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Why Putin says Russia could adopt US-style preemptive strike doctrine

By Drago Bosnic | December 14, 2022

On December 9, the Associated Press reported that President Vladimir Putin stated Russia could adopt a US-style concept of “preemptive strikes”, stressing that Moscow is in possession of advanced weapons to conduct such operations.

“We are just thinking about it. They weren’t shy to openly talk about it during the past years,” Putin said at an EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The statement clearly applies to the United States and its foreign policy framework, including the so-called “preemptive strikes” concept. The program, called PGS (Prompt Global Strike), is a US attempt to develop a capability that enables it to attack enemy strategic targets with precision-guided weapons anywhere in the world within just one hour.

“Speaking about a disarming strike, maybe it’s worth thinking about adopting the ideas developed by our US counterparts, their ideas of ensuring their security,” Putin added, noting that such strikes are intended to knock out command facilities. Putin also stated that Russia is already in possession of hypersonic weapons suitable for carrying out such operations, while the US still hasn’t deployed its own equivalents. The Russian president also added that Moscow has long-range cruise missiles that surpass US analogs, most likely referring to the state-of-the-art scramjet-powered “Zircon” hypersonic cruise missile. Putin noted that Russia’s long-range weapons would certainly be conventional PGMs (precision-guided munitions), while the US never ruled out the possibility of the first use of thermonuclear weapons.

“If the potential adversary believes that it can use the theory of a preemptive strike and we don’t, it makes us think about the threats posed by such ideas in other countries’ defensive posture,” the Russian president said. The political West’s massive mainstream propaganda machine cherry-picked Vladimir Putin’s statements in order to misrepresent them as supposed “saber-rattling” while ignoring the pure logic behind his words. As per usual, Putin pointed out the glaringly obvious hypocrisy of the US political establishment, which quite clearly thinks it’s “indispensable” and “unique” in the sense that Americans are the only ones who have the right to attack others with impunity while they watch helplessly or simply turn a blind eye to the blatant US aggression against the world.

With Russia having actual conventional military capabilities to implement such a “preemptive strike” foreign policy framework almost instantly (unlike the US), Putin warned that if everyone behaved the way America does, the world would certainly become an extremely dangerous place. To make his point even stronger, it could be argued that Moscow would certainly have more reasons to implement such policies than the US itself. Unlike America, which has dozens of vassals and satellite states, Russia doesn’t exert such “soft power” influence over other countries, including its neighbors. On the contrary, the political West even tried to stage coups against Moscow’s close partners such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, forcing Russia to come to both countries’ rescue in recent months and years.

Needless to say, never again would the Eurasian giant tolerate the instalment of hostile puppet regimes so close to its borders. Russia’s leadership is well aware of the mistakes it made by ever trusting any promises given by the political West. After the 2014 NATO-backed coup which brought Neo-Nazis to power in Kiev, Moscow decided to never again allow such occurrences from happening in its geopolitical backyard. In this regard, Putin’s remarks are twofold. First, as previously mentioned, they expose the sheer hypocrisy of the political West, and second, they show that it would certainly come in handy for Russia to use its overwhelming “hard power” to prevent the establishment of anti-Russian regimes so close to its borders. Had Moscow deployed its version of PGS against the Neo-Nazi junta back in 2014, it wouldn’t even have the current problem in Ukraine.

However, the political West keeps insisting that Putin’s remarks are a “clear sign that Russia is planning to use nuclear weapons”, although he specifically stated that Moscow’s potential PGS-style program would include only conventional weapons. For months, the troubled Biden administration has been parroting the accusations that Russia is supposedly planning to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The US has been spinning the narrative on virtually every statement by Putin, claiming alleged “nuclear saber-rattling”. The premise is usually based on Russia’s official strategic military doctrine that gives Moscow the right to use thermonuclear weapons in response to a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) or a large-scale conventional attack.

In reality, Putin never mentioned anything about the Eurasian giant’s thermonuclear deterrence. The statements were clearly his critique of the US PGS concept, which Russia has been warning about for years, especially as the weapons used within the framework of such a program would be effectively indiscernible from regular ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). Precisely this could lead to uncontrollable escalation, as other superpowers would not be able to confirm if the weapon in question is conventional or nuclear-armed. For instance, US PGS missiles spotted by Russian and/or Chinese early warning systems might prompt both (Eur)Asian giants to respond with nuclear-tipped weapons, leading to a world-ending conflict.

Russia’s response to the PGS program could be instantaneous if the Kremlin ever decides to proceed with it. With the Mach 12-capable “Kinzhal” air-launched hypersonic missile carried by modified MiG-31K/I interceptors and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, the Mach 28-capable “Avangard” HGV (hypersonic glide vehicle) deployed on various ICBMs and the Mach 9-capable scramjet-powered “Zircon” hypersonic cruise missile deployed on naval (both submarines and surface ships) and (soon) on land platforms, Russia is the only country on the planet with the capability to immediately implement its own PGS-style program. And yet, the Eurasian giant still refrains from going ahead with such plans, although its justification for this would hold much better than that of the US.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Pandemicism and the Foreknowledge of the Virus Planners

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 13, 2022

When I write of the pandemic response as a basically undirected social and institutional contagion, the same question always comes up: What about Event 201, and the 2017 SPARS exercise, and all those other creepy prophetic pandemic wargames? Don’t they indicate some of kind of unified plan? How else to explain the foreknowledge of the planners?

I’ve given partial replies here and there, but I’ve never laid out all of my ideas in one place. I think these strange exercises seem much less bizarre when considered against the broader backdrop of the pandemicists and the beliefs they share. You might call their most central article of faith pandemicism, which is the doctrine that pandemics represent a serious threat to human health, and that they can be prevented or substantially ameliorated with the right scientific interventions.

Aspects of pandemicism are as old as 1918, but the proximate origins of this mind virus are much more recent. Tellingly, they don’t lie with any kind of pandemic at all, but rather with the WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox. This started in 1967, and it took ten years to complete. Any institutionalised enterprise that persists for a full decade will acquire institutional momentum, such that it can’t simply be turned off when the mission is over. Just as the push for trans rights and trans acceptance owes a lot to the institutional forces accumulated by the gay rights movement since the 1970s, pandemicism became the next stage of advocacy for the smallpox eradicators after they had put themselves out of business. All the careers, institutions and grand funding schemes that had been thrown at smallpox needed a second act.

The smallpox eradicators began their transition to a post-smallpox world by fantasising that the virus they had killed off would someday return. Donald Henderson, director of the eradicators, founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998, a key pandemicist think tank that was later rechristened as the Center for Health Security, and that went on to hold a series of notorious and well-publicised pandemic war games. The earliest of these – Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm – were funded by the US Department of Defence and involved elaborate fictional scenarios of smallpox biowarfare. Later on, with the rise of billionaire philanthropy and the ever waning cultural significance of Variola, the Johns Hopkins pandemicists began peddling horror scenarios of other pandemic pathogens. Event 201 was their first major tabletop exercise featuring a pathogen other than smallpox that entered humans via a natural spillover event.

