Trump’s Former Syria Envoy Reveals US Administration’s Main Goal Was Denying Assad Territory
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 07.12.2020
Last month, the same official frankly admitted that he and members of his staff had deliberately obfuscated and covered up the true size of the US military contingent in Syria from the president.
Jim Jeffrey, the veteran US diplomat who served as Trump’s special envoy for Syria for nearly two years prior to his November 13 resignation, has offered another frank admission about the real goal of the US mission in the war-torn nation – preventing President Bashar Assad’s government from restoring control over territory within the Arab Republic’s internationally-recognised borders.
In an interview with the Times of Israel, Jeffrey indicated that while the Trump administration had failed to achieve its goal of securing a complete withdrawal of ‘Iranian forces’ from Syria, or the complete destruction of Daesh, or a resolution to the Syrian conflict, it did manage to reach a “military stalemate,” denying Damascus control over part of its lands.
“What we have done is stop Assad’s forward movement militarily. There is a basic military statement,” Jeffrey said. He added that Turkish forces in northern Syria were similarly ‘denying terrain’ to Damascus, while Israeli air power “dominates the skies” and continues to launch regular (and illegal) sorties into the country.
Jeffrey also boasted that the US-led coalition and its European allies have “crushed Assad economically,” leaving the Syrian president’s Russian and Iranian allies “a totally failed state in a state of quagmire.”
Jeffrey, who had joined 50 other Republican national security officials in signing a 2016 appeal suggesting that Trump was dangerous and should not be allowed to become president before ultimately agreeing to serve in his administration in 2018, credited former CIA director-turned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for convincing Trump to stay in Syria.
“I was pleased very much to work with Mike Pompeo. I think he is a brilliant secretary of state [who] has the faith and the trust of the president, and thus could talk [Trump] out of things and persuade the president of things,” Jeffrey said. This trust was “certainly necessary” to convince Trump not to pull all US troops out of Syria, according to the diplomat.
“Several times it looked like we were withdrawing our forces. That would have been a terrible mistake. But in [all] three cases… President Trump correctly reversed himself and decided to keep forces on the ground,” the ex-envoy recalled.
Jeffrey also offered praised for Joe Biden’s national security team picks, saying leaders in the Middle East and around the world “know and trust” the former vice president and described his selections as “reassuring”. For the record, these picks include former Obama-era Washington insider Antony Blinken, who was a major proponent of US wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and who Biden has tapped for his secretary of state.
Reacting to the Jeffrey interview, Syrian Arab News Agency contributor Ruaa al-Jazaeri suggested that the ex-envoy had effectively revealed that the “real goal of the US administration” has been “keeping its occupying forces in some of the Syrian areas”, discrediting the “fake slogans which claim that those forces are fighting the Daesh terrorist organisation”.
“Jeffrey’s admission is added to the admission made by Donald Trump, who has announced at many press conferences that his occupying forces which are deployed in Syria are there to protect the oil fields which have been pillaged by the US in collusion with the [Kurdish] militia,” al-Jazaeri added.
Candid Revelations
Jeffrey’s comments to the Times of Israel follow remarks he made to Defense One last month, in which he frankly admitted that he and his staff “were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had” in Syria. “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” the diplomat boasted, referring to Trump’s repeated plans in 2018 and again in 2019 to bring US troops home after announcing that the terrorists had been defeated.
According to Jeffrey, the US continues to have “a lot more” than the estimated 200-400 troops approved by Trump in Syria at present.
Trump began a major shakeup at the Pentagon following the November 3 election, firing Secretary of Defence Mark Esper on November 9, with the move sparking a number of high profile resignations. On November 17, Esper’s replacement, former National Counterterrorism Center director Christopher Miller, announced that the US would make substantial cutbacks in US troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that the US would be withdrawing almost all of its 700 troops from Somalia.
Trump had made pulling out of US ‘forever wars’ around the world a key plank of his 2016 campaign, but has so far failed to completely withdraw from any of the major conflicts the US is engaged in.
Occupation By COVID: Palestine As a Viral Export, 2020
By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | December 7, 2020
As the year 2020 expires in an embattled welter of politicized suffering, I feel I need to address my fellow advocates for Palestinian rights, too many of whom seem not to notice – or actively deny – that, under cover of coronavirus hysteria, the unhealed wounds of Palestine are steadily infecting us all.
Yes, I know all of you face calumny enough from the Israel lobby without being smeared by pro-lockdown propagandists – many of whom, alas, cling to the name “progressive” even as they abjectly submit to the most massive civil rights violations of our lifetimes.
And I know the task I am setting for you is a hard one. After all, few Americans have paid much attention to Palestine in the past; how likely is it that today, punch-drunk from the creeping despotism unleashed as COVID-19 “health” regulation, a large public will turn from its troubles long enough to realize that the blows our country is tasting for the first time – curfews, closures, mass confinements, official lying, economic warfare – have been the lot of occupied Palestine for decades?
But there is no escaping the obligation to tell the truth: and that means, first of all, that we have to acknowledge the truth. And while advocates for Palestine are well aware of what the American government has done to that land – with its money and military hardware, the systematic violence of its client [sic] state, Israel, and the cruel deceit that is called U.S. “diplomacy” – too many remain strangely blind to the poisoning of our own nation with the same evils that have blighted the lives of millions in the West Bank and Gaza.
Yes, the venue is shifting – from foreign training ground to domestic soil – but we are only deluding ourselves if we refuse to see the connection between the two. The historian Alfred McCoy warned as far back as 2009 that what the U.S. was developing in the Middle East would inevitably come home to haunt us:
the War on Terror has proven remarkably effective,” he wrote, “in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state – with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’
By 2013, McCoy had concluded, sadly, that…
that prediction has become our present reality.
And it was only the start.
Israel’s example already figured in the militarization of American police forces: think Ferguson, think Chicago. But that was child’s play compared with this year’s reconstruction of West Bank-style administrative repression throughout much of the United States.
Israel rationalizes its imprisonment of Palestine as a “defense” against “terror”; here, state authorities prefer the pretext of combating an infectious disease. But the systems of control are ultimately the same.
