Are we witnessing the start of some sort of a mass awakening in the Western world? For years, I have been writing about the extremely complex systems that are designed to shape and control what we think. Today, the vast majority of the “news” and “entertainment” that most of us consume is controlled by just a very small handful of immensely powerful corporations. And of course those corporations are ultimately owned and controlled by the elite of the world. To a very large degree, the elite have been able to determine what we focus on, what we think about current events, and how we feel about the world around us. For such a long time, most of the population would take whatever narratives that were pushed upon them by their corporate overlords as the gospel truth, and that always greatly frustrated me. Fortunately, there are indications that times are changing.
In order for any society to function effectively, there must be a high level of trust.
Unfortunately for the elite, we simply do not trust them anymore.
Trust in our politicians has fallen to an all-time low.
Trust in the media has fallen to an all-time low.
Trust in our corporations has fallen to an all-time low.
Trust in our health care system has fallen to an all-time low.
Trust in our education system has fallen to an all-time low.
Trust in the tech industry has fallen to an all-time low.
We no longer are buying into the crap that they keep shoveling our way.
And that is a really, really good thing.
It is morally wrong for them to try to control what we think. It is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves, because that is the only way that we will ever be truly free.
I have been writing about this stuff for years and years, and a number of recent trends have given me hope that people are starting to wake up on a widespread basis. The following are 10 promising signs that the insidious mind control matrix the elite have created is starting to crumble…
#1 According to a recent Gallup survey, only 16 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news.
#2 All over the Internet I am seeing article after article speaking out against the World Economic Forum. That is an incredibly hopeful sign.
#3 In the Netherlands, a new government plan would “cut fertilizer use and reduce livestock numbers so drastically that it will force many farms out of business”. This plan is deeply evil, but the massive farmer protests that have been sparked as a result are a really beautiful thing.
#4 After being arrested, a British man was told this: “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested”. But the good news is that there has been a tremendous backlash on social media and so far the video of his arrest has already been viewed more than 2 million times.
#5 As more people on the West Coast wake up, the exodus out of the state of California is rapidly becoming a stampede.
#6 Despite all of the spin from the Biden administration, 66 percent of Americans say that they believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now.
#7 Joe Biden’s overall approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 36 percent.
#8 Joe Biden’s economic approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 30 percent.
#9 A recent CNN poll discovered that a whopping 75 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters actually want their party to nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.
#10 According to a recent Pew Research survey, only 24 percent of U.S. adults are satisfied with the current state of the country.
Almost all of us can see that our society is on the wrong track, and that is the first step in getting back on the right track.
As time rolls along, I believe that more and more of us will wake up.
And in the end I believe that the current “world order” that the Western elite have tried so hard to establish will fall.
The shortest day on record has been broken by the planet Earth. On June 29, 2022, the planet completed its entire rotation in just 1.59 milliseconds, or slightly more than one thousandth of a second, less time than it typically takes for a 24-hour rotation.
Recently, the Earth has been moving quicker. Since the 1960s, 2020 marked the shortest month on record for the planet. On July 19 of that year, 1.47 milliseconds shorter than a typical 24-hour day, scientists recorded the shortest day so far.
Are the days being shortened?
I often tell people that it feels like the days are going by faster than ever, but I thought that it was just my imagination.
I have been told that as we get older it can seem like time is passing more quickly, and without a doubt 2022 seems like it is the fastest year yet.
It is hard to believe that the beginning of August is already here.
2023 will arrive before we know it, and I believe that 2023 will be a year that changes everything.
I know that there are a lot of bad things that are happening right now, and a lot of my articles tend to focus on those bad things.
But the truth is that there are a lot of good things happening too.
In fact, there is no other time in all of human history that I would have rather lived than right now.
It is when times are the darkest that the greatest heroes are needed, and the years ahead will provide plenty of opportunities for you to be the kind of hero that you were always meant to be.
Defaming journalism on the OPCW’s Syria cover-up scandal, The Guardian and its NATO-funded sources out themselves as the real “network of conspiracy theorists.”
The article is based on what Townsend calls a “new analysis” that “reveals” a “network more than two dozen conspiracy theorists, frequently backed by a coordinated Russian campaign.” This network, Townsend claims, is “focused on the denial or distortion of facts about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons and on attacking the findings of the world’s foremost chemical weapons watchdog,” the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). According to Townsend, I am named “as the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among the nefarious bunch.
In hawking this purported exposé of “disinformation”, Townsend violated every basic standard of journalism. He did not contact me before publishing his allegations; fails to offer a shred of evidence for them; and does not cite a single example of my alleged “prolific” disinformation. Instead, Townsend bases his claims entirely on a think-tank report that also provides no evidence, nor even assert that I have said anything false. In the process, Townsend failed to disclose that the report’s authors — the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign — are groups funded by the US government and other belligerents in the Syria proxy war. To top it off, Townsend fabricates additional allegations that his state-funded sources do not even make.
As a result, Townsend and the Guardian have engaged in the exact sort of conduct that they falsely impute to me and others: spreading Syria-related disinformation with coordinated support from state-funded actors. The aim of this propaganda network is transparent: defaming journalism that exposes the OPCW’s ongoing Syria cover-up scandal and the dirty war waged by Western powers on Syria.
The OPCW cover-up is arguably the most copiously documented pro-war deception since the US-led drive to invade Iraq. In Western media, as The Guardian’s behavior newly demonstrates, it is also without question the most suppressed.
