Category Archives: Social Control

PRIGOZHIN’S FOLLY

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By Seymour Hersh

Source: Mint Press News

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.
The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control. As one headline in the Times put it, “Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: “Putin looked into the abyss Saturday—and blinked.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”

Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”

At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?

We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.

Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.

So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:

“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by anti-Russian extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.

“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.

“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.

“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.

“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.

The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.

Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.

Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.

The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.

If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.

It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.

15 Questions That Are More Useful Than “What Presidential Candidate Should Americans Vote For?”

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

People keep asking me to weigh in on the US presidential race and its candidates, which is what always happens whenever there’s a US presidential race on because media saturation makes it so central in the minds of Americans it’s often the main issue they want to talk about, even if they’re fairly aware.

I really don’t have anything to say about who Americans should vote for, other to repeat what I’ve said already about the fact that you can’t vote your way out of a mess you never voted yourself into in the first place.

But what I can do instead is offer my American friends some questions to ask that would probably be much more helpful to them and their nation than the question “Which presidential candidate should we vote for?”

Here are 15 such questions:

1. Why does nothing change no matter who we vote for?

2. Why does US foreign policy always continue along the same trajectory regardless of the president’s party or platform?

3. What keeps our voting population split right down the middle into two political factions of equal size, with neither side ever gaining enough of a majority to democratically change society in any meaningful way?

4. Why does the stalemate described in #3 always seem to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the war-horny?

5. Why is it that the most consequential US government policies like plutocratic influence, privatization, globalization, ecocidal capitalism and nuclear brinkmanship are never on the ballot? Why do these things keep happening, against our interests, without our ever voting for them or electing anyone who campaigned on the pledge to enact them?

6. If our federal government’s behavior never changes no matter who we elect, could it be that there are other bodies involved in government policy-setting whom we did not elect, and who remain in positions of influence regardless of the comings and goings of our official elected government?

7. If the above is the case, then who is it? Who’s really calling the shots in this country?

8. Could it be that everything we’ve been told about our country, our government, our political processes and our world is untrue?

9. If so, what are the implications of the fact that our schools and our media have been feeding us lies since we were small?

10. What forces would be responsible for keeping all these lies flowing throughout our society? What might keep an ostensibly free press spinning more or less the same lies throughout the western world day after day, year after year, generation after generation?

11. Is it possible that our entire electoral system is a sham designed to give the public the illusion of control so that they’ll let oligarchs and empire managers run the country undisturbed?

12. If the electoral system is a sham, then how do we enact the changes we so desperately need?

13. Is it possible that there are other ways to effect change in the United States which don’t involve casting a pretend vote in a fake election?

14. Could it be that those other means of forcing change are precisely what the charade of casting pretend votes in fake elections is meant to divert us from?

15. Should we perhaps spend less energy bickering about who should get sworn into the White House a year and a half from now, and more energy examining other possible avenues toward advancing meaningful change?

FBI Make-Work Entrapment Schemes: Creating Criminals in Order to Arrest Them

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.

For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.

If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.

Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”

In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.

To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.

To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.

The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.

America At War-Provoking The Consequences

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By Christopher Black

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The United States of America is at war with Russia. There is not much point in using terms such as “proxy war” to describe the situation. If a belligerent in a war is acting as a proxy for another power and that power is not engaged directly in the war, the term can be useful. But when the power, for which the “proxy” engages in the war, is directly involved in the war itself, then it is a co-belligerent, a party to the war directly, not simply by proxy.

The issue is whether each state is pursuing its own interests and has its own independent means of doing so, or whether the interests and forces of the allied powers are subordinate to the interests and forces of a leader.  In such a case, the enemy being attacked can regard all its opponents as a single entity.

In this regard, Clausewitz said that, “if you can vanquish all your enemies by defeating one of them, that defeat must be the main objective of the war. In this one enemy, we strike at the centre of gravity of the entire conflict.”

If we analyse the war in the Ukraine theatre of operations in these terms, it becomes clear that the Ukrainian military forces are in fact forces of the United States of America. They have been created, armed, trained, supplied, financed, and are directed and commanded by the Americans, for American interests. The government for whom they nominally fight is a puppet state, installed in power by the United States and its NATO allies in a coup d’etat in 2014. It has no independent interests outside of American ones, and no control over the war or the forces nominally under its command.