There are, then, two pandemicist eras – an early period, fuelled by Defence funding and devoted primarily to biowarfare scnearios, with curious parallels to the 1995 film Outbreak; and a later period driven by banal third-worldist philanthropy, that is more heavily focused on natural pathogens and reflected in the film Contagion. The Hollywood resonances are no accident; the pandemicists are above all interested in publicity and fundraising, and they try hard to make their mark on popular culture. The earliest wargames were at base morality tales intended to convince the US government to increase its smallpox vaccine stockpiles. The second era of pandemicist thought owes a great deal in turn to the SARS outbreak of 2003. Vaccine development at this stage becomes the central concern, and the pandemicist mission expands with novel projects to predict and preempt the emergence of novel human-infecting viruses. The old roots were still there, and the Defence Department funds were a major part of this new research.

The primary problem of pandemicism, is that there just aren’t very many pandemics, which means that most of the time the pandemicists don’t have anything to do. Wargaming attracts publicity and the interest of fundraisers, and it gets scary viruses into headlines in the absence of any reason for them to be there. Pandemicist wargames feature what we should think of as “fundraising viruses.” These are either fictional pathogens with very high infection fatality rates (often modelled on SARS), or real viruses like Nipah that are extremely deadly but not very contagious. The pandemicists almost never bother to wargame the most common pandemic virus, namely influenza, because nobody finds it particularly scary. As founding pandemicist Larry Brilliant said in 2007:

Last year, six hundred thousand people died and we didn’t notice. That’s a little bit of the reason you find so much hyperbole in the whole question of pandemic flu. Because a lot of public health people are saying, oh goody, we have something that’s going to frighten rich people, let’s use it as a chance to build up the public health system.

Fundraising viruses are a fictional threat. Any viral pathogen adapted to spread widely via direct person-to-person contact in human hosts will cause nothing more than influenza-like illness, with mortality well within the familiar range for seasonal respiratory viruses. This important difference, between what grabs attention and what is actually biologically likely to occur, is one reason I think that most scientists, and the pandemicists in particular, ignore the broader behavioural patterns of viruses and the evolutionary pressures to which they’re subject. Looking too deeply into these questions threatens to turn up evidence that we don’t really need the pandemicists at all.

Formally, it seems that this bland pandemic theatre is supposed to familiarise “stakeholders” and “decision-makers” with the expected mitigationist response. As late as Event 201 in Fall 2019, this response consisted of not doing very much. Before Corona, the pandemicists didn’t like the idea of travel restrictions or lockdowns. These might be used to contain very local outbreaks, but once a virus had achieved pandemic status, closures were considered counterproductive and likely to increase poverty and disease in the developing world. The pandemicists preferred things like travel advisories and fast-tracking vaccine development. The idea of mass containment emerged in the wake of SARS; it was never a part of Western pandemicist doctrine, though brief lockdowns were trialled in Mexico in 2009 against the nothingburger Swine Flu, and again in 2014 against Ebola.(1)

As I never tire of typing, what happened in the West was a hybrid response. Via China and pressure from the WHO, mass containment came to be added at the very last minute to the standard mitigationist playbook that the pandemicists had been peddling for a generation. This is why the messaging shifted so suddenly after February 2020. Until that date, we were in the standard world of Event 201, and authorities talked down the risk of the virus in an effort to prepare us all for the inevitable infections and deaths. Mass containment, adopted with the Italian lockdown in March, required a vastly more hysterical and overblown messaging strategy, in an effort to convince all of us to hide at home.

All that wargaming about how we’d stay open didn’t matter very much in the end, because well-publicised pandemic wargames aren’t actually planning exercises and have very little strategic importance. They’re for fundraising and publicity.

Probably the most obtrusive feature of pandemicist material – and the least discussed – is its extremely low quality. This is above all why I have a hard time buying theories that these events reflect any nefarious plan. They are just so, so stupid, it is actually hard to put into words. While earlier wargames were fairly textured and elaborate, there’s been a steady decline, worsened by the arrival of Big Philanthropy. I strongly advise that you not waste your life watching the extremely insipid Event 201 videos. Far more digestible is the SPARS pandemic exercise, which is often cited as another ominously prophetic document, particularly for its lengthy discussions of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccine public health messaging. There are some parallels to recent events, but if you read carefully, you’ll see that the whole thing is firmly rooted in vintage 2016 anxieties about social media disinformation. And, again, it’s just really, really dumb. Every chapter concludes with tiresome questions for discussion by “public health risk communicators,” whoever they are. It feels like a weird textbook written for virusphobic primary school children in an alternate reality, where the hot new social media platform is called ZapQ and the big antivaxx disinformationist is a “science blogger” named EpiGirl and public health officials recruit a “hip hop icon” named BZee whose fictional tweets get fewer retweets and likes than mine do (see the figures on p. 25).

Nevertheless, the SPARS scenario and others like them have their moments of foreknowledge. I would never exclude malfeasance outright, but the general explanation for this phenomenon is that we get the virus freakouts we plan for. Virus fantasies like Event 201 and SPARS reflect a prior epidemiological interest in specific pathogens, and they serve to focus the attention of the public health brigade further on specific viral species. Monkeypox and the 2009 Swine Flu show that pandemicist attention alone – in the absence of any serious mortality – is enough to generate widespread hysteria. These are prophecies, but they are mostly self-fulfilling ones. That is also why the laboratory origins of SARS-2 are such a big piece of this puzzle.

What’s missing from all these planning scenarios – what every last one of them fails to predict – is the steely biomedical dictatorship that emerged to ruin all of our lives in 2020. Nobody in any of these wargames is ever locked up in their homes. Public health officials respond to the off-message EpiGirl with press releases, not threats and deplatforming. There are no green passes. The unvaccinated are never deplored or fired. Part of the reason is that, before 2020, lockdowns had never been part of the plan, and they gave public health bureaucrats a chance at overt and direct repression, which they’d never counted on before. But it’s also true that the basic project of pandemicism has authoritarian and repressive elements baked into it, which I think the pandemicists themselves never really noticed. They’re just not the most intelligent or introspective people.

(1) In the years after SARS, some public health bureaucrats and pandemicists played with ever more restrictionist mitigation regimes, contemplating school closures and work-from-home orders, but their focus remained firmly mitigationist. The purpose was only to slow infections to spare the healthcare system. Mass containment, by contrast, is eradicationist in outlook, aiming not to slow infections but to stop the virus altogether.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Government Has Been Planning to ‘Lockdown and Wait for a Vaccine’ Since 2007

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 13, 2022

More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.

Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.

Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.

The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.

During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.

Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.

2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.

Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.

The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.

These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.

Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Algeria’s growing influence is putting it in the US crosshairs

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 13, 2022

As Algiers continues to play a more prominent role in Middle Eastern and African affairs, will it face US pressure and even regime change attempts for its foreign policy stances that do not align with those of the West?

In September, US Congress members evoked the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), to call for sanctions to be placed upon Algeria over weapons deals with Moscow. This plea came shortly after the same argument was made by Republican Senator Marco Rubio in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Since the days of the Cold War, the Algerian state has been outside the orbit of the West, lending its favor instead to national liberation movements and pursuing a more tailor-made foreign policy platform. This pitted it against its western neighbor, Morocco, which opted to align itself with the West. Today, tensions are boiling again between the neighboring North African leaderships over a similar alignment of sorts, especially since Morocco decided to normalize ties with Israel owing to pressure from the administration of then-US President Donald Trump. An arms race has been developing between the two nations since 2015, as both governments find themselves further tied to their East-West allegiances.