At the center of the story are two veteran OPCW scientists, Dr. Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson. The pair were among a team that deployed to Syria in April 2018 to investigate an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma. They have since accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the Douma probe to reach a conclusion that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack. Their claims are backed up by a trove of leaked documents and emails that show extensive doctoring and censoring of the Douma team’s findings.
The Douma cover-up extends far beyond the OPCW’s executive suite. It also implicates NATO governments led by the US, which bombed Syria over the Douma chemical weapons allegation, and then, weeks later, privately pressured the OPCW to validate it. Since the OPCW scandal became public, the US and its allies have thwarted efforts to address it.
At the most criminal level, the scandal implicates sectarian death squads armed and funded by the US and allies during their decade-long campaign for regime change in Syria.
At the time of the incident, Douma was occupied by the Saudi-backed jihadi militia Jaysh-al-Islam and under bombardment from Syrian army forces attempting to retake control. Shortly before their surrender, local allies of Jaysh-al-Islam accused Syrian forces of using chemical weapons. They released gruesome footage of an apartment building filled with slain civilians. A gas cylinder was filmed positioned above a crater on the roof. Concurrently, the White Helmets, a NATO and Gulf state-funded, insurgent-adjacent organization, released footage of what it claimed were gas attack victims in a Douma field hospital. Several journalists, including Riam Dalati of the BBC, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and James Harkin of the Intercept, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged. (In February 2019, Dalati claimed that he can “prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.” Oddly, more than three years later, he has not released his findings).
The White Helmets’ alleged fakery of a chemical attack aftermath, coupled with the censored OPCW findings showing no evidence that a chemical attack occurred, suggest the inescapable conclusion that insurgents in Douma carried out a deception to frame the Syrian government. And given the unexplained deaths of the more than 40 victims filmed in the Douma apartment building, that deception may have entailed a murderous war crime.
Unlike the Iraq WMD hoax, the very existence of the OPCW’s Douma scandal is unknown to much of the Western world. With few exceptions, establishment media outlets have refused to acknowledge the OPCW whistleblowers and the leaks that brought their story to light.
After largely ignoring the OPCW cover-up since it first surfaced in May 2019, the Guardian has now published defamatory claims about journalists, myself included, who have dared to report on the censored facts.
When I wrote The Guardian about the Townsend article’s journalistic lapses, I did not get a response. One week later, I phoned Townsend, who was now back in the office but had yet to reply. In our conservation, which I recorded and recently published, I repeatedly asked Townsend to substantiate his claims about me and identify even a single example of my alleged disinformation.
Townsend did not attempt to defend his article’s assertions, beyond claiming that they were based on what was “in a report.” When I pressed further, he claimed that he had to “dash for a meeting” and promised that I would soon hear from the paper’s reader’s editor. (Before I published our phone call, and this article, I emailed Townsend a detailed list of questions and invited him to offer any additional comment. He did not respond).
“Deadly Disinformation”
Townsend could not provide any evidence for his assertions because the report that he parroted offers none as well.
The report, titled “Deadly Disinformation” and authored by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Syria Campaign, contains bare references to my reporting and makes no effort to refute it. Nowhere does the report even claim that I have said anything false. It simply claims to have “identified 28 individuals, outlets and organisations who have spread disinformation about the Syrian conflict,” and that I am “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among them.
When the report bothers to mention of anything that I have actually said, it engages in distortion. In its first mention, the report states that I wrote an article that “attacks Bellingcat for its contributions to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” Here, they not only fail to assert that I said anything false, but offer a false portrayal of what happened.
As for “attacking” Bellingcat — a website that, like the report’s authors, is funded by NATO states that were belligerents in the Syria dirty war – what I really did was expose its disinformation.
In short, the ISD/Syria Campaign’s first purported example of my alleged “disinformation” is an easily verifiable case where I’ve exposed state-backed lies.
The report’s only other substantive example comes when it notes that I have argued that the OPCW probe’s Douma probe “was flawed.” This far understates my case: the OPCW’s Douma investigation wasn’t “flawed”; it’s a scandalous cover-up worthy of global attention. Regardless, yet again, the report does not even assert that my argument is false, let alone try to explain why.
In a July 13th email, I asked the ISD to substantiate their claim that I have spread disinformation, and provide even one example of it. On its website, the ISD claims to “take complaints seriously,” and promises a response “within ten working days.” As of this writing, after 13 working days, I have not heard back.
At The Guardian, OPCW leaks are “problematic”
When I emailed a complaint about Townsend’s reporting, The Guardian admitted fault only on failing to contact me before publishing his evidence-free allegations. This was the result, they claimed, of a “breakdown of communication internally.” I was then offered the chance to respond to the article in 200 words.
A key point in my reply (which can be read here) was that The Guardian and its state-funded source are unable to identify any falsehoods in anything I’ve written “because my reporting on the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal is based on damning OPCW leaks.” These leaks, I added, “reveal that veteran inspectors found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, and that expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the victims’ cause of death. But these findings were doctored and censored by senior OPCW officials.”
At The Guardian, this passage set off an apparent alarm. After disparaging my reporting on the OPCW leaks, The Guardian informed me that they would now prevent me from even mentioning them. In a July 8 email, a Guardian editor wrote that the “the part about the OPCW” in my reply “continues to be problematic.” My reference to the OPCW leaks, the editor claimed, “makes an assertion that has been rebutted by an independent inquiry.”
