assistance, which carries risks of its own
Yaroslav Trofimov • The Wall Street Journal • February 25, 2023 • 2,800 Words
Although hardly critical of our involvement, the writer noted that America and its allies had already provided Ukraine with an astonishing $120 billion in military equipment and money, a figure far larger than Russia’s entire defense budget, with further massive outlays still to come.
As the title of the piece indicated, the West had effectively now taken over control of the war, and if the effort to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin failed, American global influence might be undermined and the future of the NATO alliance called into question. Indeed, such notable foreign policy luminaries as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, and Lawrence Wilkinson have all recently raised the possibility that NATO risks disintegration, especially in the wake of Seymour Hersh’s bombshell disclosure that President Biden had illegally destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.
So in effect, America is at war with Russia on Russia’s own border, and if we lose that war, the era of our global dominance that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union might come to an end. Since the earliest days of the fighting, our electronic and social media have functioned as unrestrained cheerleaders, hailing Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, but this WSJ article could not avoid providing a much more sobering perspective.
Although this war has been of enormous world importance, I’ve actually written very little about the details of the conflict.
I lack any military expertise and doubted that I could contribute anything useful about the fighting, which was anyway obscured by the fog of war. America’s reigning Neocon establishment totally controls the Western mainstream media and over the last few decades they have made propaganda, dishonest or otherwise, one of their most frequently deployed political weapons. Indeed, no sooner had the war broken out than social media was awash with the heroic exploits of “the Ghost of Kyiv” and “the Martyrs of Snake Island,” outright hoaxes that were widely disseminated and believed at the time.
We live in the era of smartphones, so video clips showing Russian tanks destroyed or Russian troops defeated and retreating were widely promoted by partisans of the Ukrainian side. But such anecdotal evidence seemed totally meaningless to me. In 1940 the French army suffered one of history’s most lop-sided defeats at the hands of the Germans, yet if smartphones had been around at the time, it would have been easy for pro-French activists to provide hundreds of clips showing destroyed German panzers or small German units suffering defeat. Such war-porn seems more like entertainment for political partisans than anything having serious value.
This obvious problem soon led some observers to search out a means of more objectively determining combat losses. Many of them began relying upon the Oryx website, run by a purportedly independent “open source” organization that organized and displayed images of destroyed tanks and other military vehicles, thereby allowing analysts to total up the losses suffered by each side in the conflict. Journalists and others soon used this photographic evidence to conclude that the Russians had suffered enormous, almost catastrophic losses, with the under-gunned but highly-motivated Ukrainian defenders destroying huge numbers of Russian tanks and other military vehicles, a result that also suggested very high Russian casualties.
The alleged loss of Russian hardware documented by Oryx seems absolutely staggering. One of the main website pages itemizes nearly 9,500 Russian armored vehicles lost, of which 6,000 were destroyed and nearly 2,800 captured. Those losses included nearly 1,800 tanks, with well over 500 of these captured by the plucky Ukrainians. Each of these listed items is linked to a photograph, most of them either being uploaded separately or contained within a Tweet. For example, 244 destroyed or captured T-72B tanks are listed, all individually numbered and linked to the photographic evidence. Obviously, not all destroyed Russian vehicles would have been swept up, so the true scale of Russia’s apparent losses must surely have been considerably greater. Ukraine’s hardware losses were also cataloged, but they only totaled about 3,000 armored vehicles.
Throughout most of the last year, our mainstream media outlets have been filled with stories of Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, and surely the large compendium of factual material provided by the Oryx website has been an important reason for this. The Oryx Wikipedia entry runs only three short paragraphs, but explains that the website has been regularly cited by Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, the Economist, Newsweek, CNN, and CBS, with Forbes hailing Oryx as “outstanding” and “the most reliable source in the conflict so far.” My impression is that many writers on military affairs are enthralled by such photos of heavy equipment, whether intact or destroyed, and Oryx provides many thousands of such striking images, thus capturing their rapt attention.
If the Russians had indeed suffered more than three times the Ukrainian losses in armored vehicles, with well over 500 of their tanks captured by the latter, a Ukrainian military triumph might have seemed very likely, so the Americans and their allies naturally rewarded their victorious proteges with a tidal wave of financial and military support that easily topped a hundred billion dollars.
The supposed Ukrainian achievement was certainly a remarkable one. According to Wikipedia, the largest land offensive in human history was Germany’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa, which involved fewer than 7,000 armored vehicles. But if we credit Oryx, over the last twelve months Ukraine’s doughty patriots have totally annihilated a far greater Russian mechanized force, while their own losses have been just a fraction of that. Individuals should decide for themselves how plausible such total numbers sound.
I only very recently looked at the Oryx website, and the first issue that came to mind was how anyone could possibly determine whether the images were real, faked, or duplicated. According to Wikipedia, the Ukrainian military possessed thousands of tanks, many of them being the same models used by the invading Russians. So if Ukrainian activists uploaded a photo of a destroyed T-72B to Oryx, how can we really be sure it was a Russian tank rather than one of their own? What if several different photos of the same wrecked vehicle were taken from different angles, and separately uploaded? The fighting in the Donbass began in 2014, and can we be sure that the photographs provided are from the current fighting rather than from battles fought years ago?
Is This a Destroyed Russian T-72B or a Destroyed Ukrainian T72B? They Look Much the Same to Me.
None of the military enthusiasts whom I asked had any ready answers to those questions, perhaps because they had never even previously considered such troubling possibilities.
