Tag Archives: Antony Blinken

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.

The End of American “Exceptionalism”?

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Failing banks, inflation, soaring interest rates and the flight from the petrodollar could become a disaster for ordinary Americans

“Dollar” by Images_of_Money is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

By Philip Giraldi

Source: FreePress.org

Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. Instead, Biden and the gang of introverts and neocon war criminals that the has surrounded himself with have done everything that can to inflict fatal damage on the economy through rash initiatives both overseas and at home. A spending spree to buy support from the bizarre constituencies that make up the Democrat Party base while also fighting an undeclared war in Europe have meant that nearly two trillion dollars has been added to the national debt under Biden’s rule, a debt that was already unsustainable at nearly $30 trillion, larger than the United States’ gross national product. Plans to cancel student loan debts will add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.

And those actions undertaken overseas, to include continuing to expand the war in Ukraine against Russia, will do immeasurable more damage. Consider how the Democratic Party has long had it in for Russian Federal President Vladimir Putin, dating back to when Putin took power in 2000 and started kicking out the western scallywags who were looting his country. Subsequently, false intelligence and other innuendoes were contrived by Hillary Clinton and her team in 2016 to implicate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge who was secretly working for Putin. When that didn’t work and Trump was elected, the Russians were accused by the media and Democrats of willy-nilly interfering in US elections more generally speaking, a much-exaggerated claim in contrast to the overwhelming silence surrounding the real electoral and policy interference, which has been coming from Israel and its fifth column inside the United States, who, not coincidentally, are the chief proponents of the war against Russia.

Placing a target on Vladimir Putin’s back appears to have an unfortunate consequence which Biden has yet to wake up to, namely the fact that the United States now has what might be described as a Ponzi scheme faux economy which is very vulnerable, particularly as much of the world has become disenchanted with the US style of global leadership. Note for example the recent state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to Beijing, where he embraced a “global strategic partnership with China” to bring about a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” that is not sheltering behind “Cold War mentality.” Macron also criticized the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”

And threats made by the Bidens against both China and Russia have accomplished little beyond drawing the two major political and military powers closer together. Beijing and Moscow entered into a trade agreement in their own currencies in 2014 and have openly taken steps to challenge US dominance of international currency exchanges, creating instead a global multipolar trading environment. Europe aside, many nations are now eager to cut the tie that binds, which is the decades long American dominance of international financial mechanisms and also the general use of dollars to pay for oil and other energy supplies. The widespread use of petrodollars enables the buffoonish Janet Yellen at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks to print unlimited unbacked fiat currency, knowing that there will always be a market for it.

Which brings us back to the Ukraine war, pursued “until we win” by Biden and his somnolent Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations.

As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency. Some nations all over the world have agreed to use the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee for any-and-all international currency transactions. Saudi Arabia continues to use the petrodollar but does not demand it. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to permit the Saudis to sell oil to China in Yuan. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is now allowing multiple currencies to be used to purchase its oil, a major attack on the primacy of the US dollar and it also has accepted Chinese mediation to mend fences with the US and Israel’s arch enemy Iran. And the Saudis have even more recently refused a Biden Administration request that it start pumping more oil to reduce energy costs, signaling that the shift is both political and economic in nature. Japan, a major economy, has also started purchasing oil and gas directly from Russia against the US imposed energy embargo while Brazil, another major economy, has agreed to use the Yuan in its increasing trade with China. As fewer nations utilize the US dollar, America’s ability to export and ignore its burgeoning domestic debt and inflation to other countries is being diminished.

This might have a decisive impact on the US currency as the drive to break with the petrodollar continues to grow and could produce something like a “perfect storm” impacting on the US economy. It threatens to drastically lower the standards of living of nearly all Americans within the next several years as the dollar loses value and purchasing power. As the US economy is heavily interconnected with many European economies, Europe is also likely to be a victim of the coming disaster.