Do I exaggerate? Who, then – before last March – ever heard U.S. politicians talk eagerly about “lockdowns”? Or bans on political demonstrations? Or the thought-policing of social media? And who would have thought that such instruments of mass repression could be introduced, not through legislation, but by means of “emergency” decrees from a handful of state executives whose edicts purport to be above the law?
These things are new to the United States; but none of them would have surprised Palestinians, whose entire lives – from where they can go to what they are allowed to post on Facebook – have been governed by arbitrary decrees for decades.
And more repression is on the way. Already there’s talk of U.S. citizens being “encouraged” to carry “contact-tracing” technology; even the first hints of travel restrictions, controlled through universal registration with a government-run monitoring agency, have begun to percolate in the “liberal” press. A year ago all of this would have been unthinkable. But Palestinians have lived under such a regime since the 1990s.
Nor should the Mideast-coronavirus connection really surprise anyone – least of all, those of us who have made it our business to follow the wrongs of Palestine. After all, we’ve been warned.
The exportation of Israel’s occupation to the West was predicted with uncanny accuracy by Jeff Halper in his book War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians, and Global Pacification. In 2016, Halper told In These Times that the success of capitalist states in controlling unruly populations would depend on what he called “globalizing Palestine.”
He said, back then:
“Israel-Palestine is the microcosm of the larger world. What Israel’s doing to the Palestinians… reflects the kind of war that capitalism is having to fight now…. The wars that are being fought in Syria, or the wars being fought against poor people in the States aren’t wars that F-35s or nuclear submarines are any use for… [W]hen they’re actually going to fight wars among the people, Israel becomes the go-to place. They [the Israelis] have the weaponry, the tactics, the surveillance systems and the security systems that are more relevant for the types of capitalist wars of repression that are being fought today than the big systems that the Pentagon has.
It’s a shame that Halper’s insight hasn’t been given more attention in public discourse – even on the left – during the critical nine months since last March’s declaration of a global “pandemic.” But then, maybe it was inevitable that Palestine would be marginalized in exact proportion to its growing importance to the West as a blueprint for domestic oppression.
Certainly its plight was never more belittled than last spring, while more than forty U.S. governors were effectively Palestinianizing their populations with mass confinements, business closures, school shutdowns and restraints on public protest. If that was a rehearsal for something like Israel’s West Bank occupation on American soil – and it certainly looked like one – you’d never have known it from listening to the few politicians around the world who even bothered to talk about Palestinians.
Donald Trump – the outgoing President who wasn’t sure whether the Western Wall was in Palestine – first declared international law irrelevant to Israelis, then claimed to have a “solution” that would resolve the “conflict” once and for all.
What he proposed was predictably outrageous, of course. But was it really any worse than the apathy that greeted the “plan” throughout Western Europe? Was it more reprehensible than the behavior of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who – while still feeding at the Israeli trough – pretended for months to be leading a rebellion against an “annexation” of West Bank territory that, for all the noise the word’s novelty generated, was actually launched a long time ago and continues to this day?
At least it’s clear now (if it wasn’t all along) that the whole to-do over “annexation” was a conjuror’s trick. Israel and its allies use the word when it’s politically convenient and forget about it when it isn’t; the verbal fashion of the moment has no effect on the pace of Israeli land theft.
As for Abbas, he’s already making nice with President-elect [sic] Joe Biden despite the latter’s ostentatious Zionism – and why not? The actual measure of Israel’s purloining of West Bank territory is the amount of its illegal colonization by Israeli Jews. And that colonization, which began almost immediately after Israel seized the territories in June 1967, has never been more rampant than it is now.
This year alone, Israel approved a record-high 12,000 new “housing units” for its squatters in occupied Palestine, who already control nearly all of the most valuable land and whose pastimes include regular violent attacks against the rightful owners – not to mention the frequent destruction of their homes and olive groves. By early 2019 the number of illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories, which by then had mushroomed to over 650,000, was growing even faster than the overall Israeli population.
And what was Mahmoud Abbas doing all that time? Nothing. What was the European Union doing to halt Israel’s land theft? Nothing. What did the Democratic Party “resistance” to Donald Trump, apart from some ritual harrumphing over “annexation” proposals, have to say about the monstrous expansion of illegal West Bank colonies? Nothing.
Against that background, was Trump’s insult to international law even worth mentioning?
To tell the truth, it’s hard to think of any Palestine-related mainstream headline over the last year that didn’t crackle with absurdity. A warmed-over reprise of Israel’s long-standing demand for Palestinian capitulation was unblushingly called “the Deal of the Century.” A cynical bargain between the crime family that runs the United Arab Emirates and a blood-stained, racist Israeli Prime Minister with one foot already in a prison cell was heralded as “the dawn of a new Middle East” – by Washington’s Con-Artist-in-Chief, a man who could make Becky Sharp look innocent by contrast.
And where was Palestine – the actual land and people – amid all the sputtering? Not one square inch of occupied territory has been reclaimed from Israel’s occupation in over fifty years of Palestinian suffering and international indifference. Not one prisoner has been freed from the concentration camp called Gaza since the heroic sacrifices of its people that began in March 2018. No wonder Israel is doing so well at exporting its occupation: its techniques represent an unqualified success story.
In fact, the most accurate pointer to where matters stand comes from a little-noticed news item about the one real consequence of the Palestinian Authority’s “refusal to cooperate” with Israel’s annexation threats. According to 972 Magazine, tens of thousands of Palestinian children born since May do not officially exist – as far as Israel is concerned – since the P.A. has not communicated their names to the Israelis. Nor can the P.A. confer legal status on its own. It follows that these children have no official identity and, therefore, no rights; they can never, for instance, leave the Occupied Territories even if their parents are permitted to. Whether they will be allowed to own their homes one day, or even to work, will apparently be at the whim of the Israelis.
Let that image sink in a moment: people who do not legally exist, in a country that is not a country, administered by a “government” that is not a government. If there’s a better summary of what “Palestine” means today, I can’t think of it.
And if you think Palestine’s fate has no relevance for what awaits the American public, think again.
Under President-elect Biden’s latest coronavirus plan, just for instance,…
the CDC will be in charge of announcing recommendations for when it is safe to open or close restaurants, schools and businesses.
This means that an unelected and unaccountable panel of bureaucrats – working in a political environment where the dominance of Big Pharma is a matter of record – will have unprecedented control over American education and economic life. And for how long? Biden is careful not to say.