During recent decades, Hollywood special effects wizards have displayed great technical skill in showing Spiderman swinging between skyscrapers and the Incredible Hulk undergoing a transformation. Surely producing simple photographs of destroyed military equipment would be a triviality, with the costs almost invisibly small compared to a movie budget. But consider that those simple photographs uploaded to a Dutch website have been a crucial factor in attracting many tens of billions of dollars of financial support from American and allied governments, giving each single image on the Oryx website a potential value of $10 million or more. Producing fake photographs is certainly much safer and easier than destroying Russian tanks in real life, and doing so on an industrial scale would seem a very cost-effective propaganda strategy, so it’s difficult to believe that neither the Ukrainians nor their Neocon/CIA/MI6 mentors ever decided to employ such methods.
Putting the issue in very crude terms, I doubt whether Russian losses may be accurately estimated by aggregating and analyzing what amounted to Ukrainian propaganda-Tweets.
Furthermore, an examination of Oryx’s origins raised other troubling issues.
From the Iraq War onward, the credibility of the American government has steadily deteriorated, considerably weakening the effectiveness of its international propaganda campaigns, a central pillar of its international influence.
Then in 2014 a British blogger named Eliot Higgins established Bellingcat, supposedly an independent research organization that relied upon the objective analysis of open source materials. However, in practice his efforts seemed to almost invariably produce conclusions closely aligned with American foreign policy interests in Syria, Ukraine, and other international flashpoints. This notably including the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the alleged gas attack in Syria that Higgins himself had covered the previous year, always pinning the blame upon governments that were the targets of American hostility.
Numerous distinguished international journalists and other experts, notably including Seymour Hersh, Theodore Postol, and Karel van Wolferen often came to totally different conclusions, but their views were usually ignored by the media, while Bellingcat was heavily quoted in the Western outlets as fully confirming the accusations of the American government. As a consequence, there have been widespread suspicions that Bellingcat merely operated as a tool of Western intelligence services, very similar to how the CIA had established other such front-organizations for propaganda purposes during the original Cold War.
According to the Wikipedia page on Oryx, both its founders were Bellingcat alumni, raising serious questions about whether they are really as independent-minded as they claimed to be.
Meanwhile, other American military experts have provided very different assessments of the course of the war.
For decades, Col. Douglas Macgregor has been regarded as a leading conservative military strategist, authoring several well-regarded books and having many dozens of guest appearances on FoxNews. After having a long career in NATO, he had been a finalist for the position of National Security Advisor, served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, and was nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He is obviously very well-connected in such establishment military circles, and based upon his Pentagon contacts, he has repeatedly stated that it is actually the Ukrainian forces that have suffered horrendous casualties, including as many as 160,000 combat deaths compared to far lower Russian losses of perhaps 20,000 or so. Other military experts such as Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson have expressed very similar views.
Across all of his numerous interviews, Macgregor comes across as quite persuasive and confident in his assessments of the military situation.
Given the enthusiastic, almost uniform support of powerful Western political, financial, and media interests for the Ukrainian side, I find it difficult to understand why Macgregor, Ritter, Johnson, and others would be taking such contrary positions unless they sincerely believed that they were correct. Indeed, a BBC research effort recently used social media and other open sources to identify 14,709 individual Russian service members killed in the war, a figure that seems quite consistent with Macgregor’s total estimate of 20,000.
So we have diametrically conflicting positions, with Ukrainian officials and the Oryx website claiming Russian losses have been several times greater than Ukrainian ones, while Macgregor and his allies put the ratio at perhaps 8-to-1 in the opposite direction.
I personally lean much more towards Macgregor’s perspective, but I actually doubt that the issue matters much in strategic terms. From the beginning, I’ve never regarded the operational-level details of the fighting in Ukraine as very interesting or important, and haven’t paid much attention to it. This explains why I had never looked at the Oryx website until just a few days ago.
If the Russian army were completely defeated by the Ukrainians and lost control of Crimea and the Donbass, that sort of military disaster for Russia would have major global consequences. But I consider that possibility exceptionally unlikely and doubt that anyone sensible thinks otherwise.
Instead, it seems almost certain that the war will either become roughly stalemated, as many Western analysts seem to believe, or that the Russians will eventually crush the Ukrainians, as predicted by Macgregor and some other Western experts. But unless the latter result draws in NATO forces and leads to a wider war, with possible risk of a nuclear confrontation, I don’t think the strategic consequences are much different in those two contrasting scenarios.
Before the war began, the Russians were widely expected to overwhelm Ukrainian resistance in a matter of weeks, and compared to those early expectations, the war has already been stalemated for a full year.
In hindsight, Russia’s failure to win a quick, decisive victory should not have been too surprising. For example, I’d been entirely unaware that Ukraine actually had an enormous regular army, more than three times the size of Germany’s, and far larger than that of any European NATO country. Much of Ukraine’s military was fully trained to NATO standards, and including reserves and the National Guard, Ukraine deployed more than a half-million ground troops, outnumbering the attacking Russian forces by around 3-to-1, with many of its best units heavily entrenched in strong defensive positions. Under such challenging circumstances, it’s quite understandable that the Russians have required a year of heavy fighting to gain ground against the stubborn Ukrainian defenders, with the latter heavily backed by supplies and assistance from America and the rest of NATO.
But although Russia’s operational progress on the battlefield has been slow and mixed, on the geostrategic level, the Russians have already won a series of major victories. China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other non-Western countries have clearly moved towards Russia, which also easily surmounted the unprecedented sanctions that most had expected would cripple her economy. The reckless American destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the European energy crisis may eventually cause the collapse of NATO. Putin’s domestic approval rating is in the 80s, probably as high as it has ever been. And I don’t see any of these results changing if the military stalemate continues.