I responded by asking the editor to specify exactly which “assertion” of mine has been rebutted. I also proposed that, if they believe that I have said anything “problematic,” they publish their own rebuttal.
In multiple follow-up emails, the editor failed to identify any “rebutted” assertion of mine. Despite that, the Guardian proceeded to publish my reply without its reference to the OPCW leaks. But this raised a new problem: in censoring my statement, they misquoted me. When I pointed out that error, they updated my reply to finally allow a (minimal) mention of the OPCW leaks.
The Guardian also took me up on my proposal that they publish their own rebuttal:
Editor’s note: Both the ISD and the Syria Campaign list a diverse range of funders and describe themselves as “fiercely independent”. In 2020 the OPCW rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident (Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack).
As for the “inquiry” that The Guardian claims “rebutted claims about its investigation into the Douma incident,” the inquiry was not independent, and did not rebut anything.
The “inquiry” was appointed by the OPCW’s Director General’s office, the very body that presided over the cover-up. It was also staffed by two “investigators” from the US and UK. These happen to be the two states that bombed Syria based on the Douma allegations that the OPCW fraudulently validated, and that have since tried to bury the scandal at every stage.
As for what the Guardian calls the ISD and Syria Campaign’s “diverse range of funders,” both groups indeed enjoy a diverse range of funders: everyone from NATO governments to NATO government-funded organizations. They also receive support from billionaire-funded foundations that often work in concert with these same NATO governments’ foreign policy objectives.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s “diverse range of funders,” according to The Guardian.
The ISD’s “diverse” funders include the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, three other US state-funded organizations, and more than two dozen other NATO government agencies. On the private side, the ISD’s funders include the foundations of three of the world’s richest oligarchs: Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In using the ISD as a source, The Guardian has a conflict of interest that its article did not disclose. The latter two ISD donors have also given sizeable grants to The Guardian: at least $625,000 from Open Society Foundations since 2019, and at least $12.9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
Omidyar’s foundation has a direct role in the ISD/Syria Campaign report. The Omidyar Group’s Luminate Strategic Initiatives is listed alongside the German government-funded Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation as the report’s fiscal sponsor.
Omidyar’s sponsorship of an attack on journalism about the OPCW scandal is highly fitting. The Intercept, the self-described “fearless and adversarial” outlet that Omidyar also funds with his vast fortune, has never once acknowledged the OPCW leaks or whistleblowers’ existence. While ignoring the OPCW scandal for more than three years, The Intercept has published multiple articles promoting the allegation that Syria committed a chemical attack in Douma.
Like the ISD, the Syria Campaign is also funded by governments and other belligerents in the Syria dirty war. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported in 2017, the Syria Campaign was founded by Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire oil tycoon and leading financial supporter of the Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group established after the Syria conflict erupted in 2011. The Syria Campaign has also done extensive P.R. and fundraising for the White Helmets, the insurgent-adjacent, NATO state-funded organization implicated in the Douma incident.
That these two state-funded groups “describe themselves as ‘fiercely independent'” is apparently enough for The Guardian. I trust that the Guardian would feel differently if they were dealing with self-described “fiercely independent” groups funded by the Russian and Syrian governments.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sources quoted in the ISD/Syria Campaign report are funded or employed by the same NATO state and private sponsors. This includes the White Helmets; the Global Public Policy Institute; Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS); self-described journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou of the BBC, who produced a podcast series that disparaged the OPCW whistleblowers and whitewashed the Douma cover-up; and James Jeffrey, the former US Special Envoy for Syria.
For a report that claims to be concerned with protecting Syrians from “real-world harm,” Jeffrey is a particularly interesting interview subject. Few US officials have been as candid about their willingness to immiserate Syrian civilians in pursuit of hegemonic US goals in their country.
Jeffrey’s proudly self-acknowledged real-world harms on millions of Syrians don’t seem to bother the study’s authors, presumably because their Western state sponsors implement them.
The report is so invested in its state funders’ aims in Syria that it approvingly airs frustration that other governments are failing to toe the NATO line. A “former Western diplomat” complains that “disinformation” on Syria is helping states “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make, say in the Security Council or elsewhere.” (emphasis added). From the point of view of Western officials, the anonymous diplomat is employing an accurate operative definition of what constitutes “disinformation”: any information that causes those deemed subordinate to “avoid making the decisions that we want them to make.”
Fittingly, another anonymous “senior diplomat” laments that supposed Syria disinformation is intended “ultimately to cast doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the people doing this kind of [policy] work.” Daring to question the “legitimacy and integrity” of Western policymakers who oversaw a multi-billion dollar CIA-led dirty war on Syria that knowingly empowered al-Qaeda and other sectarian death squads while leaving hundreds of thousands dead — another intolerable act that can only result from “disinformation.”
A member of the US-funded, insurgent-adjacent White Helmets is also given space to lament that alleged “disinformation” is hurting its donations. “We hear about billions of dollars for aid at conferences on Syria but most of that funding goes to the UN,” a White Helmets manager complains. Unmentioned is that European governments have cut funding to the group after their late founder, the lavishly paid UK military veteran James le Mesurier, admitted to pocketing donor funds and financial fraud right before he took his own life.
Having promoted the hegemonic agenda of its state sponsors, the report closes with a thinly veiled call to censor the dissenting voices it targets.