As for Palestine, the incoming administration’s top foreign policy adviser, Tony Blinken, announced last June that a Biden government…
would not tie military assistance to Israel to things like annexation or other decisions by the Israeli government with which we might disagree.
So the whims of Israel’s apartheid government will trump American law (no surprise there), and corporate plutocrats will have increasing power over whether and when Americans can go to school, work, or gather in public places. Nablus, here we come!
What can anti-occupation activists do about all this?
First…
It seems to me, we can take seriously what we have said for years: Israel’s conduct in Palestine is not an isolated problem spurred by unique historical or religious circumstances; it is an international crime that threatens us all. In fact, Israel values its occupation of Palestine precisely because its methods and technology are so readily marketable. The longer we tolerate the repression of Palestinians, the sooner we will see that system replicated in countries around the world – including our own.
Second…
We need to apply the same skepticism with which we have long viewed Israeli propaganda to the extravagant web of fear-mongering, distortions and dissent-shaming now being spun to aid the importation of Israeli-style repression onto American soil. Coronavirus hysteria is really no different from the emotional exploitation of “terrorism”: a genuine but limited danger is shamelessly manipulated to cow the public into accepting measures that are far worse than the evil they are supposed to cure. As far back as early May, I was warning in print that the unconstitutional “emergency” orders of more than forty state governors in response to COVID19 involved unprecedented attacks on civil liberties.
Now things are actually looking worse – and with still less justification. A makeshift political system intended to respond to a massive bioterror attack – and even then, only temporarily – has been implausibly stretched to rationalize the long-term suspension of representative government, in four-fifths of our states, to counter one moderately serious respiratory virus. Meanwhile, the press has bombarded us with “expert” assurances that we have too much freedom for our own good, and that wanting to “get back to normal” – that is, to democracy and constitutional rule – is a product of “bias,” if not of some psychological malady. There’s no mistaking the official message: either we surrender the Bill of Rights or we all die.
But the official tally of each week’s deaths, state by state, hardly supports these apocalyptic pronouncements. New Jersey (where I live) provides a convenient example. Since the beginning of July and right up through the first week of November – the last for which statistics are available as I write this – the number of deaths from all causes in New Jersey has been virtually identical to the figure for the same period in 2019; the totals vary by barely a third of one percent. In other words, since the midpoint of the year, COVID19 has had no significant effect on the mortality rate in New Jersey.
True, the massive application of an unreliable testing procedure has managed to generate what New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy called an “uptick in cases”; but if you’re still looking for the Emperor’s new clothes amid these tales of a “deadly pandemic,” you can save yourself the effort – even the “experts” admit that the new “cases” seem to have materialized out of thin air.
So, when Murphy once again (on October 24) unilaterally extended a “state of emergency” that, by law, was originally supposed to end on April 9 – insisting that the “dangers presented” by the coronavirus required him to hold onto quasi-dictatorial power in order “to save lives” – he was taking pretty much the same tack as Israeli propaganda that claimed the Jewish State had to poison children in Gaza to protect itself from exploding helium balloons.
(Meanwhile, across the Hudson, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo is slated to receive an International Emmy Award for “his once-daily televised briefings on the coronavirus pandemic”; like Murphy, Cuomo excels at convincing jaded audiences that he has averted a catastrophe with edicts that more likely exacerbated it.
If there were an Oscar for Best Dramatic Performance by a Nation-State, Israel would win hands down every year,
… Norman Finkelstein has written. It looks as though Israel is finally getting some competition.)
So the question is not whether Israel’s occupation is being transported – in fact, it has already been transported – far beyond the borders of Palestine. That much should be obvious. For advocates for Palestinian rights, there are really only two issues:
First, are we prepared to recognize the repressive measures we have long identified with occupied Palestine wherever they appear and under whatever pretext? Second, are we determined to resist them once they arise?
My own experience indicates that, so far, most pro-Palestinian pundits have not passed either test. I’ve been condemned by some, and cold-shouldered by others, for even mentioning the connection between lockdown policies and Israel’s long-standing outrages in the Occupied Territories.
When I submitted a version of this column to a left-wing site that has run many of my pieces in the past, the publisher responded that it was…
simply not something I can present.
Since I know him to be a reasonable and thoughtful person, I conclude that the publisher’s “not something I can present” means that his donors – to say nothing of other contributors – aren’t ready to see coronavirus policy as the police-state pretext it really is.
Yes, they’ll complain about the imprisonment of Palestine – and they’re right to do that. But refusing to notice similar abuses in their own country puts them in the absurd position of trying to keep a finger in a dike while a whole city floods around them.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If the wrongs of Palestine mean to us what we’ve always said they do, we can be – and should be – in the vanguard of resistance to what is surely the most alarming phase of the occupation to date: its spread across Europe and the United States, even as it intensifies in Palestine itself.
At the turn of the 20th century, Mark Twain noted bitterly how the oppression of other peoples led an empire’s citizens to submit to tyranny within their own borders:
trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her [the “Great Republic”], by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.
Surely those who object to the trampling of Palestinians should be the first to raise our voices against the dissemination of similar crimes throughout the world – especially when those crimes reach our own doorsteps.
If not, what have we been campaigning for all these years?
Leaked emails show Anders Aslund, the Atlantic Council’s Russia-basher in chief, tried to solicit funds from Russian billionaires
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 2, 2020
Internal Atlantic Council emails reveal the NATO-connected ‘think tank’ aggressively schmoozed the obscenely wealthy owners of Russia’s Alfa Bank, in order to secure a slice of their vast riches.
The communications have been released publicly as a result of the ongoing defamation case brought against Fusion GPS and its founder and chief Glenn Simpson in a Washington, DC court, by Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, the owners of Alfa Bank. The three allege false allegations against them in the ‘Trump-Russia dossier’, produced for Fusion GPS by former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, damaged their reputation.
The now-notorious and utterly discredited dossier alleged they and the bank maintained a covert communications channel with Donald Trump, and moreover delivered “large amounts of illicit cash” to Vladimir Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s.
In July, the trio were awarded damages in a separate action brought against Orbis Intelligence, Steele’s private espionage firm, in London after Judge Mark Warby ruled the dossier’s allegations were “inaccurate or misleading” and the former spy had failed to take reasonable steps to verify the claims.