One year ago, just after the war broke out, I’d outlined my broader perspective in a long article:
For more than a hundred years, all of America’s many wars have been fought against totally outmatched adversaries, opponents that possessed merely a fraction of the human, industrial, and natural resources that we and our allies controlled. This massive advantage regularly compensated for many of our serious early mistakes in those conflicts. So the main difficulty our elected leaders faced was merely persuading the often very reluctant American citizenry to support a war, which is why many historians have alleged that such incidents as the sinkings of Maine and the Lusitania, and the attacks in Pearl Harbor and Tonkin Bay were orchestrated or manipulated for exactly that purpose.
This huge advantage in potential power was certainly the case when World War II broke out in Europe, and Schultze-Rhonof and others have emphasized that the British and French empires backed by America commanded potential military resources vastly superior to those of Germany, a mid-size country smaller than Texas. The surprise was that despite such overwhelming odds Germany proved highly successful for several years, before finally going down to defeat…
Consider the attitude taken during the current conflict with Russia, a severe Cold War confrontation that might conceivably turn hot. Despite its great military strength and enormous nuclear arsenal, Russia seems just as out-matched as any past American foe. Including the NATO countries and Japan, the American alliance commands a 6-to-1 advantage in population and 12-to-1 superiority in economic product, the key sinews of international power. Such an enormous disparity is implicit in the attitudes of our strategic planners and their media mouthpieces.
But this is a very unrealistic view of the true correlation of forces…just two weeks before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held their 39th personal meeting in Beijing and declared that their partnership had “no limits.” China will certainly support Russia in any global conflict.
Meanwhile, America’s endless attacks and vilification of Iran have gone on for decades, culminating in our assassination two years ago of the country’s top military commander, Qasem Soleimani, who had been mentioned as a leading candidate in Iran’s 2021 presidential elections. Together with our Israeli ally, we have also assassinated many of Iran’s top scientists over the last decade, and in 2020 Iran publicly accused America of having unleashed the Covid biowarfare weapon against their country, which infected much of their parliament and killed many members of their political elite. Iran would certainly side with Russia as well.
America, together with its NATO allies and Japan, does possess huge superiority in any test of global power against Russia alone. However, that would not be the case against a coalition consisting of Russia, China, and Iran, and indeed I think the latter group might actually have the upper hand, given its enormous weight of population, natural resources, and industrial strength.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, America has enjoyed a unipolar moment, reigning as the world’s sole hyperpower. But this status has fostered our overweening arrogance and international aggression against far weaker targets, finally leading to the creation of a powerful block of states willing to stand up against us.
Then last October, I’d updated my analysis and I think that the subsequent developments have generally confirmed my appraisal:
I wrote those words just two weeks after the war began, and as is inevitable in any conflict, various matters have gone differently than anyone originally predicted.
The Russians had been widely expected to sweep the Ukrainians before them, but instead they have encountered very determined resistance, suffering heavy casualties as they made slow progress. Generously resupplied with advanced weaponry from NATO stockpiles, the Ukrainians recently launched successful counter-attacks, forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to call up 300,000 reserves.
But although Russia’s military efforts have only been partially successful, on all other fronts, America and its allies have suffered a series of strategic geopolitical defeats.
At the start of the war, most observers believed that the unprecedented sanctions imposed by America and its NATO allies would deal a crippling blow to the Russian economy. Instead, Russia has escaped any serious damage, while the loss of cheap Russian energy has devastated the European economies and severely hurt our own, resulting in the highest inflation rates in forty years. The Russian Ruble was expected to collapse, but is now stronger than it was before.
Germany is the industrial engine of Europe and the sanctions imposed on Russia were so self-destructive that popular protests began demanding that they be lifted and the Nord Stream energy pipelines reopened. To forestall any such potential defection, those Russian-German pipelines were suddenly attacked and destroyed, almost certainly with the approval and involvement of the U.S. government. America is not legally at war with Russia let alone Germany, so this probably represented the greatest peacetime destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world, inflicting enormous, lasting damage upon our European allies. Our total dominance over the global media has so far prevented most ordinary Europeans or Americans from recognizing what transpired, but as the energy crisis worsens and the truth gradually begins to emerge, NATO might have a hard time surviving. As I discussed in a recent article, America may have squandered three generations of European friendship by destroying those vital pipelines.
- American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 WordsMeanwhile, many years of arrogant and oppressive American behavior towards so many other major countries has produced a powerful backlash of support for Russia. According to news reports, the Iranians have provided the Russians with large numbers of their advanced drones, which have been effectively deployed against the Ukrainians. Since World War II, our alliance with Saudi Arabia has been a linchpin of our Middle Eastern policy, but the Saudis have now repeatedly sided with the Russians on oil production issues, completely ignoring America’s demands despite threats of retaliation from Congress. Turkey has NATO’s largest military, but it is closely cooperating with Russia on natural gas shipments. India has also moved closer to Russia on crucial issues, ignoring the sanctions we have imposed on Russian oil. Except for our political vassal states, most major world powers seem to be lining up on Russia’s side.
Since World War II one of the central pillars of global American dominance has been the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and our associated control over the international banking system. Until recently we always presented our role as neutral and administrative, but we have increasingly begun weaponizing that power, using our position to punish those states we disliked, and this is naturally forcing other countries to seek alternatives. Perhaps the world could tolerate our freezing the financial assets of relatively small countries such as Venezuela or Afghanistan, but our seizure of Russia’s $300 billion in foreign reserves obviously tipped the balance, and major countries are increasingly seeking to shift their transactions away from the dollar and the banking network that we control. Although the economic decline of the EU has caused a corresponding fall in the Euro and driven up the dollar by default, the longer-term prospects for our continued currency hegemony hardly seem good. And given our horrendous budget and trade deficits, a flight from the dollar might easily collapse the US economy.
Soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine War, the eminent historian Alfred McCoy argued that we were witnessing the geopolitical birth of a new world order, one built around a Russia-China alliance that would dominate the Eurasian landmass. His discussion with Amy Goodman has been viewed nearly two million times.
Related
The United States Is in Conflict with Countries for Doing Things We Know They’re Not Doing
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | March 6, 2023
China, Balloons, and Spying
On February 4, the U.S. military shot down a Chinese balloon they claim was a surveillance device spying on U.S. territory. The unprecedented “kinetic action against an airborne object… within United States or American airspace” was followed by three more objects being shot down by the U.S. and Canada over their airspace.
The conflict that followed derailed potential and necessary Sino-American diplomacy. But Washington knows three crucial things: the surveillance balloon was not intentionally sent over American airspace, the next three objects were not even spying, and even if they had been spying, China would only be doing what the U.S. does every day. There was never a need for the conflict.
Biden has admitted that the three later objects that were shot down “were most likely research balloons, not spy craft.” The U.S. “intelligence community’s assessment is that the three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific studies.”
As for the balloon the United States still believes was a spy balloon, they knew all along that China had not deliberately sent it over American airspace. Far from being taken by surprise, as they portrayed, “U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.”
And they knew the intended destination was never the United States. Officials “are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device.” The U.S. monitored the flight path that was taking it to Guam when “strong winds… appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States.”
The U.S. initiated a potentially dangerous conflict with a country for doing something they knew the country wasn’t doing.
And even if China did send a spy balloon over the United States, the government knows that they do that to China every day. Three times a day actually! Retired Ambassador Chas Freeman, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972, told me that the U.S. “mount[s] about three reconnaissance missions a day by air or sea along China’s borders, staying just outside the 12-mile limit but alarming the Chinese, who routinely intercept our flights and protest our perceived provocations.”
The U.S. has, not balloons, but satellites that spy on China. NBC’s Robert Windrem calls Washington’s “appetite for China’s secrets” “insatiable” and says that “spying on the People’s Republic of China has been one of the National Security Agency’s top priorities since it was established in 1952.”
But they have balloons too. On February 13, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said “that the U.S. had flown high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022.” He went on to say that “U.S. balloons regularly flew through other countries’ airspace without permission.”
And in February 2022, Politico revealed that the Pentagon is working on “high-altitude inflatables” that would fly “at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet [and] would be added to the Pentagon’s extensive surveillance network…” The Pentagon, which has spent millions on the project, hopes the balloons “may help track and deter hypersonic weapons being developed by China and Russia.”
Cuba and Sponsoring Terrorism
On October 3, 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro asked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of international terrorism. At a press conference the same day, Blinken defended the Cuban listing, insisting that “When it comes to Cuba and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements.” Petro disagreed, responding that “what has happened with Cuba is an injustice.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agrees. In December, he said that the world must “unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba, and never, ever treat it as a ‘terrorist’ country, or put its profoundly humane people and government on a blacklist of supposed ‘terrorists.’”
The United States agrees. Though the Biden administration has insisted on keeping Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, they know that Cuba is not a sponsor of terrorism.
William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, told me that the region’s resistance to the American strangling of Cuba was “preventing Washington from engaging Latin American cooperation on a range of other issues.” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said U.S. policy on Cuba had become “an albatross” around the neck of the U.S., crippling their policy in the hemisphere.
So, President Obama ordered a review of the designation. In an act of extreme historical understatement, he told Congress that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period” and “has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” After the State Department review, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that any remaining “concerns and disagreements” with Cuba “fall outside the criteria for designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.” The State Department issued an “assessment that Cuba meets the criteria established by Congress for rescission.” The U.S. intelligence community came to the same decision.
In May 2015, Obama removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuba’s Foreign Ministry announced that “The government of Cuba recognizes the just decision made by the President of the United States to remove Cuba” from the list, adding that “it never deserved to belong” on the list in the first place.
Cuba was placed on the list in 1982 in an act of hypocrisy and exceptionalism. President Reagan locked Cuba in the list for arming revolutionary left wing movements in Latin America, meanwhile Reagan was arming their right wing opponents. Reagan declared that supporting those groups was “self-defense” and waged secret proxy wars and armed and supported counter-revolutionary forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. LeoGrande has said that the U.S. backed counter-revolutionary forces “guilty of far worse terrorist attacks against civilians” than the Cuban backed revolutionary forces.
Nonetheless, on January 11, 2021, as it was walking out the White House door, the Trump administration thrust Cuba back onto the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Biden promised, while campaigning for the presidency, that he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” Instead, two months after Trump put Cuba back on the list, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that a “Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.”
Cuba remains on the state sponsor of terrorism list even though Washington knows Havana is not a state sponsor of terrorism. The Obama administration liberated them from the list, knowing that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism.” The Trump administration locked them back in the list, knowing the same, and the Biden administration has no immediate plans to reverse it.
Iran and Nuclear Bombs
The pattern is the same with Iran. The Obama administration signs the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, paving the way to end the conflict, the Trump administration illegally pulls out of the deal, renewing the conflict, and Joe Biden continues Trump’s failed policies instead of returning to Obama’s promising policies.