The ISD and Syria Campaign urge policymakers to “adopt a whole-of-government approach in tackling disinformation” and “ensure that loopholes or special privileges are not created for ‘media’ which would only exacerbate the spread of disinformation.” These “privileges” presumably refer to free speech. The report also notes favorably that platforms have addressed “thematic harms such as public health disinformation or foreign interference in elections.” As a result, the report calls on these platforms to “commit to applying similar levels of resourcing… in the context of the ongoing Syrian conflict.” Perhaps they have in mind the censorship of journalism about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, on the fake grounds that the story was “Russian disinformation.”
The fact that this network of state-funded actors is devoting energy to disparaging journalism about the OPCW’s Syria cover-up — and even advocating that it be censored – reflects their powerful sponsors’ desperation to bury a damning scandal.
On top of the two known whistleblowers, Arias has ignored calls for accountability from his original predecessor, founding OPCW chief Jose Bustani, as well as four other former senior OPCW officials. Along with Bustani, former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck has spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, a global initiative to address the OPCW scandal. The US has responded to Bustani by blocking his testimony at the United Nations. Arias meanwhile refused to open a letter that he received from Sponeck’s group, returning it back to sender.
The response of Western media outlets like the Guardian to the stonewalling of these veteran diplomats and senior OPCW officials has simply been to ignore it.
In whitewashing the OPCW cover-up, the preponderance of state sources parroted by The Guardian reveals the ultimate irony in its allegations. While claiming to “identify” a fictional network of Russia-backed disinformation actors about Syria, The Guardian’s Townsend is himself spreading the disinformation of a NATO-funded network that defames voices who expose the dirty war on Syria.
In fact, one of Townsend’s central allegations goes well beyond his state-funded sources. Although Townsend’s article is premised on identifying a “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend’s sole source – the ISD/Syria Campaign report – never alleges that such a “network” exists. Nowhere in the report does the word “network” even appear.
Thus, Townsend has not only parroted state-funded sources, but concocted an additional allegation in the service of their narrative. This is not just an ordinary fabrication: in creating the fantasy of a “coordinated”, “Russia-backed”, “network of conspiracy theorists,” Townsend also reveals himself to be the very thing that he accuses his targets of being: a conspiracy theorist.
And given that Townsend not only parrots his state-backed sources but works for an outlet funded by some of the same sponsors, it is fair to say that The Guardian and these state-funded think tanks are a part of the same network.
Consequently, reading the article’s headline — “Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”—as a description of The Guardian and the NATO-funded sources that it relied on, the claim is no longer inaccurate.
This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.
Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.
All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.
Another disposable asset
Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.
Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.
No “Pearl Harbor moment”
Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.
Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.
The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.
That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.
What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:
Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”
That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.
Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.
Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”
Chess, not checkers
The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi’s reaction to the fact on the ground – and in the skies – in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the “provocation by American reactionaries” and the “uncivilized campaign of the imperialists.”
This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face – something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.
So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic – not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China’s time will come.
For now, what’s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.
The price of collateral damage
The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million in cash as ‘humanitarian aid’ soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.
So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.
The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace – taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.
A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American withdrawal debacle last August, but could always be revived.
No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI – historically very close to the Taliban – gave to Washington on a silver platter.
Dodgy dealings
Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.
Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.
The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri’s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the “terrorist” (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.
And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington – allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.
Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the “offer you can’t refuse” – and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.
Sun Tzu deploys his six blades
Following Speaker Pelosi’s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.
The first stage is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.
The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry – so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.
Chinese CATL, the world’s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.
So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.
The War on Eurasia
For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+/SCO/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.
The Speaker’s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the “war on terror” cycle and its metastasis into the “war on Eurasia” era.
It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That’s all there is to know about the ‘strategic’ capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.
The biggest mistake the elites made with the scamdemic was to let us see what good buddies they really are, because this instantly and inadvertently presented the 99.9% with a shocking and previously quite carefully hidden reality about the true nature of power and geopolitics.
Horizontal conflict narratives have for centuries been a major part of how elites control their populations. Catholic v Protestant, Moslem v Christian, black v white, male v female, gay v straight etc etc. It’s a tried and trusted method of channeling frustrations, shaping minds and keeping people’s minds off the real authors of their misfortunes.
Behind the facade of conflict the elites have always shared a common bond of mutual interest. Kings (mostly) knew to honor the divinity of other kings even in defeat. Even when they killed each other they did it reluctantly and in the guise of “natural causes”. They knew their own populations were the real common enemies against which they knew to make common cause.
War was just another method of achieving this as well as gratifying some degree of personal pride.
Nothing much has changed in the modern era. And a great deal of the legacy media’s energy has long been devoted to helping to conceal the reality of the “big (supranational) club” that we ain’t in.
Until, that is, the recent huge error of judgement by the world’s leaders when they chose to abandon the carefully maintained “horizontal divisions” narrative in favor of some New Age, New Normal narrative of “international solidarity and co-operation to beat the virus”.
They were clearly going for some “Independence Day” type hug-fest psychic effect. Humanity falling into each other’s arms and deciding to work together in WHO-created mutual New Normal benevolence to defeat an invisible enemy that will, of course, never be defeated.
It did not go over as planned.
They just tried to sell it too hard too fast. And they blew it.
Gordon Brown reacting to a few hundred “COVID” deaths by saying we needed a world government (not yet, Gordon, too soon!).
Goldfinger Schwab and his stupid book of “happy peasant” delusional raving.