The United States of America is the leader of a hostile military alliance, the purpose of which, since its inception, has been to isolate, threaten, attack and destroy Russia, has conspired with its alliance for years to achieve this end, has spent vast resources to prepare the attack, and has, with malice and determination, sabotaged any proposals for peace.  It insists on war.  It is the centre of gravity of the entire conflict.

The American government claims that it is not engaged even in a proxy war with Russia, that they are merely assisting an independent nation suffering aggression from another, that this does not put them at war with Russia, a war which, they claim, they are trying to avoid despite their actions and daily propaganda.

But, like the British, and the rest, the truth is the United States of America is a party to the war directly, according to all accepted criteria under international law. It supplies money to conduct the war, tanks, armoured vehicles, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions and other war materials, engages its own military forces-military advisors and combatants, provides military intelligence, obtained on a real-time basis from its spy networks, satellite observations and electronic data collection, engages in an intense propaganda war against Russia, has attempted, through “sanctions,” to impose a blockade on Russia and its economy and people, blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline, sends, on a regular basis, senior government and military officials, including the American President, Congressional bigwigs and the leaders of other members of the military alliance, to meet with and direct the actions of their lieutenant Zelensky, and conducts constant military exercises further threatening attacks against Russia. The NATO Air Defender military exercises begin in Europe on June 12, the day I write this, involving hundreds of NATO aircraft.

Make no mistake. The United States of America is at war with Russia. No amount of rhetoric can hide that fact and what the consequences for the United States will be. To quote Clausewitz again,

 “Danger is part of the friction of war. Without an accurate conception of danger, we cannot understand war.”

The problem is that the neither the Americans nor the other members of its unholy alliance, seem to realise the danger they are in, neither their leaders nor their citizens. Like the British, they suffer from the delusion that they are insulated from the consequences of their war, that they are invulnerable, that Russia will not dare to respond to the attacks upon its territory and people by attacking their territories. This shared delusion makes them ever more dangerous, since they think, they can keep escalating their actions in the war without any limits.  They cannot-not without consequences.

On June 8th Tass reported, following the statement by the former head of NATO, Fogh Rasmussen, that NATO countries may send their forces into the conflict directly, that Dmitry Medvedev stated,

“Fogh Rasmussen wasn’t a very smart man before. And now he has sunk into a doctrinaire’s dementia. In an interview with The Guardian, he stated that even if Banderavite Ukraine doesn’t receive an invitation to join NATO in Vilnius, the countries of the alliance will be able to send their troops there. Sort of on their own.”

“Well, have the people of these countries been asked? Who among them wants war with Russia? Do they really want hypersonic strikes on Europe? And what does Uncle Sam think about this? It would affect him too, wouldn’t it?”

Again, on June 1, TASS reported that Dmitry Medvedev stated, in connection with the attack on Russians in the Belgorod region by NATO-Ukrainian forces,

“The aim was simple – to cause damage, to harm to the civilian population somehow, And the fact that our enemy is already behaving as a terrorist characterizes in a very specific way both the Ukrainian regime and those who are behind it – first of all the Americans and the Europeans, who, in fact, have got on the warpath with us. Terrorist acts must entail the harshest retaliation possible.”

Medvedev’s views have been stated by other members of the government, by members of the Duma and by President Putin when he referred to Russian strikes on command and decision centres wherever they may be.

The Americans can whistle in the dark, lie to their people, try to fool the world, but what matters is what the Russian government thinks and knows, and it thinks, because it knows, that the United States of America is at war with Russia and seeks Russia’s complete defeat and subjugation. The campaign in Ukraine is just a phase of this war, is the current geographical space for this war, so for the United States and its allies to assume that they can carry out attacks on Russia and not suffer being dealt with in kind or worse, that war cannot be waged on their territories, is a serious mistake.

Indeed, on May 31, Dmitry Medvedev stated with respect to Britain,

“London is, in fact, waging an undeclared war on Moscow, which means that any British official can be viewed as a legitimate military target.

“Today, Great Britain is acting as an ally of Ukraine, by providing it with equipment and personnel as military assistance, that is de facto waging an undeclared war against Russia. Therefore, any of its officials, both military and civilian ones, who are making a contribution to the war effort, can be viewed as a legitimate military target,”

Medvedev was commenting on a remark by British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly who had justified the drone attacks on Moscow, saying that Ukraine had the right to attack targets on Russian territory for self-defense.