The good news, of course, is that the United States will no longer be able to afford its endless wars and international interventions. Lacking its economic power, it will no longer be able to declare itself “exceptional” and the enforcer of a “rules based international order.” It would mean an ending of the funding of developments like the Ukraine proxy war and the troops will have to come home from places like Syria and Somalia. And it might even mark the ending of sending billions of dollars annually to a wealthy Israel.

Ending dollar supremacy would inevitably have an immediate impact on what passes for US foreign policy, making it more difficult for Washington to initiate and sustain Treasury Department sanctions on countries like Iran and North Korea. It could also create economic turmoil for many countries until the situation resolves itself by producing greater volatility in currency markets worldwide. The Federal Reserve Bank will no doubt respond to the unfolding crisis by acting as it always does by raising interest rates to astronomical levels, thereby hurting most the Americans who can least afford the shock therapy.

And it did not have to turn out this way. It could have been avoided. If the US, which had no horse in the race, had left Ukraine alone Vladimir Putin would not have become a symbol of defiance against the “Rules Based International Order” and he would not have worked with China to establish multipolarity in the way the financial world operates. Instead, we have a situation where Europe is being de-industrialized due to soaring energy prices and Washington’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines while the US is potentially confronting economic disaster as the dollar’s relevance to international trade sinks. The ultimate irony is that Russia, and also the US/Israeli arch enemy Iran, are by comparison doing quite well economically as they sell their oil and gas to anyone in any currency. One has to conclude that when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made her secret trip to Kiev to promise the despicable Volodymyr Zelensky billions of taxpayer dollars the United States might just have been better served if she had stayed in Washington and made some minimal effort to address the mounting economic problems confronting us here at home.

Seymour Hersh: the CIA Knows Ukrainian Officials Are Skimming US Aid

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Hersh says the CIA estimates at least $400 million was embezzled last year in funds earmarked for diesel payments

By Dave DeCamp

Source: Antiwar.com

On Wednesday, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of US aid.

The report said the Ukrainian government has been using US taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military. Hersh said Zelensky “has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.”

Hersh said according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year. Sources told Hersh that Ukrainian officials are also “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts to private arms dealers around the world.

The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January. An intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting told Hersh that Burns delivered a stunning message to Zelensky.

Hersh wrote: “The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’”

During the meeting, Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA. Zelensky responded by dismissing 10 officials who were engaged in flagrant corruption. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official said.

Hersh said Zelensky’s “half-hearted response” and the “lack of concern” in the White House angered some US intelligence officials. The intelligence official speaking to Hersh criticized President Biden’s two main foreign policy advisors, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“They have no experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up stories. Diplomatic deniability is something else,” the official said. The official said there was a “total breakdown between the White House leadership and the intelligence community.”

The report said the rift started in the fall when the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines were blown up. According to Hersh’s earlier reporting, President Biden ordered the operation that took out the pipelines. “Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines was never discussed, or even known in advance, by the community,” the official said.

The official said there is “no strategy for ending the war” within the Biden administration and offered more scathing criticism of Blinken and Sullivan.

“Burns is not the problem,” the official said. “The problem is Biden and his principal lieutenants—Blinken and Sullivan and their court of worshippers—who see those who criticize Zelensky as being pro-Putin. ‘We are against evil. Ukraine will fight ’til the last military shell is gone, and still fight.’ And here’s Biden who is telling America that we’re going to fight as long as it takes.”

Hersh’s story comes after a series of leaked top-secret documents from the Pentagon and other government agencies surfaced online. Some of the documents show US war planning for Ukraine and reveal the US doubts Kyiv’s ability to launch a successful counter-offensive, offering a starkly different view of Ukraine’s abilities than what Biden officials have been saying publicly.