Insane overkill on the “nothing will ever be the same” meme based on a few flu cases.
All pushing their own magically produced untested toxic concoctions, all unctuously mouthing the same lies in a hundred different languages.
They goofed and made it just too obvious how closely in sync they are.
Sure they did also seed a few “alternative” deadly virus narratives that halfheartedly muddied the waters by blaming China, or maybe the US, but it wasn’t enough to counter the truly stunning images of international elite solidarity. Most particularly east-west solidarity.
Why were the Chinese elites spearheading this lie? Why were the Russian elites promoting it?
This was a big wake up moment for many many people all over the world.
Not for the majority, of course. For the majority there was nothing but zombified lockstep, absolute obedience, bizarre levels of willing self-destruction.
But for a large and growing minority the very opposite began to happen.
This growing minority began realizing, not only that the pandemic was a massive lie, but also began to discern that most carefully hidden and most explosive truth — that the elites of the world – all the world – owe allegiance to each other above and beyond any trapping of national identity.
And that convincing us this is not true had heretofore been a huge part of retaining their power.
Faced with this awakening some people began to see they had no choice but to take control of their own destiny rather than wait for their governments to save them.
Small grass roots and spontaneous rebellions began sprouting. First it was just a very few but then more and more people began challenging the pandemic lie. There were mass marches in cities across the globe and small local “stand in the park” protests. People were speaking out, reaching out. The truckers began their convoy.
Suddenly from a place of darkness there was real hope. Not invested in some phony hero politician or some noisy celebrity populist, but in ourselves. Groups of ordinary people began realizing they could take back their lives.
And simultaneously the pandemic narrative began to falter.
Vaccine uptake was not meeting expectations. Even people who had one jab were getting reluctant to have another. Some of those who had once been compliant began to feel they’d had enough.
By autumn 2021 the New Normal – and, more importantly, the system promoting it – were actually in some trouble. The worst trouble they had known for a while.
Faced with overwhelming resistance the “Independence Day hug-fest”, and indeed the whole pandemic narrative, began to go into panic-reverse. Mask mandates began to be canceled. Quarantines abandoned. QR codes likewise.
And the elites began to recall the benefits of those good old tried and true horizontal conflict narratives.
The US began accusing Russia, China began accusing the US. Israel began bombing everyone again.
But not because they wanted to distract you from that awkward realization about how chummy they really are behind the scenes!
No. Never. Not at all.
It was because Russia suddenly got extra scary. And those Nazis in Ukraine suddenly became seriously worrying. And Israel got all worried about terrorists and Iran again. And Taiwan….yada yada.
And, obviously, those elites who can all agree to tell the same lies in the same words at the same time and produce the same “response” and promote the same “solutions” in lockstep over covid just can’t agree at all over anything else.
Because deep seated ideological and strategical differences make it impossible.
Oops.
So, the US had no option but to start provocations in the China Sea and flood Ukraine with weapons and advisors, and Russia had no option but to invade Ukraine.
It was all inevitable. Like death and taxes. Just something that wise people know had to happen.
And the fact it rescued the power structure from a dicey little moment is absolutely and totally a coincidence.
Yes, it did reinstate all the old conflict narratives and allow the media to make a lot of noise and distract people while the embarrassing “Independence Day co-operation” narrative snuck out the room.
And yes, it did rescue the New Normal and provide a lovely new reason for potential rationing, belt-tightening, forever shortages, travel restrictions and all the other things Goldfinger Schwab and his billionaire supranational globalist chums really like.
But coincidences are like that.
Coincidental. Convenient. And no need to look any further.
I mean – would your favourite world leader really start or provoke a war just for convenience or profit? Would they really sacrifice lives just to benefit themselves?
Ok, maybe the Americans would, because Imperialism.
But Russia? China? They’re more moral, right. Higher ethical plain.
I mean sure, they are all equally happy to let their citizens get injected with untested toxic sludge, and sure they just worked with the West to joint-perpetrate an unprecedented global scam that may have killed or maimed millions.
And sure there is quite a lot to be gained from “winning” in Ukraine, aside from defeating Nazis. Fat rebuilding contracts. Access to a lot of resources.
And of course the same convenient distraction equally serves West and East.
But no, come on. Sure they were all in lockstep in 2020. And, ok they still are in lockstep in 2022 – but only over the pandemic lie!
They are absolutely opposed and forced into conflict about everything else, and we need to take a side, support the good guys who are rooting for a better world.
The only alternative is to recognize that horizontal divisions benefit them not us. That neither side is good, or rooting for anything but their own advantage, and that fundamentally, as ever, the global 0.1% take care of their own interests while striving hard to deter and divert us from doing the same.
I suggest we stop being diverted and deterred, remember the lesson of 2020 and continue on the path of personal and collective awakening they are doing their best to lure us from.
[This article is derived from a speech I made at the July 23rd Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston New York]
There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties. Biden has recently declared that the US will support Ukraine “until we win” and, as there are already tens of billions of dollars of weapons going to Ukraine plus American “advisers” on the ground, it constitutes a scenario in which American and Russian soldiers will soon likely be shooting at each other. The President of Serbia and columnists like Pat Buchanan and Tulsi Gabbard believe that we are already de facto in World War 3 and one has to wonder how the White House is getting away with ignoring the War Powers mandates in the US Constitution.