‘We got nothing’
In May 2016, coincidentally around the same time the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump, the Atlantic Council caught wind of the fact Alfa Bank’s owners wished to give away the entirety of their fortunes to charitable causes while alive, and saw a prime opportunity for grift.
Writing to the think tank’s top executives, Council ‘senior fellow’ Anders Aslund lustily noted their intention, and respective net worth of Fridman ($15 billion) and Aven ($5 billion).
“This could open an opportunity. To date Fridman has been extremely stingy,” Aslund stated rapaciously. “Rich Burt represents both Fridman and Aven quite intensely. I shall tentatively have dinner with Aven in Moscow Sunday night so I might be able to ask him what he wants. As you remember, we hosted him here in November and got nothing.”
That the November 2015 event left the Council empty-handed was undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for Aslund, given he went to great lengths to be highly accommodating to Aven, letting him pick the time and format of his Council talk, the number of attendees, and more.
“Our preference would be a lunch talk, but please indicate what time that suits you. Do you want a private off the-record meeting with 20-24 people or a bigger public meeting? The choice is yours,” he wrote to Aven.
Aslund added chummily that whenever the billionaire had spare time in Washington, he and his wife Anna were “always happy” to see him. However, there were some organizational problems.
In an email to Council higher-ups, Aslund’s colleague Alison Perry suggests Aven wished to invite “former Russian propaganda minister” Mikhail Lesin to the meeting, to which Aslund initially agreed. However, the Council subsequently learned Lesin was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for money laundering, and was forced to “find a polite way” of letting Aven know Lesin was no longer welcome.
The volte face was presumably begrudging in extremis, given Lesin’s purportedly immense wealth – five properties in California alone allegedly owned by companies affiliated with his family were worth a combined US$28 million. In a bizarre twist, the day after the Council event, he was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room. Authorities concluded he died of blunt-force trauma to the head, induced by falling due to acute alcohol intoxication.
‘Nothing must be reported’
Fast forward to October 15, 2017, and Aslund’s gold-digging scheme was in full swing – he wrote to Council staff stating invitations for a “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” on October 26 with Fridman and Aven needed to be sent to a number of powerful individuals.
Proposed attendees included representatives of the US State Department, National Security Council, Treasury, Congress, Senate, and other influential government-funded think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation, and others. The senior fellow was keen to stress no journalists should be invited.
Aslund’s long-running effort to curry favor with Alfa Bank’s owners is highly ironic given his vociferous promotion of the Steele dossier, which in June 2017 he dubbed “outstanding intelligence.”
In February the next year, he wrote an essay for the Council stating the “reasons to believe Steele are multiple and overwhelming,” and slamming the refusal of the mainstream media to publicize the dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign due to the unverifiable nature of most of its contents.
Claiming news outlets had “confused the profession of journalism with that of prosecution,” Aslund also expressed contempt for the philosophy that “if not everything is proven correct, nothing must be reported” – a rather troubling indictment, given the Council’s ‘anti-fake news’ partnership with Facebook, and claims to be “on the front lines of disinformation.”
“The US media missed the greatest scandal of the 2016 election campaign because they were so stuck in medieval liturgy it rendered them incapable of reporting the truth… The question is not whether the Kremlin helped Trump win the election but whether it can be proved in court and whether it is punishable according to all too arcane US law, which could not even sentence Al Capone for anything but tax evasion,” he fulminated.
Strikingly, the essay has since been “retracted and removed” from the organization’s website.
What claims in the dossier can be verified have since been proven to be total fiction, its contents drunken tittle-tattle provided to Steele by Brookings Institute staffer Igor Danchenko. In interviews with the FBI in February 2017, he expressed dismay this gossip had been used to secure surveillance warrants against individuals connected to the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, Aslund still views the dossier as “largely credible,” and has even praised the “excellent” and “knowledgeable” Danchenko, who somewhat amazingly was a student of his at Georgetown University.
‘Corrupt politically exposed persons’
Aslund’s fundraising activities are doubly ironic given in 2019 he authored ‘Russia’s Crony Capitalism’, a book documenting the country’s alleged descent from a “market economy to kleptocracy.”
In March this year, he predicted this shift would contribute to Russia’s economic collapse in the very near future. It was at least the fourth occasion Aslund has foretold the country’s impending and unstoppable implosion, having previously – and incorrectly – done so in 1999, 2001, and 2014.
All along, his willingness to personally profit from the very financial activities he condemns has endured untrammeled. In June 2018, Aslund was appointed to the supervisory board of Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia – he resigned in September this year.
In explaining his decision, he claimed he was exposed to “excessive” legal risks by not being provided directors’ and officers’ liability insurance, and said many of the board’s decisions hadn’t been implemented by Ukrzaliznytsia’s management.
Principled enough, but there was also the small issue of directors not having been paid since April. Or, at least, not paid enough – earlier this year, President Volodymyr Zelensky capped salaries of public employees as well as members of management and supervisory boards of state-owned companies at 10 times the official minimum salary, about $1,700 a month, from April 1 to the end of quarantine.
In a statement to Interfax, Aslund moaned that while presented as a temporary emergency measure, “it might persist” even longer, an obviously horrifying and unacceptable prospect for the closeted kleptocrat.
“Members of parliament attack foreign members of supervisory boards of state-owned Ukrainian companies for being foreigners and having been paid too much, but we have been paid nothing since April,” he raged bitterly.
The month after his supervisory board appointment, BuzzFeed revealed Aslund was paid to write a paper alleging financial institutions in Latvia, long-lambasted as lairs of criminality and corruption, had made tremendous strides in enforcing anti-money laundering statutes – by the very banks involved. It was commissioned by Sally Painter, a lobbyist for Baltic banks and member of the Council’s board of directors.
The organizations that lined Aslund’s pockets included a subsidiary of ABLV Bank, which at the time was attempting to secure permission to establish an office in the US. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful, as the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network concluded ABLV was a bank of “primary money laundering concern.”