Against the backdrop of tensions with its Western-aligned North African neighbor, Algiers has emerged in 2022 as a revived regional player. As the global energy crisis continues amid the West’s standoff with Russia in Ukraine, Algeria has come off well and with more wealth. In the first five months of this year alone, Algeria’s oil and gas earnings skyrocketed by more than 70%, amounting to a total of $21.5 billion. This has given Algiers greater freedom to work on its defense goals and infrastructure projects.

Algeria is making significant strides at building sustainable living and working on projects to provide more jobs to its citizens. One such project is the construction of a futuristic city called Boughezoul. The city will not only house 400 new residents as part of its strategy to eliminate slums and derelict housing, but also seeks to host the Algerian space agency, a new railway station, and a new international airport. Efforts such as these, combined with the revival of military displays on the nation’s independence day, seem to represent a real effort to reassure the population of the government’s intentions after years of mistrust and mass demonstrations.

Along with the ongoing attempts to make the best of the new economic advantages domestically, Algiers also seems fixated on having its own impact on regional affairs. As the nation has cut off ties with neighboring Morocco, due in part to Israel’s intelligence and military influence, as well as the alleged Moroccan backing of Kabylie separatist groups, it now seeks to align itself with Tunisia to a greater degree.

Algeria, the third largest gas supplier to Europe, has attracted significant interest this year, becoming the top supplier now for Italy, as military ties also seem to deepen. In the case of Tunisia, Algeria has granted recognition to the nation’s president, Kais Saied, who relies on Algerian gas and is receiving supplies at a discounted rate. Tunis is facing an acute economic crisis and has been accused of trading its historically cordial relations with Morocco for closer ties with Algeria. The Tunisian president invited Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front – a movement that fights for the disputed territory of Western Sahara, against Morocco – to the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development that was hosted in Tunisia in August. Inviting the sworn enemy of Morocco to the country triggered the subsequen withdrawal of ambassadors between Tunisia and Morocco. Algeria supports the Polisario Front in its fight over Western Sahara.

For Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune, keeping Tunisia on its side is an important issue, as it fears the UAE-Saudi-Egyptian bloc will assert its own dominance over Tunis’ policies. Kais Saied, who seized power in October of 2019, is clearly within the UAE’s sphere of influence, as opposed to his opponents in the Ennahda party that align with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. Due to such a strong influence from Abu Dhabi in North Africa, Algeria is made to play a careful balancing game.

Another major issue that Algiers is now involving itself in is Palestinian reconciliation. It has hosted a number of meetings between rival parties Hamas and Fatah in order to bridge the gap and develop a stronger platform from which to argue for Palestinian statehood. The issue of achieving Palestinian statehood also played out as a central theme in the Arab League summit in November, as Algeria attempted to bolster its position regionally by hosting the meeting.

Despite having to play a careful balancing act, both regionally and internationally, Algeria has emerged this year as a key player in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. It has even held strong against its former colonizing power, France, forcing President Emmanuel Macron to change his rhetoric about Algiers and has paved the way to dropping French in the education system and opting to adopt the English language instead, eroding France’s influence further.

All the moves being made by Algeria are signaling that it intends to continue along the lines of adopting policies that do not necessarily align with Western interests, sometimes coming into direct conflict with them. This is why threats from US congressmen and senators to impose sanctions on Algeria have begun to raise eyebrows. America’s ambassador to Algeria, Elizabeth Moore Aubin, has refused to answer questions on hypothetically imposing sanctions, opting to focus on what her job entails, which may indicate that such decisions may not be on the immediate minds of high-ranking US officials. However, Republican party officials have certainly stirred the pot. The question now becomes how far Washington will go to punish Algeria for refusing to ditch Moscow and whether the strategy going forward may be to use Morocco against Algeria.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. 

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Social media’s history of suppressing Palestine content

By Kathryn Shihadah | Israel-Palestine News | December 12, 2022

For years, social media have been making it difficult for Palestinian and their allies’ voices to be heard – even as Israel’s stranglehold on Palestinians has grown stronger, and as increasing amounts of US tax money have been sent to Israel and to various countries for Israel’s direct benefit.

Social media users, especially Palestinian human rights advocates, have reported puzzling occurrences on the major platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – especially during times of Israeli crackdowns.

Users who shared information on the situation in the Palestinian territories described posts being deleted as “hate speech or symbols,” or “violence,” inexplicably losing followers and views of their content, or having entire accounts abruptly frozen or deleted.

One rights group documented over 700 instances of social media networks restricting or removing Palestinian content in May 2021 alone, during a time of especially heavy Israeli state violence.

Another group reported that nearly half of the Palestinian-themed content that disappeared off of Instagram during this time period

occurred without the company providing the user a prior warning or notice. In an additional 20 percent of the cases, Instagram notified the user but did not provide a specific justification for restricting the content.

When users appealed the censorship, often their content or account would be restored, with a message that it never should have been deleted to begin with. But by the time this resolution came, the opportunity to inform and influence readers was past.

For example, in May 2021, during a time of escalating Israeli violence, Twitter restricted the account of Palestinian-American journalist Mariam Barghouti, who had been posting photos and videos of the violence in Jerusalem. It later restored Barghouti’s account and apologized for the suspension, saying it was done “by mistake.”

A long report on social media actions regarding Israel-Palestine in the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out: “Some of those who have been covering such issues for years don’t think these kinds of things are a mistake; rather, they believe social networks are deliberately censoring Palestinian content.”

Barghouti explained the significance of Twitter to the Palestinian rights movement:

It’s our only avenue for speaking with the world from under a military occupation that controls all our entry and exit points. We’re left to share through soundbites of 280 characters. If even that is taken away, we’re looking at the slaughter of Palestinians in silence.

Social media suppression is particularly critical since mainstream media tend not to cover Israel and Palestine with the kind of accuracy and context that would enable Americans to understand the issue.

In essence, social media have been preventing the victims of Israeli violence from sharing their experiences or building support for their plight.

Excuses

Although owned by two different companies, the three platforms, Twitter and Facebook/Instagram, have offered duplicate “explanations” for what has happened, including glitches that just happened to affect posts and hashtags about Israel, and  “widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic.”

One Facebook spokesperson stated,
While these [glitches] have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place. We’re so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention – nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view.
Human rights advocates familiar with the years-long social media battle were not convinced.

TRT World reported another case in which Twitter restricted information on Palestine:

Pro-Palestinian activist Hebh Jamal’s Twitter was targeted with complaints over a post detailing an emotional conversation between her husband and his little cousin in Gaza. The young cousin admitted to wanting to brush his hair before sleeping for fear that the Israeli fire may kill him in his sleep. He said he wanted to look good in case he died. Hebh’s post was flagged for deletion, and restricted by Twitter.

Since the German government has implemented legal measures to make social media companies accountable to users, Twitter later confessed to Hebh that the complaints against her post were baseless. Under German law, Twitter has to inform the user if their post or account is being investigated. This only applies because Hebh and her family reside in Germany. For most Palestinians hailing from Gaza City, there’s a different set of rules, and a radically different set of rights.