The Biden administration knows that the Trump era policy they are keeping alive is a mistake. Blinken called the Trump administration’s “decision to pull out of the agreement” a “disastrous mistake.” Biden, while campaigning, said that Trump “recklessly tossed away a policy that was working to keep America safe and replaced it with one that has worsened the threat.” He promised to “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy.” He hasn’t.
Instead, the State Department has said that the negotiations with Iran are “not our focus right now.” Robert Malley, the top U.S. diplomat for negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, said that “It is not on our agenda…we are not going to waste our time on it.”
So, Iran continues to be the recipient of American sanctions, threats, assassinations, and sabotage: all while the United States knows Iran is not building a nuclear bomb.
The 2007 and 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimates both concluded with “high confidence” that Iran was not building a bomb. But you don’t have to go back that far to find American admissions that they are continuing the conflict with Iran for doing things they know Iran is not doing.
The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review makes the stunning admission that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon nor has it even made a decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. The Nuclear Posture Review makes that admission, not once, but twice, and it is repeated again in the National Defense Strategy in which it is included.
The Nuclear Posture Review says that “Iran does not currently pose a nuclear threat but continues to develop capabilities that would enable it to produce a nuclear weapon should it make the decision to do so.” It then lays out the truth about Iran in the greatest clarity: “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.”
That was true four months ago, when the Nuclear Posture Review was released, and it remains true today. On February 25, CIA Director William Burns said that “[t]o the best of our knowledge, we don’t believe that the supreme leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program.”
As with its Cuba policy, the United States continues to engage in conflict with Iran for doing something they know Iran is not doing. In the case of Iran, that escalating, self-defeating policy is potentially very dangerous.
In all three cases—China, Cuba and Iran–the United States has engaged in hostile, and sometimes dangerous, conflict with countries for doing what Washington knew all along they weren’t doing.
Scholz’s US tour shows Germany’s subservience to Washington
By Lucas Leiroz | March 6, 2023
Despite all the recent humiliation against Germany and reports from credible sources that the US indeed bombed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, the German government seems willing to continue maintaining a policy of absolute submission to Washington. In the first week of March, German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz traveled to the US. First, analysts suggested that he was trying to negotiate new economically interesting deals for Berlin. However, conversations with Biden were restricted to the Ukrainian topic, and revealed the submission of the German leader to the American.
The visit of the head of the German government seems to have had the intention of negotiating with President Biden the position to be occupied by Berlin in the current European context. In the midst of the economic, energy and social crisis that affects the country, the leadership position that Germany previously maintained on the continent (in partnership with France) has been strongly shaken in recent times – which motivates the German government to seek agreements that enable it to recover its status.
Commenting on the matter, Alexander Rahr, German political scientist and head of Eurasian Society, said: “Germany wants, anyway, to restore its leadership in Europe, and this can be done only with the assistance, support and blessing of America”.
As expected, in order to obtain such a “blessing” the tactic used by Scholz was to show himself even more willing to help the US in its proxy war against Russia. The German Chancellor proposed discussions on his country’s role in the conflict and emphasized his commitment to help Kiev. Biden thanked his counterpart for the effort to help Ukraine and both reinforced their votes of friendship.
“You (Olaf Scholz) stepped up to provide critical military support. And I would argue, beyond the military support, the moral support you’ve given Ukrainians has been profound. Profound”, US President Joe Biden said.
However, Scholz does not seem to have heard anything very special from Biden regarding the German role in Europe. Significant agreements were not signed and topics of great strategic interest do not seem to have been included in the conversations. To summarize, the meeting did not have content worthy of a summit between two leaders of world powers. This was more like a meeting that could have been held by telephone or online, since the central issue was to discuss the situation of another country – Ukraine. If Scholz expected Biden to be “pleased” with the German willingness to help Kiev and propose to “bless” German projects in return, the objective definitely failed.
Rahr considers that Scholz received “a slap in the face from the US”, and that the Prime Minister “can do nothing but obey”. The expert recalled that Biden made several tours in Europe, visiting countries like Ukraine and Poland, but ignoring Germany. Clearly, Scholz is not seen as “an equal” by Biden, not being “worth visiting.” This seems to have led to much criticism within Germany over the prime minister’s visit to Washington.
“There is a lot of talk in Germany about why Scholz really needs to go to Washington now. Many believe that he and Biden are discussing everything on the phone, so what could have prompted Biden to allegedly call Scholz on the carpet in Washington? I think a lot has to do with the fact that Biden himself was recently in Europe, but did not visit Germany. He has not visited Germany as a president, so far. He was twice in Poland and by this he clearly emphasized that Poland is the main ally in Europe for him today. I think it’s a slap in the face for Germany,” Rahr said.
As if it were not enough to assume a passive posture and visit Washington after being repeatedly ignored by Biden, there is still the aggravating factor related to Nord Stream. Lately, the discussion on the gas pipeline has been a trending topic on social media. Thousands of people inside and outside Germany have been absolutely shocked by reports that American intelligence has destroyed the gas pipelines. And Scholz simply ignored this situation and visited the accused country.
Rhar claims that German officials already know the truth about the case and that the Scholz government is aware that the country was attacked by the US, but adds that Scholz seems to have no choice but to accept, ignore and continue trying to appear even more like a “good friend ” for Washington, since Germany has no military protection other than NATO.
“It seems to me that everything is already clear to Scholz. I do not believe that German intelligence or the military structures of Europe, which should have known what happened, have any doubts about the US role in [destroying Nord Stream pipelines]. And there were publications and investigations into this in the US. But Scholz also clearly understands that it is impossible to act against America, because today America provides Europe, including Germany, with that security, that nuclear umbrella that Europe itself does not have”, he added.