He added,

“Foolish officials in the UK, our eternal enemy, should remember that under universally recognized international law governing the conduct of war in modern conditions, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols, their situation can also be qualified as being at war.”

The same analysis applies in spades to the United States of America.

An interesting comment in this regard was made by the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on June 3rd when, according to Tass, he stated in an interview on the Rossiya-1 TV channel, that,

“Ukraine has simply become a tool of the West’s ‘hybrid war’ against Russia, and therefore it is futile to deal with it in resolving the conflict. Now, Ukraine is actually a tool of conflict. The conflict has indeed become broader, as the collective West is waging a hybrid war against our country. It is futile to deal with this tool in order to resolve the conflict, and this must be understood too.”

All the rhetoric from NATO about whether or not Ukraine can become a member of NATO is just a smokescreen to hide from their people the fact that Ukraine is already de facto part of NATO.  Whether or not the formalities of signing pieces of paper, of getting the approval of NATO states is followed through, is irrelevant.

Remember that on March 26, 2022, in Warsaw, President Biden stated,

“We have a sacred obligation under Article 5 to defend each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.”

He was referring not only to Poland but to Ukraine as well. What Russia feared is now the reality. Ukraine is de facto a NATO state.  And all the rhetoric from the West and commentators about whether or not NATO will invoke Article 5 is another smokescreen designed to mask what is really happening, for NATO has already activated Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

The talk about invoking it in the future is an attempt to hide NATO’s weakness, its defeats on the military, economic and political fronts, even as they throw one weapon system after another at Russia, and inject NATO forces into the fighting only to have their equipment and forces destroyed.

 They have nothing left to throw at Russia that can defeat it.  So, they pretend NATO is not yet really engaged. But these facts make the USA even more dangerous as it becomes clear that the combined West cannot defeat Russia, a nuclear power, using conventional means.

Remember also that the United States has a first strike nuclear arms policy, and they have already placed, in Romania and Poland, land-based versions of the Aegis Air Defence System, which can be used to launch nuclear-armed missiles at Russia. These systems have been tested.  The one in Poland is reported to be fully operational as of June 30.  The danger to Russia is immediate and existential. Those systems are one of the reasons Russia activated its military operations.  Russia has further responded to this, and to the attacks on Russia, clearly planned and ordered by the US and UK, by placing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus which are to be made operational after July 7, when the facilities to store and use them will be completed.

Those tactical nuclear weapons are designed for battlefield use. We hope it never comes to that, but Russia faces a direct threat from people bent on its destruction that think they are untouchable. So, Russia faces very difficult choices on what to do and how to prevent an escalation to all our nuclear war while ensuring its own security.

On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued a warning on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region.

“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point, events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”

Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,

“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”

So, we come back to Clausewitz. The American government and people cannot understand the war they are engaged in unless they understand the danger, they are in.  They have to understand their country is the centre of gravity in this war, whose defeat will mean the defeat of all its minions in NATO. The Russian people know the danger they are in. The Americans, through NATO, through their NATO puppets in Ukraine, have attacked Russians in Russia. It is logical to expect that Russia will decide to bring home to the Americans what war means, what danger they are in, and they do not need to use nuclear weapons to achieve this.

Russia can strike using its conventional hypersonic weapons as well, against which the USA has no defence whatsoever, as has been established with the destruction of the Patriot Air defence complexes in Ukraine which could not stop Russian missiles. They have no other air defence systems operational in the United States territory or on its naval forces that can stop them either.  Russia has not decided to take this step yet. But it can and the Americans can do nothing about it except bluster about using nuclear weapons against Russia, But Russia took that possibility into account when the special military operation began.

The American people have not directly experienced war in their own territory for a long time. They have no idea what it is. They have no idea of the danger they are in so long as their government continues its aggressive policies, not only against Russia, but China as well.  The American people, misled and misinformed, have no conception of the dangers of this war anymore than the British people and the peoples of the other NATO countries do. The American people must be warned.  The United States of America is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. To repeat what I said in my warning to the people of Britain, the consequences are predictable and they will be catastrophic.

A Credible Explanation of How Kakhovka Dam Was Blown Up

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By Eric Zuesse 

Source: Dissident Voice

Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).

The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.

First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.

The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.

The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.

Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,

“Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.

“Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”

Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …

Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.

Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”

So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.