“ABLV executives, shareholders, and employees have institutionalized money laundering… Management permits the bank and its employees to orchestrate and engage in money laundering schemes; solicits high risk shell company activity that enables the bank and its customers to launder funds; maintains inadequate controls over high-risk shell company accounts; and seeks to obstruct enforcement of Latvian anti-money laundering rules in order to protect these business practices,” the Treasury ruled.
Some of this illicit activity, the Treasury alleged, involved transactions for parties involved in North Korea’s procurement and export of ballistic missiles, and money laundering for “corrupt politically exposed persons.” ABLV was accused of funneling billions of dollars “in public corruption and asset-stripping proceeds through shell company accounts,” and failing to mitigate risks stemming from these accounts, “which involved large-scale illicit activity connected to Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Shortly after the Treasury’s findings were made public, ABLV was forced to close – but Aslund told BuzzFeed he stood by his report, as it was “factually correct.”
The paper was presented at a private Council event in October 2017, the same month he was arranging that “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” with Alfa Bank’s owners.
It was convened despite Aslund’s research not being an official Council publication, and the think tank claiming it was written and published without its input. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no reference to the report or the event can be found on the Council’s website.
Snouts in trough
The email tranche indicates Aslund wasn’t the only Council apparatchik determined to get the think tank’s proverbial mitts in the Alfa Bank till.
In July 2015, Council chief executive Fred Kempe emailed Petr Aven about a fully-fledged partnership between the Council and Letter One, an Alfa Bank affiliate, and suggested there was “a larger role” for him to personally play at the Council.
All the Council’s approaches to Alfa Bank were allegedly unsuccessful, but there’s no shortage of dubious institutions and individuals all too willing to lavishly bankroll the think tank. Its donors currently include the US embassies of UAE and Bahrain, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, defense giant Raytheon, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the US State Department.
From 2006 – 2016, the Council’s annual revenue leaped tenfold, from $2 million to $21 million – a period in which, concurrently and not coincidentally, corporate and state budgets typically reserved for lobbying firms were increasingly directed to think tanks.
Its board of directors comprises well-connected US government veterans Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Michael Hayden, David Petraeus, and many others. The emails related to Alfa Bank also name Council officials Richard Burt, Daniel Fried, John Herbst and Richard Morningstar, all previously US ambassadors to European and/or Eurasian countries.
Such close ties to the US national security state unquestionably allow for very effective, well-targeted lobbying on behalf of its bankrollers indeed. Except Alfa Bank refused to bite.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @Kit Klarenberg
Congress moves to block US troop pullout from Afghanistan, Germany
Press TV | December 6, 2020
US President Donald Trump’s controversial move to pull out 2,000 American troops out of Afghanistan and 12,000 more from Germany would be blocked by the major defense policy bill, a report has said.
One provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2021 “would block funding for reducing the number of US troops in Afghanistan from 4,500 to 2,500 by January 15, as ordered by Trump, until the Defense and State Departments verify that it was in the national interest,” Military.com news outlet reported Saturday.
Another provision of the NDAA, it added, essentially urges the incoming Biden administration to take a second look at Trump’s executive order to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany.
According to the bill, troop levels in Germany should remain at 34,500 until 120 days after the secretary of defense submitted cost estimates and assessments of the impact of a withdrawal on allies and military families.
The final draft of the NDAA — released Thursday night — underlines that Afghanistan pullout orders, announced by the newly-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller on November 17, “gave Congress no estimate of the national security implications.”
According to the report, the Trump administration has so far failed to clarify how a troop withdrawal was “in the national security interests of the United States to deny terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan, protect the United States homeland.”
Trump’s announcement last June that he wanted 9,500 troops out of Germany after years of battling with NATO allies to spend more for defense has also drawn opposition from both ruling political parties in the US Congress.
On July 29, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper declared plans to carry out Trump’s order that increased the number of US soldiers to be withdrawn from Germany to 12,000.
Some of those troops would return to the US, while others would be transferred to Poland and the Baltic states in a shift eastward to enhance NATO’s purported deterrence against Russia, Esper claimed at the time.
The report further pointed out that the NDAA provision on Germany “means that final decisions on a troop withdrawal could go to Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of Defense for Policy who is considered a frontrunner for defense secretary in the Biden administration.”
Flournoy, the report added, has already stated that pulling thousands of troops out of Germany would likely cost more than leaving them in place. He also underlined in an Aspen Security Forum in August that “Our allies were completely surprised by this punitive troop withdrawal from Germany.”
Moreover, once Biden is inaugurated on January 20, he would have the authority to issue his own executive order reversing Trump’s withdrawal mandate.
Election Day Information Blackout Shows U.S. Media Is No Friend of the People. Americans Must Demand Better
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 6, 2020
While half of the United States is mesmerized by witness testimony describing the ‘irregularities’ that purportedly occurred in the 2020 presidential contest between the incumbent Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the other half has been left deliberately in the dark by an activist media.
It has become almost a cliché to say that the United States is now fiercely divided into parallel universes, alternative realities, otherwise known as the Republican and Democratic camps. One of the primary reasons for this great divide, aside from the obvious ideological differences, is that just one side, that is, the left, predominantly controls the flow of news and social media content.
Indeed, the ‘legacy media’ even feels itself bold enough to cast judgment on presidential messages via Twitter in real time. If ever there was a recipe for disaster, as the most consequential election in recent memory remains up for grabs, this is it.
On November 30, Bobby Piton, a mathematician and expert, testified at the Arizona voter fraud hearing where he provided compelling evidence that up to 300,000 “fake people” cast a vote in the contested election of Nov. 3. The data, if correct, was alarming in its implications since it meant the difference between Trump or Biden winning the fiercely contested swing state. Certainly the major media networks, in the interest of safeguarding the voting process and consequentially democracy itself, would be interested in providing its viewers with such news, right? Think again.
Not only was Piton’s riveting testimony sent to the memory hole by all of the ‘legacy’ media networks, but Twitter actually decided to block his account the very next day. Piton was treated as yet another ‘conspiracy theorist’ nutcase who will probably need to enter some sort of re-indoctrination internment camp before he can join polite society again. He certainly won’t be in need of company if the thought police get their way.
Just days earlier, the social media platform also suspended the account of Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano, who testified at that state’s election hearing. Twitter later said that Mastriano’s suspension was a “glitch,” which begs the question as to why these technological breakdowns almost always, without fail, target Republicans.