Second, I believe that the Russians approached the United States and its allies with some quite reasonable requests regarding their own national security given that a hostile military alliance was about to land on its doorsteps. The issues at stake were fully negotiable but the US refused to budge on anything and Russia felt compelled to take military action. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a good war. I categorically reject anyone invading anyone else unless there is a dire and immediate threat, but the onus on how the Ukraine situation developed the way it did is on Washington.
Third, I believe that the US and British governments in particularly have been relentlessly lying to the people and that the media in most of west is party to the dissemination of the lies to sustain the war effort against Russia in Ukraine. The lies include both the genesis and progress of the war and there has also been a sustained effort to demonize President Vladimir Putin and anything Russian, including food, drinks, the Russian language and culture and even professional athletes. The latest victim is a Tchaikovsky symphony banned in Canada. Putin is being personally blamed for inflation, food shortages and energy problems which more properly are the fault of the Washington-led ill-thought-out reaction to him. There is considerable irony in the fact that Biden is giving Ukraine $1.7 billion for healthcare, while healthcare in the US is generally considered among the poorest in the developed world.
I believe that Russia is winning the war comfortably and Ukraine will be forced to give up territory while the American taxpayer gets the bill for the reckless spending policies, currently totaling more than $60 billion, while also looking forward to runaway inflation, energy shortages, and, in a worst-case scenario, a possible collapse of the dollar.
All of the above and the politics behind it has led me to believe that the United States, assisted by some of its allies, has become addicted to war as an excuse for domestic failures as well as a replacement for diplomacy to settle international disputes. The White House hypocritically describes its role as “global leadership” or maintaining a “rules based international order” or even defending “democracy against authoritarianism.” But at the same time the Biden Administration has just completed a fiasco evacuation that ended a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from Afghanistan, there are now US troops illegally present in Syria and Iraq and Washington is conniving to attack Iran over false claims made by Israel that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Neither Syria nor Iraq nor Iran in any way threaten the United States, just as the Russians did not threaten Americans prior to a regime change intervention in Ukraine starting in 2014, when the US arranged the overthrow of a government that was friendly to Moscow. The US has also begun to energize NATO to start looking at steps to take to confront the alleged Chinese threat.
The toll coming from constant warfare and fearmongering has also enabled a steady erosion of the liberties that Americans once enjoyed, including free speech and freedom to associate. I would like to discuss what the ordinary concerned citizen can do to cut through all the lies surrounding what is currently taking place, which might well be described as the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, far more extensive than the lying and dissimulation by the White House and Pentagon officials that preceded the disastrous Iraq war. It is an information plus propaganda war that sustains the actual fighting on the ground, and it is in some senses far more dangerous as it seeks to involve more countries in the carnage while also creating a global threat perception that will be used to justify further military interventions.
Part of the problem is that the US government is awash with bad information that it does not know how to manage so it makes it hard to identify anything that might actually be true. Back in my time as an intelligence officer operating overseas, there were a number of short cuts that were used to categorize and evaluate information. For example, if one were hanging out in a local bar and overheard two apparent government officials discussing something of interest that might be happening in the next week, one might report it to Washington with a source description FNU/LNU, which stood for “first name unknown” and “last name unknown.” In other words, it was unverifiable hearsay coming from two individuals who could not be identified. As such it was pretty much worthless, but it clogged up the system and invited speculation.
My personal favorite, however, was the more precise source descriptions developed by military intelligence using an alphabet letter followed by a number in a sequence running from A-1 to F-6. At the top of an intelligence report there would be an assessment of the source, or agent. A-1 meant a piece of information that was both credible and had been confirmed by other sources and that was also produced by an agent that had actual access to the information in question. At the other end of the scale, an F-6 was information that was dubious produced by a source that appeared to have no actual access to the information.
By that standard, we Americans have been fed a lot of largely fabricated F-6 “fake information” coming from both the government and the media to justify the Ukraine disaster. Here is how you can spot it. If it is a newspaper or magazine article skim all the way down the text until you reach a point towards the end where the sourcing of the information is generally hidden. If it is attributed to a named individual who indeed indisputably had direct access to the information it would at least suggest that the reporting contains a kernel of truth. But that is almost never the case, and one normally sees the source described as an “anonymous source” or a “government official” or even, in many cases, there is no source attribution at all. That generally means that the information conveyed in the reporting is completely unreliable and should be considered the product of a fabricator or a government and media propaganda mill. When a story is written by a journalist who claims to be on the scene it is also important to check out whether he or she is actually on site or working from a pool operating safely in Poland to produce the reporting. Yahoo News takes the prize in spreading propaganda as it currently reproduces press releases originating with the Ukrainian government and posts them as if they are unbiased reporting on what is taking place on the ground.
Another trick to making fake news look real is to route it through a third country. When I was in Turkey we in CIA never placed a story in the media there directly. Instead, a journalist on our payroll in France would do the story and the Turkish media would pick it up, believing that because it had appeared in Paris it must be true even though it was not. Currently, I have noted that a lot of apparently MI-6 produced fake stories on Ukraine have been appearing in the British media, most notably the Telegraph and Guardian. They are then replayed in the US media and elsewhere to validate stories that are essentially fabricated.
Television and radio media is even worse than print media as it almost never identifies the sources for the stories that it carries. So my advice is to be skeptical of what you read or hear regarding wars and rumors of wars. The war party is bipartisan in the United States and it is just itching to seize the opportunity to get a new venture going, and they are oblivious to the fact that they might in the process be about to destroy the world as we know it. We must expose their lies and unite and fight to make sure that they can’t get away with it!