In fact, the failure of the Scholz government shows how the US has proved to be a terrible ally for its partner countries. American international conduct has simply consisted of demanding weapons for its proxy war against Russia while illegal coercive measures (such as sanctions) and even terrorist sabotage (such as the Nord Stream case) are simultaneously taken to harm these same allies.
The case is simple to understand: subjugating its partners and making them more submissive and dependent, Washington consolidates a zone of influence in the midst of the current process of geopolitical transition to multipolarity. It was not by chance that many sovereigntist projects in Europe, such as Nord Stream itself, the EU-China agreement and the plan for a “European army, have been abandoned or sabotaged since last year.
However, as difficult as it is to face the US, this is a step that will become inevitable for the Germans. If Scholz remains submissive to Washington even after recent sabotage, the government will enter an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Massive US, South Korean War Games Set to Inflame Tensions with North Korea
By Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter | Libertarian Institute | March 5, 2023
Washington and Seoul announced their largest war games in five years. Last month, North Korea warned the US and South Korea that Pyongyang would take “unprecedentedly persistent and strong counteractions.”
American and South Korean forces will engage in two different military exercises in mid-March, dubbed “Warrior Shield.” A portion of the war games will involve a computer simulation, while the live-fire military operations are named “Foal Eagle.” The combined drills will run from March 13-23.
The drills were announced on the same day the US sent a B-1B bomber over the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang views the bombers as provocative because of the large payloads the planes can carry.
This year’s Foal Eagle will be the largest joint American and South Korean war games in five years. The Department of Defense claims the military operations are “defensive.” “We’ve conducted routine training like UFS (Ulchi Freedom Shield) and Freedom Shield for decades that have been defensive in nature,” US Forces in Korea spokesperson Col. Isaac Taylor said.
Washington will deploy an aircraft carrier and other strategic assets to the region for the war games, according to the Korean Herald. Additionally, the Pentagon is sending MQ-9 Reaper armed drones to the Korean Peninsula for the first time.
The Foal Eagle war games were last conducted in 2018. Then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in and American President Donald Trump canceled the military drills to help foster diplomacy with North Korea. Pyongyang views the war games as practicing for a regime change against Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.
Last month, Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s sister, blasted Washington and Seoul for considering resuming the war games. “There is no change in our will to make the worst maniacs escalating the tensions pay the price for their action.” She warned North Korea would turn the Pacific Ocean into a “firing range” if the US and South Korea conducted the drills.
More recently, the DPRK warned that it would soon consider continued US military action on the peninsula as a “declaration of war.”
The US and South Korea say they are prepared to respond to increased North Korean military activity by further escalating tensions. “Our military will not tolerate North Korea’s provocations that threaten the life and safety of our people.” South Korean military spokesperson Col. Lee Sung-jun said. “We will sternly respond to such acts with the alliance’s overwhelming capabilities.”
In a press release issued by the North Korean Foreign Ministry on Saturday, Pyongyang cautioned, “the Korean peninsula is turning into the world’s biggest powderkeg and war practice field due to a military expansion scheme led by the United States and its followers.”
On Sunday, North Korea demanded the United Nations take action against US military provocations. “The UN and the international community will have to strongly urge the US and South Korea to immediately halt their provocative remarks and joint military exercises,” a statement from the foreign ministry said, adding that tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached an “extremely dangerous level.”
Netanyahu claims special right to strikes on nuclear facilities
RT | March 6, 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that the option of attacking an Iranian nuclear facility in “self-defense” must be left on the table, arguing that the chief of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made an “unworthy” statement when he declared that any such strikes are banned.
“Are we forbidden to defend ourselves?” Netanyahu said on Sunday in a cabinet meeting. “Of course, we are allowed, and of course, we are doing this… Nothing will prevent us from protecting our country and preventing oppressors from destroying the Jewish state.”
Netanyahu’s rant came a day after IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi was asked by a reporter about US and Israeli threats to attack Iran if it doesn’t agree to curb its nuclear program.
“Any military attack on a nuclear facility is outlawed, is out of the normative structures that we all abide by,” Grossi said at a press briefing in Tehran after meeting with Iranian leaders. That principle applies to all nuclear facilities, including Europe’s biggest atomic facility in Zaporozhye.
Netanyahu said no such prohibition could apply to Israel. “Rafael Grossi is a worthy person who made an unworthy remark,” he said. “Outlawed by what law? Is Iran, which publicly calls for our extermination, allowed to protect its weapons of destruction that will slaughter us?”
Grossi’s trip to Tehran apparently paid dividends, as Iranian officials agreed to restore the UN watchdog’s access to some surveillance tools at the country’s nuclear facilities. The IAEA also was granted an increase in inspections at the Fordo nuclear site, as well as additional verification and monitoring activities.
“These are not words,” Grossi told reporters upon his return to Vienna on Saturday. “This is very concrete.”
Tehran has denied having any ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran signed a deal with the US and other world powers in 2015, agreeing to impose restrictions on its nuclear industry, including uranium enrichment, to allay fears about its potential for warhead development. Washington reneged on the agreement in 2018, when then-US President Donald Trump said he would instead apply “maximum pressure” through sanctions on Iran to contain its nuclear program.
Yemen’s parliament calls for confrontation with foreign occupation forces
Press TV – March 5, 2023
Yemen’s parliament has reiterated its rejection of the presence of foreign occupation troops in the country.
The lawmakers called on the Yemeni people to confront the foreign forces to prevent any outside intervention in the country’s internal affairs.