TRT reports: “Hebh now faces a video review for every post she makes. She’s also been reported on TikTok as well, with her account deleted before.”

Journalist Bayan Ishtaiwi explained: “For Palestinians sealed-off in open-air prisons like Gaza, social media is all they have. Whoever uses words like occupation or martyr, is penalized for three days at least, which happened to me, or face a ban on live videos for a month.”

Whistleblowing

A group of Instagram employees confirmed the human rights activists’ suspicions when they protested the platform’s blocking of pro-Palestinian content during Israel’s violence in May 2021 – even after the issue had already been reported.

An employee circulated an internal document, which was later shared with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which he asked,

Can we investigate the reasons why posts and stories pertaining to Palestine lately have had limited reach and engagement, especially when more people than ever from around the world are watching the situation unfold?

Other employees added comments, including,

I’d really like to understand what exactly is breaking down here and why. What is being done to fix it given that this is an issue that was brought up a week ago?

Soon after, nearly 200 Facebook employees signed on to an open letter demanding that Facebook address the allegations of censorship.

Israel calls the shots

Foreign Policy reports:

“Since 2015, the Israeli Justice Ministry has operated a Cyber Unit that has issued tens of thousands of content removal requests to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, mostly alleging violent incitement or support for terrorism.

Technically, these requests are voluntary. They are not legally binding and are therefore not tracked in the transparency reports that technology companies use to disclose formal government censorship orders.

Nonetheless, social media companies have complied with the Cyber Unit’s requests roughly 90 percent of the time.”

Israel’s infamous Cyber Unit patrols social media, searching for “incriminating” content, passing along thousands of requests to social media administrators to remove what the unit finds unacceptable.

In 2016, the Israeli government and Facebook agreed to collaborate on ways to combat what Israel considers “incitement to violence” on the platform.

Then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked noted that at the time, Facebook’s compliance with Israel’s requests to take down content was up to 95%, but expressed hopes that the plan would result in even more censorship.

Neither Israel nor the platforms have been transparent about this practice.

In 2020, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs issued a report on allegedly “phony” online profiles that put out content critical of Israel.

Within a day, Twitter “suspended dozens of Palestinian and pro-Palestine accounts,” claiming the information they circulated violated its terms of service.

It may be noteworthy that both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk have had private audiences with top Israeli leaders.

Israelis abound in Silicon Valley, with about 60,000-100,000 in the Bay Area, and Israel partisans are also ever-present. A recent photo of Musk shared on Twitter was of him with his friend Ari Emanuel, son of a former Irgun terrorist and brother of Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the IDF.

One Palestinian activist summed up the situation:

Rather than being some kind of enabler of democracy, social media has come to be the epitome of political silencing and repression as tech giants have collaborated with various oppressive governments, including the Israeli government, to censor and delete content that exposes their true oppressive character.

Facebook, Instagram report card

Facebook’s Oversight Board recommended that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) undergo an evaluation of its treatment of Palestinian content in May 2021. Meta hired the consulting company Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) for the work.

Jewish Currents summarized BSR’s final report in an article entitled “Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine”:

The report underscored heavy-handed content moderation by Facebook and Instagram, which Palestinian social media users claim censors critics of Israeli repression.

These restrictions have undermined Palestinian users’ effort to use social media to document Israeli human rights abuses.

BSR contrasted Meta’s over-enforcement of Palestinian social media posts with its under-enforcement of Hebrew-language posts, which the report attributes to Meta installing an algorithmic “hostile speech classifier” for Arabic, but not for Hebrew.

The report concludes that Arabic language content is over-regulated because Hamas, the ruling, elected party in Gaza, is on Facebook’s blacklist, so it was standard to remove posts that appeared to “praise, support, or represent” that group or others on the list.

Other reasons for the interference lie in the fact that the Palestinian content was not reviewed by Palestinian dialect speakers of Arabic, nor was the algorithm developed with the proper “linguistic and cultural competence.”

Internet policy experts summed up the situation at Facebook and the other platforms:

Social media companies have] shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

“Unintentional”? Really?

BSR’s report speculated that the impact of Facebook’s actions – Palestinian users’ loss of rights to expression – was unintentional. Rights groups disagreed.

Dozens of groups signed a public statement in response to BSR’s report, insisting that they had been

calling Meta’s attention to the disproportionately negative impact of its content moderation on Palestinians for years, [so] even if the bias started out as unintentional, after knowing about the issues for years and not taking appropriate action, the unintentional became intentional.

Looking ahead

The BSR report ends with 21 recommendations to Meta, some of which Meta has committed to, either fully or in part.

Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for a digital rights group, had mixed feelings:

The report validates the lived experiences of Palestinians… They cannot tell us anymore that this is a system glitch. Now they know the root causes…

But regarding Israel’s interference in content restriction, he added,

We’ve wanted more clarity on this because Meta refuses to provide answers. Users deserve transparency on whether their piece of content has been removed as a result of the Israeli government’s request.

Bottom line

Social media have for years – and for various reasons – repressed content about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

In some particularly egregious situations, like Israel’s aggression in May 2021, the companies have offered excuses and apologies. But impartial analysis has proven these excuses false and the apologies hollow.

Not only are social media platforms inherently skewed to over-regulate Palestinian voices, but they are influenced by a powerful foreign government (and no doubt, its US lobby) to an extent we can only imagine.

And Palestinians continue dying.

A report in Foreign Policy by Emerson T. Brooking and Eliza Campbell described the situation with rare eloquence:

The 4.8 million residents of the occupied Palestinian territories live in two simultaneous and vastly different realities. In the physical world, Palestinians are captives, crammed into Gaza or West Bank enclaves and blockaded by Israeli military checkpoints…

But on the internet, the checkpoints disappear. Palestinians can converse with family from whom they are separated by barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. They can share their stories with observers and sympathizers around the world.

In doing so, Palestinians can call themselves citizens of a sovereign State of Palestine: one recognized by 138 countries and admitted in 2012 as a non-member observer state to the United Nations. This second, digital Palestine represents a fulfilment of the internet’s optimistic and largely forgotten promise to give voice to the voiceless and illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

It is also under threat of being extinguished. This is due to a confluence of three forces. The first is the expansive police and surveillance apparatus of the State of Israel, which is used to track, intimidate, and imprison Palestinians in the occupied territories for their online speech.

The second is a network of formal and informal institutions used by the Israeli government to target pro-Palestinian expression across the globe.

The third—and most surprising—force is that of American social media companies, which have shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

Together, these forces demonstrate how it is possible for an ostensibly democratic government to suppress a popular online movement with the acquiescence of ostensibly liberal Silicon Valley executives. The playbook being pioneered against Palestinians will not stay in the Middle East forever. In time, it may be deployed against activist communities around the world.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From Neck-Breaking Ejection Seats to Frightening Lightning: F-35’s Top Ten Problems

By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 13.12.2022

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is the most expensive weapon in history, with a per unit price between $78 and $95 million, and a lifetime operations and sustainment cost of a whopping $1.3 trillion. Yet years after its introduction, the plane has continued to plague operators with a host of problems.