On Tuesday in response to Pelosi’s affront to Chinese sovereignty, the PLA began conducting live-fire maritime and aerial drills around Taiwan — surrounding the island.
According to China’s Global Times, they feature “J-20 stealth fighter jets and test-firing of conventional missiles…with additional important drills announced for days to come.”
Beginning moments after Pelosi arrived in Taipei, they’re ongoing in waters and airspace “north, southwest and southeast of the island…”
They include “live-fire shooting…in the Taiwan Strait and…missile test launches…east of the island.”
While ongoing for a number of days, “Taiwan will be surrounded by PLA drills in five directions.”
Drills are likely designed to develop PLA capabilities to seize the island militarily if unable to do it peacefully.
According to PLA Eastern Theater Command deputy chief of staff, Gu Zhong, as reported by GT:
Drills involve “courses like joint blockade, sea assault, land attack and air superiority seizing plus live-fire shooting of precision weapons.”
They’re “comprehensively test(ing) the performance of weapons and equipment as well as the troops’ joint operational capabilities, making preparations for all crises.”
Separately, Xinhua reported that live-fire drills are being conducted in six maritime and air space areas around Taiwan — north, northeast, east, south, southwest and northwest of the island.
Entry into areas where they’re ongoing is prohibited.
Last Sunday, China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier embarked from its Qingdao homeport to waters near Taiwan — accompanied by “a Type 075 amphibious assault ship.”
Chinese military expert, Song Zhongping, said the purpose of ongoing drills is to enhance the PLA’s military preparedness in light of Pelosi’s unacceptable visit to Taiwan.
During her meeting with Taiwan’s so-called president Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday — in a display of imperial arrogance — Pelosi assaulted China’s sovereignty again as follows, saying:
Hegemon USA’s vow to preserve (fantasy) democracy in Taiwan and around the world (is) ironclad.”
She barely stopped short of vowing to defend the island if China uses military force to reunite it with the mainland.
In cahoots with dominant Biden regime and congressional hardliners, Pelosi is pushing things recklessly for possible direct confrontation between two nuclear powers — ones able to transform cities of targeted nations into smoldering rubble.
Indeed, hostile-to-peace-and-stability Pelosi and the Biden regime are playing with fire against Russia, China and Iran — humanity’s fate hanging in the balance.
Separately in response to Taiwan’s complicity with Pelosi’s effrontery, Beijing retaliated by suspending exports of certain food products to the island.
According to Bloomberg News, the suspension includes “some fish and fruit imports,” as well as “natural sand used in construction.”
The Financial Times said that China “suspend(ed) (imports of) 2,000 food products,” along with “suspend(ing) exports of natural sand” to Taiwan.
Beijing’s Mainland Affairs Council deputy chair, Chiu Chui-cheng, said the following:
“In the past, China hit single products from the primary sector such as specific fruit or fish.”
In “that way, (it) kept the overall macroeconomic impact on Taiwan limited but could target regions where the (ruling) Democratic Progressive party is strong.”
“But now (Beijing is) broadening this immensely as (it’s) targeting processed foods, so what’s going on is much more broad-based.
“This is probably only the beginning.”
“We are certain that (China) will further step up (its) economic coercion measures.”
According to the FT, Beijing’s suspension “cover(s) 35 categories including fish and seafood, edible oils, citrus fruits and biscuits and cakes, hitting publicly listed companies such as instant noodle and soy sauce producer Ve Wong and Chi Mei, which makes frozen foods.”
At this time, China’s likely short-term import and export suspensions are largely shots across the bow warnings to Taiwan.
Economist Ma Tieying said the following:
“What needs to be watched is whether Beijing will broaden the trade bans into the manufacturing sector, particularly semiconductors/electronics going forward.”
China is Taiwan’s largest trade partner, bilateral volume last year totaling $328.3 billion, around 52% from the island to the mainland.
Beijing relies on imports of Taiwanese semiconductors.
The island exports about one-fifth of its agricultural products to the mainland.
Chinese media reported that the country’s General Administration of Customs suspended imports of “refrigerated large-head hair-tail and frozen Japanese horse mackerel from Taiwan.”
Taiwan’s state-controlled CNA said that the mainland temporarily halted imports of from “over 100 Taiwanese food manufacturers, including the well-known brands I-Mei Foods, Wei Chuan and Kuai Kuai Co.”
According to Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture (COA):
Hundreds of temporarily “blacklisted companies include producers of tea leaves, dried fruits, honey, cocoa beans, and vegetables, as well as catches from around 700 fishing vessels.”
Separately, CNA said China largely, but not entirely, suspended imports of coffee beans, stuffed pasta and bread, health foods and supplements, baby food and formula, foods for medicinal purposes, plant based oil, candy, beverages, cereal-based products, seasonings and condiments.
Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies’ director, Tim Anderson, believes that Pelosi’s provocative visit was planned to trigger US confrontation with China in similar fashion to its proxy war on Russia, adding:
“Imagine if the Chinese military went into Puerto Rico or some other part of the US territories.”
“It’s unacceptable, and I can’t say that any good would come out of it.”
The Biden regime provoked Russia to launch its SMO in self-defense.
The US financial sector has long looted other countries. A number of participants have described the process. First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid. Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population. Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan. Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.
As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation. It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy. If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.
Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary. The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions. Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.
The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent. Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments. Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners. The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values. That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out. When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.