The very same media blackout has hit dozens of other poll watchers, regular citizens with no political ax to grind who had the courage to come forward and relay their stories in the hope of protecting America’s democratic process. Their reward has been crickets from the media industrial complex, which is essentially telling those witnesses that their stories do not matter; only the stories that are peddled to them from the corporate masters are all that count.
Such medieval rationale applies even to the President of the United States, who gave what he said was possibly “the most important speech I’ve ever made.”
“We used to have what was called ‘Election Day,’ but now we have Elections Days, Weeks and Months, and lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous long period of time,” Trump said in his 46-minute statement from the White House.
The American leader then proceeded to provide the various ways that the U.S. election system has come under “coordinated assault and siege,” as he described it. Naturally, Twitter tagged the presidential message by saying “This claim about election fraud is disputed.” Imagine, if you will, what the response would have been had the media titans dared to interrupt one of FDR’s famous fireside chats with a message disputing the veracity of the claims.
In any case, the media, acting, or not acting, in absolute lockstep (jackboot?) synchronicity, decided that the U.S. leader’s remarks were not important enough for the American people to hear. Chris Cuomo, CNN talking head, explained his network’s decision to blank the president’s “tirade.”
“Here’s the fact,” Cuomo began. “Trump is the least of our problems. He is a simple study at this point. Trump is toxic. Period. Sure, he’s going to go out with a bang as in trying to blow up as much as he can. He is absolutely trying to make nothing better, despite the fact that America is in a time of abject crisis.”
Was Cuomo talking about the election crisis that has left the United States without any idea who will be its next president, and especially more now that new evidence of foul play are emerging every single day? Of course not. CNN (which Project Veritas just demonstrated has a very big dog in the outcome of the ongoing race) has decided for their audiences, who apparently can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves, that what the U.S. leader has to say is not important because… yes, Covid, the disease that just keeps giving the Democrats excuses to kill any semblance of democratic principles left in the country.
Cue the hysteria.
“He’s not working on the pandemic that is worse than ever,” crazy Cuomo continued. “He’s not making a deal on relief when more people are struggling to put food on the damn table [cue the violins] than at any time in this country since my parents were babies during the Great Depression.”
In other words, Trump is acting like a monster for considering the integrity of the most consequential election in U.S. history when there is a virus on the loose that leaves 99.8 of its ‘victims’ alive and well.
Judging by CNN and the rest of the mainstream media’s breathtaking arrogance, it is not so hard to imagine a day when the president – whether he or she be Trump or some other nation-loving populist – is outright denied the ability to transmit information over social media, while being deprived of the necessary news coverage, as is already the case with the 45th POTUS. This is the pinnacle of corporate power, or rather the abuse of corporate power.
Such a turn of events in the ‘land of the free’ should be of massive concern for both Democrats and Republicans. Yet partisan politics is winning the day, as the Democrats and their lapdog liberal media believe they have sealed the White House. And perhaps they have. But such a victory will be short-lived as corporate power will not stop at Washington, D.C., but will go on to ravage every last remnant of freedom and democracy in the country. It goes without saying that fake elections supported by fake media will never nurture the conditions for a thriving democracy.
Owner of LA bar closed by Covid-19 restrictions decries ‘slap in the face’ as film company allowed to set up dining nearby
RT | December 5, 2020
A Los Angeles bar owner barely held in her tears of outrage after discovering tents meant for feeding a movie crew erected right next to her restaurant, which was shut down and banned from serving outdoors due to Covid-19 rules.
“Tell me that this is dangerous, but right next to me as a slap in my face – that’s safe?” Angela Marsden says in a video pointing to two outdoor spaces, hers and that serving a movie company. The short clip, which highlights how small businesses in California are left behind and going under while large companies apparently get the green light to march on, has gone viral and won a massive outpouring of support.
Marsden owns Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, a restaurant in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. Like many other establishments, it was forced to shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite Marsden investing a reported $80,000 into making her facility safer.
As such, she was furious when she discovered that a movie company had been allowed to set up tents to feed employees right in front of her bar, which has an outdoor dining area of its own. The film industry is considered essential by Los Angeles County and was allowed to operate despite coronavirus risks.
“I am losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio!” Marsden said. “They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive! My staff cannot survive!”
Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill has been running in the neighborhood for over four decades, but unless it opens by February, Marsden may have to shut it down for good, she told local media. She and several other small business owners are organizing a protest against what they see as unfair treatment by Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
The situation however is hardly unique for California. Throughout the US authorities have been deciding which forms of entertainment are essentials and which are not.
For example, the comedy show Saturday Night Live brought back a live audience in October in a move not in line with health guidelines. They got round the rules by compensating people for watching the show, which technically made them paid employees.
But some larger productions are still suffering. In New York, Broadway remains closed and isn’t currently slated to reopen until at least 2021. The Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday announced the cancellation of its entire 2020-21 season due to the pandemic, an ominous sign for the performing arts.
BLM’s lesson in how ‘trained Marxism’ really works, leader rakes in millions while chapters get nothing
Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, December 1, 2020. © REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 4, 2020
While the Black Lives Matter Global Network, led by ‘trained Marxist’ Patrisse Cullors, embraced the windfall of donations following the George Floyd protests across America, local chapters say they were left holding the bag.
It was through the hard work of “radical black organizers” engaging in a “protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism” that Black Lives Matter attracted millions of dollars in contributions this year, yet the BLMGN only recently invited selected chapters to apply for a $500,000 grant, ten chapters from across the US said in a statement this week.
“This is not the equity and financial accountability we deserve,” they declared.
The Global Network is “not accountable to local communities” and chapters, and due to its lack of support their work “continues to be erased,” Black Lives Matter DC said in a twitter thread. The newly announced BLM political action committee (PAC) and Grassroots entities were set up without the chapter approval – or even knowledge. “[All] of these events occurred without democracy,” the chapters said.
This state of affairs isn’t exactly new. Between July 2017 and June 2019, the Global Network had spent $4.5 million on consultants, travel and salaries while giving only $328,000 to local chapters, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation. What’s new is that BLM fundraising went stratospheric in May this year, as riots over the death of George Floyd in Minnesota spread across the nation – and even globally.