The Yemeni parliament warned in a statement on Sunday of American plots to target the unity and sovereignty of the country amid the US-British-Saudi presence in the southeastern province of al-Mahrah, according to Yemen’s al-Masirah television network.
It called for standing united in the face of invaders and occupiers while blaming the coalition of aggression and its mercenaries for tampering with the wealth of the Yemeni people and forfeiting the sovereignty, independence and unity of Yemen and its territorial integrity.
The statement strongly condemned any foreign presence in “Yemeni lands, islands and waters, whatever its justifications.”
The House of Representatives also condemned the suspicious American movements taking place in the occupied Yemeni provinces, the latest of which was a visit by the American ambassador and the commander of the US Fifth Fleet under the pretext of combating smuggling.
The US military moves in the southeastern provinces of al-Mahra and Hadhramaut have escalated significantly and provocatively over the past months, in parallel with Washington’s attempts to thwart peace efforts and circumvent the demands of the Yemeni People and the requirements for a solution, including the complete departure of foreign forces from Yemen.
The American news website Huffington Post recently confirmed that the United States is moving in the path of seizing al-Mahra Province for “geopolitical purposes and long-term economic ambitions and goals, including control of the governorate’s coasts and ports.”
The site revealed that “US soldiers and military experts frequent the province, moving around it, away from the media spotlight.”
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with its Arab allies and with arms and logistics support from the US and other Western states.
The objective was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.
While the Saudi-led coalition has failed to meet any of its objectives, the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
FBI Whistleblowers Nail the Bureau at House Panel on Weaponization Hearings
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 05.03.2023
The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, dubbed by some lawmakers a new Church Committee, is pushing ahead with its investigation of alleged misconduct and political bias by US government agencies.
Just the News, a media outlet founded by award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, obtained some transcripts of the committee’s hearings which demonstrate that a growing number of FBI whistleblowers have stepped forward to expose the agency’s alleged misdeeds.
In particular, retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill testified that the Washington Field Office exerted pressure on other field offices to probe US citizens for activities protected by the First Amendment.
Hill revealed that the Washington office pressed his own Boston Field Office to open cases on 140 people who, according to the retired analyst, were “guilty” of riding buses to DC in order to attend then President Donald Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021.
The former FBI employee noted that on a nationwide phone call of all 56 FBI field offices, then-chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Center Section Steve Jensen asked the Philadelphia Field Office about the status of a lead on American individuals that had been sent by the agency’s DC office. The individuals in question posted on social media about being pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion. According to Hill, Jensen described those persons as “bleeping terrorists” even though social media posts appeared to be their only fault.
FBI whistleblower Garret O’Boyle testified before the House GOP committee that he was suspended by the agency after making “protected disclosures” to Congress.
O’Boyle also told the House GOP committee that following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (which used to regard abortions a constitutional right in the US), the FBI prioritized possible threats against the justices from “pro-lifers,” i.e. those who are against abortions.
The whistleblower wondered at the time as to why the bureau was targeting pro-lifers when it was “pro-choice” people who threatened violence in front of justices’ houses. “I was like, why would this person know about those threats? He’s pro-life. Like, he’s not the one going and threatening the Supreme Court Justices,” O’Boyle testified.
Former FBI special agent Steve Friend, a former SWAT team member, testified before the committee that the bureau apparently misused heavily armed SWAT teams to arrest January 6 defenders who were not accused of violent crimes and did not have a criminal record. He particularly referred to a January Sixer who was cooperating with the FBI and willing to surrender voluntarily. Friend was concerned that the bureau wasn’t using the least intrusive methods possible to arrest them.
When Friend met with two senior officers he was “pushed back on” his concerns and was told that even though he had a right to raise them, he also should “follow through on the orders” which he was given.
Friend filed a whistleblower complaint to the US Office of Special Counsel last year concerning the apparent misuse of SWAT teams to arrest January Sixers accused of misdemeanors. He was suspended from his duties by the agency after that.
Speaking to Sputnik in January, Friend highlighted that “any objective observer can see that the FBI is concentrating its attention and resources to investigate and prosecute citizens holding opposing views to the current administration.”
Following his interview with Sputnik, Friend was forced to leave the FBI after he had been denied a paycheck for 150 straight days as his security clearance was placed under review in the wake of his whistleblower complaint. Speaking to US journalists in February, the former FBI agent said that after leaving the bureau he had accepted a job offer from a private nonprofit organization that will be conducting investigations of the FBI.
According to the US media, House Judiciary Democrats on Friday lashed out at the FBI whistleblowers in a 316-page report. The Democratic lawmakers claimed that the whistleblowers had “limited firsthand knowledge” and “did not present actual evidence of any wrongdoing at the Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” In response, the House GOP committee on weaponization lambasted their Democratic peers for disclosing the content of confidential witness depositions.
The House GOP’s new “Church Committee” follows in the footsteps of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which was a congressional body that investigated abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS in 1975.
The shocking revelations back in 1975 reportedly included Operation MKULTRA, human experimentation on mind control involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens; COINTELPRO, which envisaged the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil rights organizations; and Operation Mockingbird, a propaganda campaign run by the CIA in coordination with domestic and foreign journalists and US media outlets, to name but a few.
NATO and EU states already parties to Ukraine conflict – top Hungarian MP
RT | March 5, 2023
Massive deliveries of military aid to Ukraine have made multiple NATO and EU nations parties to the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev, according to Laszlo Kover, the speaker of Hungary’s National Assembly.
Speaking to Hir TV late on Friday, Kover said certain members of the two blocs are already participants in the conflict, despite not “yet” actually engaging in the fighting themselves. He did not identify the countries to which he was referring.