Ukraine Stays with the West But Russia Is Winning and Has the Receipts

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A delegation of African leaders travelled to Ukraine and Russia to help broker peace. But the collective west insists on prolonging the conflict.

The war in Ukraine grinds on and the Ukrainian army is being destroyed by Russia with great loss of life. One would think that Ukraine would be grateful for any and all peace efforts, but it is being used as a proxy by the United States and its NATO allies, the collective west. The seeds of this catastrophe began long before Russia’s special military operation. The European Union and NATO nations brought anti-Russian right-wing forces to power in 2014 in a coup against the elected Ukrainian president. If not for them there would be no war at all.

Their degree of culpability became clear recently when a delegation of African leaders traveled to Ukraine and Russia as part of a peacemaking initiative. The party included heads of state of Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Comoros, Uganda, Republic of Congo, and South Africa. Comoros President Azali Assoumani is the current chair of the African Union. The group was greeted in Kiev by air raid sirens used to create the appearance that a Russian missile attack was underway. President Zelensky was barely polite, thanking South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and others for coming but letting them know that everything was Russia’s fault and that he had no interest whatsoever in peace talks. 

Not only is Ukraine a de facto U.S. colony which lives and dies by Washington’s whims, but it is also a deeply racist country. Much of its population is still attached to Nazi ideology and the politics of World War II collaborator Stephan Bandera. 

Nazi salutes, swastikas and other insignias are common there. So much so that the New York Times recently felt obliged to wonder in feigned innocence why these symbols are worn openly. The simple and obvious answer is that Ukraine is full of Nazis. Any likelihood that the same people would listen to Africans were indeed slim. 

Ukraine was joined in racial superiority theater by Poland. Media and security staff accompanying the presidents were delayed there and the delegation had to travel without them. When the manufactured drama was no longer needed the delegation arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia and met with president Vladimir Putin who had a surprise of his own. 

Putin listened politely to the 10-point plan and then interrupted with a surprise of his own. He not only reminded them the conflict began in 2014 but pointed out that Russia has been ready for peace ever since Turkey brokered negotiations with Ukraine in April 2022. Ukraine was on the verge of signing an agreement until its collective west friends, the US and UK in particular, scuttled the plan. 

The Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Guarantees of Security of Ukraine offered security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for a commitment to remain neutral, meaning that NATO membership would be off the table. Putin pointed out that as soon as Russian forces left Kiev the agreement was thrown into “the dustbin.” Just as in the case of the Minsk Agreements, the collective west offered treachery instead of peace.

The African leaders have their own self-interest which sent them to Russia. Their nations’ supplies of grain and fertilizer have been disrupted by the western sanctions and restrictions on trade with Russia. Earlier agreements on this trade have worked against Africans, as Putin pointed out, “These European neo-colonial powers, technically the US, have once again deceived the international community and the Africa countries in need: 31.7 million tonnes were exported and only three percent reached Africa’s needy countries. Is this not deception?”

It is all to the good that the international community works together to end this war, but the west is only interested in escalating and Ukraine pays the price. The collective west excels in creating propaganda and bullying its allies. The rest of the world is working to escape U.S. and NATO domination as Ukrainians die in large numbers.

Ukraine’s love of Nazi symbolism reveals why that country is content to turn its population into cannon fodder. Meanwhile western insistence on escalation brings the entire world to the brink. Yet there is still no honest discussion about how the war began, or how the Nordstream pipeline exploded. Russia is still painted as the villain and the people of this country go into another presidential election year in the dark.

Russia is not just winning on the battlefield. Nation after nation has declared an intention to use currencies other than the dollar for trade or to join the BRICS. But the collective west cannot accept defeat. The threat they represent to the world cannot be underestimated.

Traitor to the Constitution: The U.S. Government Is the Real Criminal

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H.L. Mencken

And so it continues.

This entire fiasco—indicting Donald Trump for allegedly violating both the Espionage Act and obstructing justice by improperly handling classified records—is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Deep State.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.

This indictment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing is the key word here.

Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, this is all just smoke and mirrors.

Mark my words: the government is as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.

If you really want to talk about who’s guilty of treason, set your sights higher: indict the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, disregarding the rule of law, and betraying the American people.

When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.

When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.

This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.

There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing the government to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The republic has fallen.

The Deep State’s plot to take over America has succeeded.

The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, corporate oligarchy bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.

Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

These are dangerous times.

These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime or terrorism or illegal immigration.