BLMGN raked in millions using ActBlue, the fundraising platform serving the Democratic party, and while legions of fact-checkers insisted that none of that funding spilled over to the DNC or any campaigns, the Democrats admitted they also had a record fundraising haul paralleling the Floyd riots.
As the African-American activists gave the party a piggyback ride yet again, the very least they could have got out of the deal was some cash for their trouble. Not only did the BLM chapters not get that, they also bore the brunt of the backlash against rioting, arson, and property destruction inflicted by the riots on their own communities. It was a win-win for the self-styled leadership, lose-lose for the actual footsoldiers on the ground.
What Black Lives Matter chapters don’t understand is that the system they’ve embraced is working exactly as intended. They may have forgotten, and the mainstream media certainly hates reminding anyone, that Cullors boasted in a 2015 interview that she and BLMGN co-founder Alicia Garza were “trained Marxists.”
“We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk,” Cullors told Jared Ball of The Real News Network.
Having been trained in Marxism myself many years ago, in a country that’s no longer around, I recall all too well how in “scientific socialism” everyone is supposed to contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. What happens in practice, however, is that this incentivizes the needs to grow – and abilities to diminish.
That’s even before the people in charge – who already believe they are “more equal than others” by the virtue of that, as George Orwell put it in ‘Animal Farm’ – decide that their needs are near-infinite. And since there’s a finite amount of wealth to be re-distributed, that means the needs of the many must amount to nearly nil. When the two inevitabilities converge… well, you get the picture.
Therefore, it is only right and proper that the activists on the ground get nothing while the leaders such as Cullors, or the Democrats piggybacking on the movement, get to laugh all the way to the bank. Complain all you want, but this is part and parcel of the ideology you signed up for.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
The U.S. Election Is Not Over
By Patrick Armstrong | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 4, 2020
President Putin is correct not to congratulate Joe Biden on being elected. There are two reasons. The first is that the complex U.S. election process has not finished; therefore, as Trump has not conceded, there is no “President-elect”. The second reason is that the results may be overthrown by reason of fraud. In which case, Putin will, at the end of the story, look smarter than those who rushed to congratulate Biden before the process was complete.
The hearing in the Pennsylvania Senate and the lawsuits filed in Georgia and Michigan in the last week of November were the first public appearance of the fraud arguments and their supporting evidence – although the alternate media had been on the case from the beginning. Contrary to the utterances of the news media, it was only then that the case was presented in its fullest – the previous legal actions having been only preliminary manoeuvring. The evidence for fraud falls under four heads: eyewitness accounts, improbabilities, statistical analysis and the matter of voting machines and their software. It’s difficult to make up numbers – there are relationships and patterns the fraudster may not know about: better to just make up a final percentage à la the USSR. This piece gives a summary of some of the difficulties with the published results; this piece describes some of the “statistical aberrations”.
Parenthetically, one might observe that the U.S. government declares foreign elections to be fraudulent on a mere fraction of this evidence. Or even, as in the case of Belarus, with no proffered evidence at all: no exit polls, no blurry films; nothing at all.
There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of eyewitness accounts of strange happenings – sudden arrivals of ballots, observers kept away, counting stopped but apparently continuing in secret, suspiciously pristine postal ballots, stacks of ballots with only Biden’s name filled out, Trump votes destroyed, suspicious ballot “curing”, signature problems, backdating postal ballots, wandering USB drives, dead people voting, computer “glitches” sending Trump votes to Biden. Many of these are incorporated into affidavits in the lawsuits and may be read and judged by the public. Many eyewitness accounts, of course, can be dismissed for one valid reason or another, but there are too many now, with more appearing, for casual dismissal.
There are improbabilities in the result. Biden received fewer votes than Clinton or Obama in most areas but many more in the “battleground states”. There were striking exceptions in “down-ballot” voting: in the key states there were large differences between the votes for Biden and for the Democratic Senate candidate. There are cases of historically high – almost Soviet-level – turnouts in key precincts in the “battleground states”. There were improbably high turnouts in nursing homes and in group homes. There are many cases where more votes were cast than voters registered. It was generally a bad day for Democratic candidates: seats were lost in the House and in state legislatures but we are expected to believe that Biden won a strong victory. Despite the spectacular difference in enthusiastic crowds, we’re told that more people turned out for Biden on the day. Perhaps any one of these can be explained but can all of them?
Statistical analysis comprises the next grouping of evidence. We see that votes for Biden, most of the time, and votes for Trump, all of the time, roughly accord with the curve of Benford’s Law. But in those areas where Biden needed the votes, they do not. Violations of Benford’s Law are commonly used by forensic accountants to indicate fraud. An analysis of moving averages over time shows a settled ratio of votes for Biden with a sudden jump in the hours when counting was “stopped”. In some cases votes seem to have been processed faster than physically possible. Other analyses point to suspicious spikes of votes for Biden. A number of statisticians have been attracted to the question and their analyses suggesting fraud are appearing. Again there are too many of these pointers – all of them in the same direction – to be easily dismissed.
Finally there is the whole collection of problems with some voting machines – especially Dominion – and their associated software. The argument is that the machines and software were specifically designed to produce fraudulent results: totals can be changed, votes switched from one candidate to another, incoming vote weighted in favour of one candidate and so on. There are affidavits to this effect. U.S. Embassy cables and previous investigations had shown problems with Dominion machines but, nonetheless, they and the associated software were widely used in 2020. There is possible foreign involvement in these important machines: many parts are made in China; affidavits claim that voting tallies were sent to other countries on the Internet and were massaged there and that passwords into the system were widely available. A computer security expert attests that “hundreds of thousands of votes” were transferred from Trump to Biden by the machines. These issues are attracting computer programmers and hackers and there are now a number of videos on the Internet showing how easily the machines can be hacked.
In summary, the argument is that the machines were programmed to rig the vote in the key states (and perhaps everywhere) by an amount that was thought to be sufficient. But the Trump vote was so much greater than anticipated that the counting had to be “halted” in the “battleground states”; in the “halted” time, ballots were manufactured to compensate. The image of a smooth red curve being overtaken by a blue stepped curve has become the logo of those who believe there were such injections.