With its overall $1.7 trillion price tag roughly equivalent to the annual GDP of Australia, or more than twenty times Russia’s annual defense budget, one might expect US weapons giant Lockheed Martin to show a little humility when it comes to requesting more cash to fix issues affecting the F-35.

But it seems that’s too much to ask. Last week, US media reported that cost overruns for upgrades to the jet’s sophisticated cockpit computers had reached $680 million, nearly matching the $712 million the Pentagon originally planned to spend on upgrading them (for a total cost of $1.3 billion). Adding insult to injury, the F-35 Joint Program Office announced that the upgrades wouldn’t be completed by the agreed-upon completion deadline of July 2023, with the timeframe pushed back to the end of 2023.

Separately this month, the US Congressional Research Service revealed that the Pentagon wants an unspecified amount of cash for upgrades to the plane’s engines, promising that the new ones will reduce annual sustainment costs, which jumped from $79 million in 2016 to $315 million in 2020, and are projected to reach over $ 1billion by 2028.

Fortunately for Lockheed, cost overruns aren’t a problem. Actually, they’re baked into the agreements on the planes’ acquisition signed by the United States and its allies, with the company enjoying “cost-plus,” “undefinitized” contracts which make any unexpected costs the buyer’s problem (i.e. governments and their taxpayers). Some of Washington’s allies have caught on to the scheme. Last week, one angry Australian defense expert demanded that Canberra get a refund for its existing F-35s and stop buying new ones after calculating that the plane’s “killer” price tag, range limitations, and reliance on a hackable data communications link based thousands of kilometers away in the US makes it a bad buy for the Land Down Under.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issues yearly updates on the F-35’s projected costs, as well as outstanding problems associated with the plane. In its 2022 report, the GAO calculated that seven years after its introduction, the plane still has four major “Category 1” deficiencies, and 822 lesser “Category 2” problems.

Here are some of the issues the jet has faced over the years:

10. Cabin Overpressurization

The 2022 GAO report outlined “cabin overpressurization” as one of these outstanding Category 1 deficiencies. The watchdog did not elaborate on the scale, nature and causes of the problem. However, an overpressurized cabin can be a big deal, causing ear popping, temporary hearing loss, headaches, sinus pain, and, if it’s severe enough, ruptured eardrums, permanent hearing loss, and loss of consciousness. It goes without saying that for the pilot of an $80 million aircraft flying through the skies at speeds up to 2,000 km an hour, an overpressurized cabin can be problematic.

9. Night Vision Problems

“Issues” with the F-35’s night vision camera are another “critical deficiency” highlighted in the GAO’s 2022 report. The document did not offer details, but earlier reports on the matter pointed to a range of potential problems – from failing to operate when there is no Moon, to annoying horizontal lines, or striations, in the night vision display. Other issues, including a disorienting “green glow,” have also been reported, with the latter feeding video from a built-in camera onto the headgear display, obscuring the pilot’s vision during night flight. Last year, the Pentagon announced that fixes to these issues would involve upgrading the planes’ $400,000-a-piece integrated night vision helmets. However, not all branches of the US military have approved the acquisition of the new equipment.

8. Lightning Strikes

Given its name, the F-35 Lightning II has an ironic propensity to suffer from problems related to stormy weather, with the Marine Corps expressing concerns as far back as 2018 that “as a composite type aircraft,” the plane “does not provide inherent passive lightning protection.” A 2012 Pentagon report concluded that the planes’ operation is unsafe within 40 km of a thunderstorm amid fears that lightning could damage or destroy the aircraft if it struck their fuel tank inerting system. The Air Force announced earlier this year that it will fix lightning danger-related issues by 2025.

7. Software Bugs

Software bugs with the aircraft’s onboard computer and its 8 million+ lines of code are a persistently-reported problem for the F-35, with the issue apparently getting so bad that the Pentagon called in software experts from top American universities last year for advice on how to resolve the persisting issues. A $14 billion software upgrade promises to fix a range of issues, from weapons functionality and communications to navigation, cybersecurity and targeting, but the Pentagon has already called the patch “immature, deficient and insufficiently tested.”

6. Radar Headaches

In 2016, the Pentagon confirmed that the F-35 had a problem involving the shutdown of its radar system once every four hours. After shutdown, it would reportedly take “a few minutes” for the radar to “regain picture” – a not-insignificant issue for a warplane, where “a few minutes” can be the difference between flying over your target or finding yourself a hundred or more kilometers away.

5. Corrosion

F-35 jets feature an advanced radar-absorbent skin, designed to improve stealth capabilities against cutting-edge enemy radar. However, photos of Navy F-35s published earlier this year showed that the planes’ skin appears to be suffering from severe corrosion thanks to its use of an iron ball paint designed to scramble radio waves. It’s not clear if and how Lockheed plans to address the problem, but as with almost every other problem involving the aircraft, a fix probably won’t be easy, or cheap.

4. Breakneck Action

One of the most serious problems with the F-35 has been its faulty ejection seats. In 2015, low-speed ejection tests revealed that the aircraft’s ejection seat systems were snapping crash test dummies’ necks. In 2016, the Pentagon responded by beginning testing of a reinforced helmet designed to keep pilots’ precious necks safe. A year later, the Air Force reported that tinkering with the planes’ ejection seat systems had alleviated the danger, allowing the military to lift pilot weight requirements.

3. Trackability

One of the F-35’s biggest selling points is its stealthiness – the ability to fly into and out of enemy territory undetected, fire its munitions, and leave before ever being engaged by enemy missiles. However, even before substantial quantities of the aircraft were built, a flurry of reports indicated that Russian, Chinese, and Iranian designers had developed radars capable of detecting the jets at long ranges. Of course, only time, and radar and air defenses’ interactions with F-35 in real-life environments, will determine the true significance of the aircraft’s trackability.

2. Lockheed’s Nary a Care Culture

Over seven years after its introduction, the F-35 has not yet received approval from the Pentagon for full-rate production. That’s because the US military has not completed the jet’s certification. To date, Lockheed has yet to make good on its requirement to provide the Pentagon with detailed data for the Joint Simulation Environment – a virtual training domain designed to test the F-35’s hypothetical performance against top Chinese and Russian aircraft. The company promises to provide the military with data from 64 JSE tests by the summer of 2023.

Despite the lack of certification, the Pentagon has already taken delivery of hundreds of F-35s, and expects to receive about one-third of its 2,470-plane F-35 fleet before full-rate production is granted, with all the problems that come with it –including issues upgrading and fixing problems with jets already built and bought.

1. Single-Engine Design

Arguably the F-35’s biggest problem, and a flaw that no amount of tinkering will be able to fix, is its single-engine, ‘one size fits all’ design. Lockheed’s decision to use a single, Pratt & Whitney F135 afterburning turbofan means that, if the plane suffers a major malfunction at sea, or damage to its engine while engaged in combat against an enemy plane or ground-based air defenses, it would become nearly impossible for it to limp safely back to base. Japan’s Air Force had cause to ponder this issue in 2019, when one of its F-35A jets was lost at sea after its pilot suffered spacial disorientation.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

US nuclear bomber catches fire after emergency landing

RT | December 13, 2022

One of the US Air Force’s stealth nuclear bombers caught fire on Saturday after being forced to make an emergency landing in Missouri due to a technical malfunction.