“Members of NATO and the EU have already sent almost $60 billion worth of lethal military equipment to Ukraine, one of the warring parties. This means that individual countries – members of the European Union and NATO – are participants of this war, although not yet fighting,” he said.
The speaker also shared his opinion on the potential accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO.
While the move has already been approved by the vast majority of member states in the US-led military alliance, it has been opposed by Hungary and Türkiye. Budapest is expected to dispatch a delegation to the two Nordic nations shortly in an effort to resolve differences regarding the accession bid, Kover noted.
Both Finland and Sweden have caused “damage” to Hungary, repeatedly making hostile moves against Budapest within the EU, he continued.
“They cause specific, measurable damage to Hungary’s national interests. These people are putting pressure on the European institutions so that they do not allocate the EU funds due to Hungary. This is about specific damage, not just that our souls are sensitive,” Kover explained.
He also claimed that their potential accession to NATO would not increase the “sense of security” within the bloc, but rather yield the opposite result, greatly extending the alliance’s border with Russia.
Earlier this week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called for the creation of a “European NATO,” arguing that America’s desire for the further expansion of its influence has led to the current tensions between the West and Russia. The EU needs to create a military bloc of its own to become free of American influence and stop doing Washington’s bidding, Orban suggested.
Hungary has repeatedly called for peace since the outbreak of conflict between Moscow and Kiev, criticizing both the Western sanctions imposed on Russia and the continuous flow of arms to Ukraine. Budapest has also been the only NATO nation to voice support for China’s recently unveiled peace plan for Ukraine.
Viktor Orban: “In A War Taking Place In Europe The Americans Have The Final Word”
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | March 5, 2023
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said in a fresh interview with Swiss weekly Weltwoche that his country’s leadership is “strong enough to keep the war away from our country” while also stressing that Washington has become prime the decision-maker over the conflict in Ukraine.
He further addressed the proxy war nature of the conflict in saying, “There are some who want to force Hungary into the war, and they are not picky about the means with which to achieve that goal.”
“Ukraine is our neighbor where Hungarians live as well,” he continued. “They are being conscripted and are dying by the hundreds on the front.” The Hungarian government has long protested this practice and presented its complaints to Kiev.
“Europe has retired from the debate,” Orban complained of EU countries being dragged into confrontation with Moscow by Washington. “In the decisions adopted in Brussels, I recognize American interests more frequently than European ones.”
“In a war that is taking place in Europe the Americans have the final word,” he stressed in the interview.
Most recently, Hungary has shown its unwillingness to go along with the rest of NATO by delaying a vote on ratifying Sweden and Finland’s accession bids.
According to a Thursday Associated Press report, “The delay, which pushes the vote back by two weeks to the parliamentary session beginning March 20, comes as Hungary remains the only NATO member country besides Turkey that hasn’t yet approved the two Nordic countries’ bids to join the Western military alliance.” The report indicates:
Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has said that he is personally in favor of the two countries joining NATO, but alleges that the governments in Stockholm and Helsinki have “spread blatant lies” about Hungary which have raised questions among lawmakers in his party on whether to approve the bids.
“It’s not right for them to ask us to take them on board while they’re spreading blatant lies about Hungary, about the rule of law in Hungary, about our democracy and about life here,” Orban complained. “(How) can anyone want to be our ally in a military system while they’re shamelessly spreading lies about Hungary? So let’s stop for a friendly word and ask them how this can be.” But even if Budapest were ready and willing to give its approval, Turkey’s ongoing resistance has been even fiercer, and thus Sweden and Finland are unlikely to enter the alliance anytime soon.
Orban also recently broke ranks with other European leaders regarding China’s 10-point peace plan for resolving the Ukraine war. He was a lone Western voice in expressing approval. “We also consider China’s peace plan important and support it,” the Hungarian leader said before parliament last Monday. He also reiterated Hungary’s position that it will not be supplying weapons to Kiev.
Tulsi Gabbard Slams US ‘Warmongering Elite’ for Waging ‘Proxy War’ in Ukraine
Sputnik – 05.03.2023
Former US congresswoman and ex-presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has verbally slammed the Democratic Party establishment and US President Joe Biden himself over the conflict in Ukraine.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gabbard told the audience that she parted ways with the Democratic Party because it fell “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers, led by the queen of warmongers herself, Hillary Clinton, and embodied by President Joe Biden.”
She accused Biden of pushing the United States to “the precipice of nuclear war,” which may well lead to the destruction of “the world as we know it,” and insisted that the Democratic Party is “focused on filling the pockets of their bosses in the military-industrial complex.”
She pointed at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, stating that Biden and “warmongers from both parties in the Congress” have already sent over $100 billion to fuel what she described as a “proxy war” waged by the US and NATO through the regime in Kiev against Russia.
“Last week, it was another $500 million. Yesterday, it’s another $400 million of our taxpayer money — continuing to escalate this war that could at any moment spark a direct conflict between the US and NATO and Russia, the world’s most nuclear-armed country,” Gabbard lamented.
Tulsi also blasted the “warmongering elite” in the United States which does not seem to care about the potentially catastrophic consequences of their actions. As she put it, this elite have the means to protect themselves and their families in case of a nuclear attack and they are fine with leaving the rest of the American people to perish in the ensuing armageddon.
“The reality is, though, it doesn’t need to be this way. Our future is in our hands. But we have no time to waste to protect our children, to protect our loved ones, to protect this country that we love,” Gabbard said. “We have to lift our voices and stand up to these cowardly warmongering positions in both parties and stop them from destroying us all.”
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