This is now quite a large heap of accusations, witness statements and assertions: can these charges be proved in a court (leaving aside the question of whether U.S. courts can be trusted to rule on such a partisan issue – vide General Flynn’s experience)? Or, given the provisions of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution – “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” – can sufficient state legislatures be convinced to select Trump-voting Electors? We will find out. But there are certainly too many things to be airily dismissed and there is nothing to suggest that either side will concede until the issue has been fought out to the end.
But, whatever is decided, half the population will be convinced that the election was stolen – indeed a Rasmussen poll in mid-November showed that nearly half the population – including 30% of Democrats! – already believes that “Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win”.
2020 has not been a good year for the United States: COVID-19 has wreaked havoc, the economic gains of the past few years have eroded, civil violence and rioting have been common. A disputed election leaving half the population thinking its candidate was cheated out of office will not make things more peaceful. Many are speaking of, if not outright civil war, severe civil strife.
And, in a condition of widespread civil strife and who knows what else, what is the future of the Imperium Americanum? Many pundits will quote Plehve’s alleged remark about the attractiveness of a “little, victorious war” to distract the population. But what little wars are there left? Afghanistan? Iraq? Hardly victorious. It is unlikely that overthrowing Maduro would be very short or, even if it were, that it would distract impassioned American rioters. A war with Iran would be neither little nor victorious. A really severe civil war would divide the U.S. military and bring it home. The consequences of the November 2020 election, whoever winds up in the White House in January, will be long-lasting; the Imperium will have important concerns at home.
What from Moscow’s perspective? The ingathering of American resources to deal with problems in the homeland will be welcomed but the dangers of a nuclear state imploding will not. 2021 may make 2020 look like a blessed haven of stability.
Blue-check Twitter brands Kristi Noem a ‘cyborg’ for not locking down South Dakota following her 98yo grandma’s death
By Helen Buyniski | RT | December 3, 2020
The South Dakota governor has been slammed for refusing to impose strict Covid-19 controls after her grandmother’s non-Covid related death in a care home – where masks were required. Such minor details haven’t stopped the pile-on.
The Republican governor was savaged as a “cyborg” and an unfeeling creature for not responding to her nonagenarian grandmother’s death by shutting down the state – something she has refused to do throughout the pandemic. Such a policy has elicited praise from her constituents, but howls of derision from the blue-tick intelligentsia – most of whom, it’s safe to say, have never been to South Dakota.
The Daily Beast had the decency to wait until a day after Noem had buried her grandmother on Monday to attack her for not responding “correctly” to near-centenarian Aldys Arnold’s death. Nevertheless, they argued her refusal to make policy based on the death of her grandmother – who, Noem’s office has stressed, tested negative for Covid-19 before dying – represented a personal failing and proof she was, as the Beast has said previously, “Covid-19’s cartoon villain.”
Further down in the Beast’s hit piece, it reluctantly admitted that the facility where Arnold died already had a mask mandate – which apparently doesn’t have sufficient supernatural powers to prevent all death, since the 98-year-old was one of 13 people to die over a two-week period in the Estelline Nursing Home. Families of the dead even praised the facility, leaving the Beast with little to work with other than Noem’s “failure” to deliver a personal message to their relatives while she was mourning her own grandmother. Who’s the unfeeling cyborg here?
In any other year, 98 would be considered a ripe old age, and, while losing a grandparent is never easy, it’s absurd to suggest that exceeding the national life expectancy by two decades is a life cut short. So much of the Covid-19 panic is operating on the irrational assumption that humanity can conquer death, and anyone who points this out is slimed as an emotionally stunted ghoul who puts profits before people – as if quality of life is possible without the funds to pay for food and shelter.
And if Noem had tuned out such reasoning to govern by emotion and punish the entire state for her grandmother’s death? She would no doubt have been accused of fulfilling the worst stereotypes of female politicians: of ruling with her heart instead of her head.
But not only did Noem not cave in to the demands of the lockdown fetishists following Arnold’s death, she continued defending her approach to the pandemic and mocked media-designated president-elect Joe Biden’s patronizing efforts to soothe the virus-crazed populace.
Responding to Biden’s “message to everyone struggling right now” that “help is on the way,” Noem posted a well-known quote from former president Ronald Reagan. The conservative icon famously joked that the scariest nine words for Americans to hear were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
The tweet triggered a supercharged outpouring of abuse, with social media users calling for Noem to be jailed for her “negligence” and her refusal to put the citizens of her sparsely populated state under house arrest.
But the governor’s policy has not been to merely turn a blind eye to Covid-19 deaths, as described in antagonistic media. “South Dakota trusted our citizens to exercise their personal responsibility to keep themselves and their loved ones safe,” she tweeted back in July, explaining that she has “always taken Covid-19 very seriously” but her office simply does not have the right to impose a statewide mask mandate. “People that want to wear masks should wear masks, and people who don’t should not be shamed because they choose not to,” she reiterated last month.
The governor is no anti-science loon – she has explained, echoing rapidly memory-holed World Health Organization guidance, that “it’s very, very difficult to spread the virus when you’re asymptomatic,” and made clear her belief that plunging South Dakota into an economic depression would only make things worse for the sick. Indeed, many states have seen their case count soar after imposing mask mandates and lockdowns, and a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that even the strictest lockdowns were unable to stop the spread of the virus.
If anything, South Dakota’s governor has “listened to the science” more closely than her peers. More proof is emerging that the heavy-handed pandemic response seen around the world was based on faulty data, and is likely hurting more people than it helps. Tens of thousands of medical professionals have banded together to plead with the world’s governments to roll back the ill-informed totalitarianism supposedly justified by Covid-19.
It’s telling that while the media have excoriated Noem for the unthinkable crime of respecting her constituents’ constitutional rights, many outlets have turned a blind eye as other politicians laying down much stricter rules are caught violating them. From Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry illegal dining extravaganza to the Democrat (notice a pattern here?) mayor of Austin, Texas, jetting off to a Mexican resort last month (where he proceeded to record a video reminding Austin residents to stay home lest further restrictions be piled on them, these mini-Mussolinis largely get a pass from the establishment. Noem is wise not to listen. As Americans flee New York, California, and other states operating under the banner of Snitch Nation in droves, South Dakota has its doors open for them.
Follow Helen Buyniski on Twitter @velocirapture23
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Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
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