The B-2 Spirit touched down at Whiteman Air Force Base and suffered damage on the runway after experiencing an “in-flight malfunction during routine operations,” according to a US Air Force statement. “There was a fire associated with the aircraft after landing, and the base fire department extinguished the fire.”

There were no reports of injuries in the incident, which is still under investigation. A still image purported to be from the scene – as broadcast by KMBC-TV, the ABC News affiliate in Kansas City, Missouri – appeared to show smoke rising from the crash site. Another shot appeared to show the bomber sitting on the ground, without its landing gear engaged, and with smoke rising from behind the aircraft.

The 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman touts the B-2 Spirit as “the world’s most strategic aircraft.” It’s also reportedly the world’s most expensive bomber. It had a unit cost of about $1.16 billion, including spare parts and software support, when it entered service in 1997, which is equivalent to more than $2.15 billion in today’s dollars.

Another B-2 stealth bomber was damaged at Whiteman last year, when a mechanical failure caused the left landing gear to collapse upon landing. The US Air Force blamed the malfunction on “worn springs.”

The lead defense contractor on the B-2 Spirit, Northrop Grumman, earlier this month unveiled the new aircraft that will replace it, the B-21 Raider.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Moscow’s response to oil price cap revealed

RT | December 13, 2022

The Russian authorities have “generally agreed” on a response to a Western coalition’s price cap on the country’s seaborne oil that took effect last week, the newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday.

Moscow will ban oil sales under contracts that specify a price cap, according to the report, which cites government sources. Also, exports will be banned to countries that demand the price cap as a condition in their supply contracts, or if their reference prices are fixed at the cap price level of $60 per barrel.

A decree describing the mechanism is currently being finalized by the president’s administration, sources said. It will take effect immediately upon being issued and will be valid until July 1, 2023, with the possibility of extension. On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the decree would be announced “in the next few days.”

The document will also reportedly contain a clause that allows buyers to bypass the restrictions if granted government approval. The measures will not apply to contracts that were concluded prior to December 5, the date when the price cap took effect. One of the sources said the final draft of the decree might include a provision on the marginal discount for Russian oil relative to international grades.

The price cap was introduced by the EU, G7 countries and Australia on December 5. The mechanism prohibits Western companies from providing shipping, insurance, and other services to tankers carrying Russian oil, unless the cargo is bought at or below the price limit.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US anti-Russian war plans limit aid to Kiev

By Lucas Leiroz | December 13, 2022

There is no doubt among military experts that NATO is currently at war with Russia – just using Kiev as a proxy. However, the possibility of something even worse – a direct full-scale war – limits American participation in the current conflict. Internally, Washington’s political scenario is divided between parliamentarian warmongers, interested in taking assistance to Kiev to the ultimate consequences, and experienced, cautious military, interested in keeping the country’s internal stocks ready for any need.

According to a recent Foreign Policy article, US lawmakers are pressuring Pentagon’s officials to send more weapons to Ukraine. The objective would be to allocate the largest possible amount of combat equipment in Kiev, allowing the local forces to continue to face the Russians and possibly “win the war” – since, according to the narrative of the American media, Russia would be frightened and weakened, which obviously does not correspond to the reality of the battlefield.

Pentagon agents, however, act more rationally, avoiding strategic mistakes that could bring problems for national security. Unlike congressmen, whose reasons for supporting Kiev are based on ideological alignment or economic interest, the American military thinking is based on calculations and solid data, so it seems irrational to send Kiev military aid at a level that threatens the US’s defense capability.

The dialogue between the Pentagon and the US Congress for the production, purchase or allocation of weapons and ammunition works through the Department of Defense’s periodic reports on its war plans. These reports are called operational plans (or OPLANs). In theory, the Pentagon has an OPLAN for every situation considered a risk to American security, which includes relations with enemy countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea. After considering the evaluation of its experts, the Pentagon prepares a list of equipment considered necessary to face such countries, submitting the reports to the Congress for approval. If approved, the Pentagon purchases such weapons from private companies affiliated with the “military industrial complex” and eventually allocates them to overseas bases.

In principle, military assistance to Kiev was supposed to be restricted to an exclusive OPLAN for the Ukrainian conflict, but congressmen want to change that. For politicians, who do not think strategically, this is a “mistake” and more weapons to Kiev are needed. Congressmen consider it appropriate to invest all available resources in Ukraine, as Kiev is the state that is currently actually fighting Russia. For them, betting on sending weapons on a large scale is the right attitude, even if the stock reserved for other OPLANs is running out – which is already happening.

As a response to the stock supply crisis, parliamentarians suggest thinking about measures to speed up production and replenishing. According to them, the problem is not the transfer of weapons to Ukraine, but the fact that there is difficulty in filling stocks quickly, as they are dwindling with assistance to Kiev.

However, this narrative does not seem consistent with reality. As previously reported, the American military industry is entering a vicious cycle, where there is no modernization of its arsenal, only a race by military companies to replace weapons which are wasted by the systematic transfer to Ukraine. In this sense, expanding aid and violating the stocks of other OPLANs would only worsen this critical scenario.

In its decisions, the government oscillates between supporting realism and warmongering. For example, a new aid package was recently announced, valued at 275 million dollars – one of the smallest since February. Warmongers criticize this attitude and say that it is time to increase assistance as much as possible, taking advantage of the opportunities of the supposed “Ukrainian counteroffensive” and “imminent victory”. Apparently, many politicians in the US believe the lies created by the American media itself and actually plan strategies based on these fallacies.

Experts, however, know that this rhetoric is unsubstantiated. Ukraine is suffering significant losses day after day. The great victory of Russian forces in Bakhmut makes this absolutely clear. There is no chance of victory for Kiev and, given the defeat in this proxy conflict, the most rational thing to do would be to reduce support and encourage peace negotiations, while replenishing internal stocks for an eventual situation of direct war.

In fact, the case illustrates the US internal scenario well: the dispute between those who want to prepare for a future war with Russia and those who want to do it now, through Ukraine. To solve this problem, the most appropriate thing would be to avoid any possibility of war, taking the simple attitude of interrupting support for Kiev and talking to Russia about a policy of non-expansion of NATO in Eurasia.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

21 Years Ago Today: US Rips Up ABM Treaty With Russia, Starting Slow Slide Toward Current Crisis

Samizdat – 13.12.2022

Tuesday marks the 21st anniversary of the decision by then-US President George W. Bush to quit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a landmark 1972 agreement which limited the anti-ballistic missile capabilities of the US and the USSR (and later Russia). The move became the canary in the coalmine of trouble in relations between Russia and the US.

“I have concluded the ABM Treaty hinders our government’s ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attack,” President Bush said, speaking to reporters at the White House Rose Garden on December 13, 2001. “Today I have given formal notice to Russia… that the United States of America is withdrawing from this almost thirty year old treaty,” he said. Six months later, on June 13, 2002, the agreement was history.

The ABM Treaty, signed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and US President Richard Nixon in May 1972, limited Moscow and Washington’s ability to build ballistic missile interceptors, and was designed to slow the expansion of the superpowers’ arsenals of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, and to prevent either country from trying to gain an advantage over the other which would upset the global strategic balance.

What Did Russia Say and Do at the Time?