No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

  • Americans have no protection against police abuse.
  • Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.
  • Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
  • Americans no longer have a right to private property.
  • Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school.
  • Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.
  • Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
  • Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
  • Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
  • Americans no longer have a representative government.

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

Indictments, impeachments and elections will not save us.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

From Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’re caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or pandering will change that.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by political circuses and entertainment spectacles.

What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where “we the people” are at a distinct disadvantage in the face of the government elite’s power grabs, greed and firepower.

The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.

That is the real betrayal.

Neocon Warmonger Advocates Nukes to Nazis in Ukraine

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Violent Russian-hating Nazis wouldn’t nuke Moscow, would they?

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Maybe you may remember Michael Rubin. He worked with Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a neocon pro-war outfit set-up in the Pentagon by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The OSP’s objective was to create a series of false pretenses to invade Iraq in 2003.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer, the Office of Special Plans represented a “subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.”

Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney used the OSP to publicize “hot garbage” from a cast of dubious characters produced by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, including “Curveball” (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German intelligence asset pretending to be an Iraqi chemical engineer).

The lies that killed over a million Iraqis were dismissed as “intelligence failures” and swept under the rug. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rubin, and other neocons were never held responsible for the massive war crimes they perpetuated.

On June 9, Rubin, a “senior fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (and former “fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations), penned “Can Biden Deter a Russia Nuclear Attack on Ukraine? Yes, if He Gives Ukraine Tactical Nukes.”

Rubin demands the nazified post-coup government of Ukraine receive nukes. Rubin believes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (exchanging Soviet-era nukes deployed to Ukraine in exchange for sovereignty) was a monumental error. “The simple fact is this: United States maintains nuclear weapons because they are an effective deterrent against other nuclear states. Ukraine should have the same right,” Rubin writes.

Rubin and his neocon co-conspirators are not interested in “an effective deterrent” in Ukraine; they are interested in destroying the Russian state, the same as they destroyed the Iraqi state. However, Iraq, despite neocon lies, never had nuclear weapons (and the chemical weapons they did possess were supplied US corporations). Russia controls the largest arsenal of nukes in the world.

The non-proliferation mafia might howl with outrage, but the West must gear its nuclear policy toward reality, not wishful thinking or an empty façade of a treaty regimen by which revisionist states no longer abide.

Please read between the lines. According to this entitled “senior fellow,” the neocon “reality” envisions nuclear war as the most effective way to overthrow Putin and dismember the Russian Federation. Rubin, of course, does not call directly for nuclear war. However, his demand that Ukraine be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons will result in precisely that outcome. Imagine Ukraine’s Azov Battalion neo-nazis using nukes to target the Kremlin instead of hit-or-miss drones.

Rubin’s clarion call for nuclear destruction was crossposted on 19FortyFive, a “center-right” website that has produced neocon propaganda subsequently picked up by The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Hill, Reuters, and Voice of America (CIA propaganda), among others. It should be noted that 19FortyFive was until very recently a “regional defense publication.”

With the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway, the threat that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons is increasingly a likelihood. It would be unfair to blame Kyiv. There is no moral equivalence. Russia invaded Ukraine; not the other way around. So long as Ukraine was on the verge of victory, Putin would arrive at this point of nuclear retaliation.

Nonsense. Zelenskyy’s “counter-offensive” has thus far failed miserably, a fact even the war propaganda media is obliged to admit. Thus, Russia does not need to use nuclear weapons. Rubin, however, is able to make his bogus claim thanks to the fiction of Russian desperation over defeat, a false narrative telegraphed daily by a mendacious and cynically fantasist corporate propaganda media.

As should be expected, Rubin completely ignores the fact Russia went into eastern Ukraine to prevent the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of ethnic Russians. For the neocons, responsible for massive war crimes in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya), human life is expendable. Disease, malnutrition, infant mortality, DU-produced cancer—these are the preferred tools for regime change and the destruction of targeted societies resistant to neoliberal serfdom.

Rubin believes the prospect of USG nukes handed over to Russian-hating neo-nazi ultranationalists in Ukraine will save the day and prevent military action “not only against Ukraine but also against Moldova and the Baltic States,” a claim that is utter BS.

Meanwhile, more rational Americans, while small in number, are increasingly concerned about the escalatory behavior of the USG, under the sway of vicious and murderous neocons, which will put an end to not only civilization but all life on planet Earth.