The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors. This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent. Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown. Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system. The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation. The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.
As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy. A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt. With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.
If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction. The fact is that the United States does not have an economy. Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.
The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states. While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders. How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad? How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?
You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse. And what are the fools in Washington doing? The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.
The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia. Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of troops in Romania and bolster other deployments in the Baltic states. Also, the number of US troops in Europe, currently approaching 100,000, will be increased. Biden also was pleased to learn that Turkey had been enticed to drop its objection to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
On the way to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised that “By the end of the summit what you will see is a more robust, more effective, more combat credible, more capable and more determined force posture to take account of a more acute and aggravated Russian threat.” Presumably Sullivan was reading from a prepared script, but the objective surely seemed to be to heighten tension with Moscow rather than attempt to reduce it and come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also did his bit. In an astonishing display of derriere kissing, he responded that the new US force posture commitments were demonstrative of Biden’s strong leadership. What Stoltenberg did not mention was that Biden has been lying for some time about the presence of US military personnel in Ukraine. He let the cat out of the bag back in March, when he told troops belonging to the 82nd Airborne division in Poland that they would soon be going to Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see —” It was an admission that US forces are already in place inside Ukraine even though the White House quickly did damage control, asserting that the president continues to be opposed to American soldiers being directly engaged in the fighting. Biden also claimed that the US was working to “keep the massacre [of Ukrainians] from continuing.” Again, the language was hardly designed to make some room for a possible accommodation with Russia to negotiate an end to the fighting.
And now there is a New York Times report entitled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say: A secretive operation involving US Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.”
The article describes a more active US role in Ukraine than the Biden Administration has been willing to admit publicly. Back in February, before intervened in Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its own 150 military instructors, many of whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on newly acquired American produced weapons. However, some Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operatives and special ops troops continued their service in the country secretly, directing most of the intelligence flow the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces. In addition to that, special ops soldiers from Washington’s NATO allies have been managing the movement of weapons and equipment into Ukraine and providing some specialized training. It has also been reported that British SAS commandos are actually guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky. The NYT specifies, citing American and other Western officials, that the soldiers and CIA officers are currently not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops. Also according to the Times, even though the US and NATO member states have not acknowledged the presence of their paramilitaries soldiers in operational roles in Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence services around the world are aware of this.
The New York Times report appears to be generally correct, though it does omit some details, some of which I have been hearing from former colleagues in the intelligence services. There has been considerable overt training at the Grafenwoehr German army base as well as at the Ramstein US Air Base to familiarize the Ukrainians with the new weapons arriving. Other NATO countries are also participating in the training. Meanwhile, the cadres of special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel operating primarily in western Ukraine are not in uniform and many of them are working under various contrived cover designations, including sometimes loose affiliations with foreign embassies and NGOs. There are also a conventional CIA Station, a group from the National Security Agency and a Military Attache’s office in the recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.
All of the above means that Biden and other western leaders have been dissimulating regarding their active participation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Apart from his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit that there are American boots already on the ground, but they are there and are playing a major role in both logistics and intelligence sharing. The potential downside for the president could come when some of these soldiers in mufti get killed or, worse, captured and start to talk about their role.
Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, observes that deploying plausibly deniable non-uniformed personnel “is completely typical of the initial stages of a US-backed long war, and for long-term political manipulation of the target country. This is the future that neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and their British and European allies imagine for Ukraine. Rather than a negotiated conclusion, with a new Ukrainian role as a neutral and productive country, independent of both Russian and US political influences, the US government and CIA see Ukraine as an expendable yet useful satrap in its competition with the Russian Federation.”
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity in stark terms, while also commenting that the CIA has not won a semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty years. He observes that “Ukraine is a proxy; the West is trying to destroy Russia, it’s that simple. It would be one thing if Russia was the most evil, oppressive, authoritarian regime in the world. It’s nowhere even close. Even though the West keeps trying to portray Russia as such. The fact of the matter is, the West wants the resources that Russia has and it wants to control Russia. [But] Russia is not about to be controlled.”
In other words, Washington might be seeking an unending war entangling Russia and limiting its options globally. The Biden Administration has staked its reputation and possible political future on enabling Ukraine to survive without succumbing to Russian territorial demands. It is a risky and even dangerous policy, both in practical terms and politically. The persistence of the Ukrainians in their defense is largely a product of US and Western Europe guarantees that they will do all that is necessary to support Zelensky and his regime, which is already seeking $750 billion in aid for “reconstruction.” If western military casualties begin to surface, the political support for the Ukraine war will begin to fade in Washington and elsewhere and there will be consequences in the upcoming midterm US elections in November.
A final comment on the Times piece is in response to the question why it has appeared at all at the present time. The mainstream media has been a cheerleader for aggressive US support of Ukraine and Zelensky, but now it is beginning to step back from that position, as have also the Washington Post and other media outlets. Perhaps they are becoming convinced that the game plan being promoted by Washington and its European allies is unlikely to succeed at great cost to the respective economies. Larry Johnson puts it this way: “I think the purpose of this article coming out now is just to lay the groundwork for why we can’t put or shouldn’t put any more US military personnel or even CIA personnel inside Ukraine because continuing to put US personnel…inside Ukraine to train is becoming too risky because of Russia’s success on the battlefield.” One might also add that it is exceptionally dangerous. A misstep or even a deliberate false flag coming from either side could easily make the war go nuclear.
After the Crash 