Vladimir Putin, then just starting his first term as president, told his US counterpart that Moscow was not surprised by the US decision, but considered the move an “erroneous one,” given that the treaty had served as a “cornerstone” of world security and stability.

A month before that, on November 13, 2001, during a state visit to the US, Putin informed his hosts that Russia and the US had “different points of view about the ABM Treaty,” but would “continue dialogue and discussions… to develop a new strategic framework that enables both of us to meet the true threats of the 21st century as partners and friends, not as adversaries.”

Publicly, Washington maintained at the time that terrorists, or so-called “rogue states” like North Korea or Iran (which the Bush administration labeled as members of an ‘Axis of Evil’) might create or obtain missiles to attack America or its allies.

Behind the scenes, Moscow suspected that the US was bluffing, and that the true purpose of new expanded American missile defenses would be to disarm Russia’s nuclear deterrent, which at the time was one of the only remaining factors standing in the way of total US global hegemony and the ‘new world order’ declared by President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in late 1991.

To prove it, Putin and Sergei Lavrov (who became Russia’s Foreign Minister in 2004), concocted a diplomatic maneuver to test Washington’s sincerity. In July 2007, on the sidelines of a G8 summit in Germany, Putin threw Bush a curve ball by proposing the deployment of a joint missile defense system in Azerbaijan. The plan outlined the use of an X-band radar in the post-Soviet republic to guide anti-missile interceptors, and, if approved by the US, would confirm that Washington’s missile shield plans really were aimed at so-called “rogue states,” not Russia.

“This will make it impossible – unnecessary – for us to place our offensive complexes along the borders with Europe,” Putin said, referring to US plans at the time to create a series of radar systems in the Czech Republic, along with missile interceptors in Poland.

The Bush White House politely declined the proposal. “This is a serious issue and we want to make sure that we all understand each other’s positions very clearly,” Bush told Putin.

In April 2008, at a meeting in Sochi – their final one before Putin stepped down as president and became Russia’s prime minister, and less than a year before the end of Bush’s presidency, the leaders failed to come to an agreement on missile defenses. “This is an area we’ve got more work to do to convince the Russian side that the system is not aimed at Russia,” Bush said, speaking to reporters. “I want to be understood correctly. Strategically, no change has taken place in our… attitude to US plans,” Putin responded.

(Re)Birth of Russia’s Hypersonics Program

Still recovering from the catastrophic geopolitical and economic fallout of the collapse of the USSR, and watching closely as NATO expanded into Eastern Europe in several waves between 1999 and 2004, Moscow appeared to have gained the vague impression that behind the US rhetoric of friendship and partnership, Washington had not truly given up on its vision of Russia as an adversary after 1991.

In September 2020, during a meeting with Gerbert Efremov, the former director and chief designer at the legendary NPO Mashinostroyenia rocket design bureau – responsible for the creation of some of Russia’s new hypersonic weapons, Putin revealed that the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was the singular moment which prompted Moscow to develop these cutting-edge armaments, which the USSR had tinkered with at the twilight of the Cold War.

“America’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 forced Russia to start developing hypersonic weapons. We had to create these weapons in response to the deployment of the US strategic missile defense system, which would have been able to neutralize and render obsolete our entire nuclear potential,” Putin said. Russia’s hypersonic designs, gave Russia, for the first time in its modern history, “the most modern types of weapons, superior in terms of their force, power, speed and, very importantly, in terms of accuracy, compared to all which existed before them and exist today,” Putin said.

Putin returned to the fateful US decision on the ABM Treaty in remarks in October 2021, saying that Washington’s move opened a Pandora’s box of a new global arms race, and demonstrated that America was not looking to defend itself, but trying to “receive strategic superiority, effectively eliminating the nuclear potential of a potential rival.”

“What should we have done in response? I have spoken on this subject many times,” Putin said. “We could have either created a similar system, which would cost immense amounts of money, and it would be unclear in the end if it would work effectively or not. Or we could have created a different system which would definitely overcome missile defenses. I said that we would do this. The response from our American partners was that ‘our missile defenses are not directed against you, do whatever you want, we will proceed from the fact that your projects are not against us.’ We built our systems. What claims do they have against us now? Now they don’t like them,” Putin said.

Russia unveiled a series of new strategic weapons systems in 2018, with the arms, including the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, the Kinzhal aero-ballistic air-to-surface missile, the Sarmat ICBM, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed autonomous torpedo, designed to assure that even if Washington did successfully build a missile shield, Russia would still be able to retaliate to hypothetical US aggression.

What Other Treaties With Russia Has the US Unilaterally Ripped Up?

The ABM Treaty wasn’t the only security agreement with Moscow that Washington had unilaterally quit in recent years. In 2018, the United States pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty – an agreement banning the deployment of ground-based strategic missile in the 500-5,500 km range. In 2020, the US left the 1992 Treaty on Open Skies – which allowed 35 partner nations to perform military reconnaissance overflights over one another’s territory using specialized aircraft. Moscow was forced to follow suit in 2021.

What’s Left?

In January 2021, the incoming Biden administration agreed to renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), an arms control treaty which obliges the two countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed warheads. The Trump administration intended to let the clock run out on the agreement, demanding that China’s modest nuclear arsenal be added to any strategic treaties. The Biden administration agreed to extend it to February 2026.

With the collapse of the ABM Treaty, the INF Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies, New START is now the last major security treaty between Russia and the United States. But there are two other international agreements, the Outer Space Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which both Moscow and Washington are parties, whose future has also been threatened by US behavior.

The resolution was merely a political declaration, and no means exist to enforce it. However, in 2008, Russia and China recommended a binding agreement – the Proposed Prevention of an Arms Race in Space (PAROS) Treaty – outlining specific measures to ban the deployment of space-based weaponry, anti-satellite spacecraft and other technologies which could be used for military purposes, in orbit. Successive US administrations have spurned the proposed treaty, and in 2019, the Trump administration formalized the creation of a new branch of the US military called ‘Space Force’, signaling that Washington will has no plans to rein in its space-based military activities.

Space Force, and other US efforts to militarize space (such as the deployment of large networks of dual-use commercial communications and surveillance satellites), may be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, a 1967 agreement signed by 112 countries, including the United States, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space, restricts the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes, and forbids military bases, weapons testing and military exercises in space.

US scholars of international law have outlined a series of arguments on how the US may be in violation of the Outer Space Treaty, ranging from former President Trump’s statements about the need to assert US “dominance” in space, to Washington’s designation of space as a new “war-fighting domain.”

“These assertions violate major Outer Space Treaty principles, including the prohibition of establishing sovereignty in space and using space only for peaceful purposes. The creation of the US Space Force can also be seen as a ‘threat of force’ based on its history of aggressive and dominant remarks,” explained Rachel Harp, an associate member of the University of Cincinnati Law Review.

Finally, there is the Chemical Weapons Convention, another arms control treaty to which both the United States and Russia are parties, but where question marks remain regarding Washington’s commitment to the agreement. While Russia completed the destruction of the last of its Soviet-era chemical weapons in September 2017, under the watchful eye of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the United States has consistently revised deadlines to destroy its own chemical arms stockpiles.

Washington originally promised to eliminate the last of its deadly chemical agents by 2012, but now promises to do so by late 2023. With nearly 650 tons of chemical agents and munitions remaining in its arsenal, the United States now has the largest declared chemical weapons stockpile in the world.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Junior ROTC Fits Perfectly within Public Schools

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 12, 2022

The U.S. military is having a tough time meeting recruiting targets, possibly because young people are figuring out that they don’t want to come back from some stupid foreign war without legs or arms or with some brain injury or, even worse, dead. To encourage young people to join up and be all that they can be, public-school officials across the country are forcing high-school freshmen to take Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) class, where students are “encouraged” to later join the military. 

An article about the controversy in yesterday’s New York Times points out that the JROTC program is funded by the U.S. military and is designed to produce “leadership skills, discipline and civic values — and open students’ eyes to the idea of a military career.”

The JROTC students are required to wear uniforms and are taught the importance of obeying orders. At Pershing High School in Detroit, several students asked to drop the class. They were told that the class was mandatory. The article states: “A review of J.R.O.T.C. enrollment data collected from more than 200 public records requests showed that dozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Ala.”

Why would public-school officials act as tools for the military? According to the article, “The military subsidizes instructors’ salaries while requiring schools to maintain a certain level of enrollment in order to keep the program. In states that have allowed J.R.O.T.C. to be used as an alternative graduation credit, some schools appear to have saved money by using the course as an alternative to hiring more teachers in subjects such as physical education or wellness.”

Oh, and guess which students they are mainly targeting as potential future cannon fodder. According to the Times’s article, “A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households.”

Julio Mejia, a Fort Mayers, Florida, parent whose daughter tried to get out of the JROTC class, pointedly observed, “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination.’” The Times points out, “But critics have long contended that the program’s militaristic discipline emphasizes obedience over independence and critical thinking.” Jesús Palafox, a former student, calls the process “brainwashing.”

Not so, claims Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman, a Pentagon spokesman and herself a former JROTC student. “It’s really about teaching kids about service, teaching them teamwork.” It sounds more like she might be a perfect example of the program’s success at indoctrination and brainwashing. 

While parents can see how JROTC creates mindsets of conformity, blind obedience, and regimentation, unfortunately they are not able to see that that’s precisely what public (i.e., government) schooling itself does. In fact, public schooling could easily be described as “army-lite,” which is why the JROTC program fits perfectly within the public (i.e., government) schooling system. 

Just as students are being forced into JROTC, young people are forced into the state’s educational maw, where they are indoctrinated and brainwashed into becoming “good little citizens,” ones who are inculcated with mindsets of regimentation, obedience to orders, and deference to authority, all of which, they are taught, constitutes “patriotism.” As with the JROTC classes, public-school students have any ability to engage in critical thinking smashed out of them, and they are taught instead to memorize and regurgitate. 

In fact, one cannot help but wonder if the reason that so many parents can easily see the downside of JROTC but not the downside of public (i.e., government) schooling is because they themselves are products of the public-school system and its very successful system of indoctrination and brainwashing. After all, what better success story than indoctrinated and brainwashed people who have no idea they’ve been indoctrinated and brainwashed and recoil at any suggestion that they are victims of indoctrination and brainwashing?

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Washington wants Europe’s total Dependence on the US

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – 12.12.2022

In March 2022, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that “Europe is the new hotspot” of global arms import. While this development is attributed to the ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine (US/EU/NATO), what’s equally, or even more, important to understand is how most of this European purchase is coming from the US and how the latter has turned the conflict into a money-making machine. The US is responsible for the so-called ‘energy crisis’ in Europe and, by selling expensive US gas to Europe, is making a lot of money. Of course, the US told the Europeans that doing so was necessary to reduce their critical dependence on Moscow. The Europeans, in their bid to ‘punish’ Russia, decided to increase their dependence on the US. This is now turning into an ugly issue, as European powers, as reports in the western mainstream media show, are now directly accusing the US of profiteering from war.

This criticism is based not just on the fact that Europe is buying expensive US gas and the latter is profiting from it. In fact, it is based upon the fact that Europe is now too dependent on the US to prevent its economic collapse. If Europe’s dependency on the US continues to increase, it will only come at the cost of its strategic autonomy.

Secondly, this is not just about gas. If gas is linked to economy, Europe’s increasing military purchase from the US is directly linked to its defence and security, or at least this is how it is being projected. This dependence in the defence field is most easily evident from the German purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the US. While the US is going to make a whole lot of money out of this multi-billion dollar deal, strings attached to this deal show how this deal is a direct reinforcement of European dependency on the US.

Martin Kroell, the President of the Federal Association of the German Aerospace Industry (BDLI), was quoted to have said that Germany, even after purchasing these jets, would not have the rights to maintain and repair these jets in Germany. They will be maintained “in other European countries in the network of the US Armed Forces, or by the US companies Lockheed … this creates a dangerous dependency.”

Let’s not forget that this sale happened, first and foremost, when the US started putting pressure in early 2021, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, on European nations to increase their defence capacity. But, using the pressure of this conflict, the US authorities managed to make a deal that did not give much leeway to the German authorities to really protect their interests. As another report confirms, the Germans made an ‘error’ in not demanding the involvement of their own “arms industry in the maintenance, repair, and support of these expensive aircraft.”

This is not Germany alone. Finland, for instance, is another country entering the phase of dangerous dependency on the US. It has already decided to buy 64 Block 4 F-35s for US$9.4 billion. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Finland has upped its weapon purchase, with, unsurprisingly, most of this purchase coming from the US.

While the conflict in Ukraine has led to many deals worth billions of USD, there is a growing fear in the continent that the US is now trying to start a new crisis with China. Such a conflict would create additional problems for Europe.

But the rhetoric being produced – and effectively used – by the US for Europe is to reduce dependence on China. Europe of course is concerned about this form of geopolitics. As Charles Michael, President of the European Council who recently met Xi, said in a tweet: “The EU promotes its interests and values in the world. With China, engaging openly on all aspects of our relationship is the only way forward.”

China, too, understands that Europe is far from being in agreement with the US over a joint China policy. Therefore, Xi was candid enough to tell the EU last week that the bloc should keep up its investment in China, adding that China and the EU must jointly “oppose de-coupling.”

But while the EU is fighting the US over forcing a policy on the EU vis-à-vis the China question and the economic consequences it could have for Europe in the long term, the US continues to make policies that directly impact the EU economy. The latest irritant is certainly the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which gives tax breaks for components used in electric cars provided they are made in (North) America.

While the EU-based companies could set up factories in the US, this would effectively mean that these companies will add to the US economy more than the EU’s economy. In other words, the EU’s capital will be used to add to the US capital at the expense of the EU’s own economic health.

This pattern is similar to the way the EU capital is being used via expensive gas sales and weapon systems to help the US economy. This is precisely how the conflict in Ukraine has turned out to be a major source of profit for the US state.

What can the EU do? The Europeans are unlikely to be able to break out of this dependency relationship without first developing an independent global outlook. Imagine the economic scenario in the EU if, instead of supporting the US bid to expand NATO, it had taken an independent line. The EU did not take that line. Now, the EU accuses the US of its energy crisis. The question is: can it translate this anger into a concrete policy?

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

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