Brainwashed for War With Russia

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By Ray McGovern

Source: AntiWar.com

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues – Professor John Mearsheimer – got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”

Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:

“Wooden-headedness…plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”

Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing

Thanks to US media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:

  • 14 years ago, then US Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The Subject Line of Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.”Thus, Washington policymakers were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding membership for Ukraine in NATO. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2008, a NATO summit in Bucharest asserted: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
  • 8 years ago, on Feb. 22, 2014, the US orchestrated a coup in Kiev – rightly labeled “the most blatant coup in history’, insofar as it had already been blown on YouTube 18 days prior. Kiev’s spanking new leaders, handpicked and identified by name by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the YouTube-publicized conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, immediately called for Ukraine to join NATO.
  • 6 years ago, in June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Western reporters of his concern that so-called antiballistic missiles sites in Romania and Poland could be converted overnight to accommodate offensive strike missiles posing a threat to Russia’s own nuclear forces. (See this unique video, with English subtitles, from minute 37 to 49.) There is a direct analogy with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Moscow put offensive strike missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy reacted strongly to the existential threat that posed to the US.
  • On December 21, 2021, President Putin told his most senior military leaders:“It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.” [Emphasis added.]
  • On December 30, 2021, Biden and Putin talked by phone at Putin’s urgent request. The Kremlin readout stated:
  • On February 12, 2022, Ushakov briefed the media on the telephone conversation between Putin and Biden earlier that day.
  • On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Unprovoked?

The US insists that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Establishment media dutifully regurgitate that line, while keeping Americans in the dark about such facts (not opinion) as are outlined (and sourced) above. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

The late Fred Hiatt, who was op-ed editor at the Washington Post, is a case in point. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review [CJR, March/April 2004] he commented:

“If you look at the editorials we wrote running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction.” “If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.”

(My journalism mentor, Robert Parry, had this to say about Hiatt’s remark. “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”)

It’s worse now. Russia is not Iraq. And Putin has been so demonized over the past six years that people are inclined to believe the likes of James Clapper to the effect there’s something genetic that makes Russians evil. “Russia-gate” was a big con (and, now, demonstrably so), but Americans don’t know that either. The consequences of prolonged demonization are extremely dangerous – and will become even more so in the next several weeks as politicians vie to be the strongest in opposing and countering Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine.

THE Problem

Humorist Will Rogers had it right:

“The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem.”

Assange Is Doing His Most Important Work Yet

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has authorized the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to be tried under the Espionage Act in a case which seeks to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports inconvenient truths about the US empire.

Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision, reportedly with arguments that will include the fact that the CIA spied on him and plotted his assassination.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters on Friday.

And thank goodness. Assange’s willingness to resist Washington’s extradition attempts benefit us all, from his taking political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 until British police forcibly dragged him out in 2019, to his fighting US prosecutors in the courtroom tooth and claw during his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.

Assange’s fight against US extradition benefits us not just because the empire’s war against truth harms our entire species and not just because he cannot receive a fair trial under the Espionage Act, but because his refusal to bow down and submit forces the empire to overextend itself into the light and show us all what it’s really made of.

Washington, London and Canberra are colluding to imprison a journalist for telling the truth: the first with its active extradition attempts, the second with its loyal facilitation of those attempts, and the third with its silent complicity in allowing an Australian journalist to be locked up and persecuted for engaging in the practice of journalism. By refusing to lie down and forcing them to come after him, Assange has exposed some harsh realities of which the public has largely been kept unaware.

The fact that London and Canberra are complying so obsequiously with Washington’s agendas, even while their own mainstream media outlets decry the extradition and even while all major human rights and press freedom watchdog groups in the western world say Assange must go free, shows that these are not separate sovereign nations but member states of a single globe-spanning empire centralized around the US government. Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more attention is being brought to this reality.

By standing his ground and fighting them, Assange has also exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, it will always reek of hypocrisy when US presidents like Joe Biden say things like, “The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, people will always know British prime ministers like Boris Johnson are lying when they say things like, “Media organisations should feel free to bring important facts into the public domain.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more of us will understand that they are being deceived and manipulated when Australian prime ministers like Anthony Albanese say things like “We need to protect press freedom in law and ensure every Australian can have their voice heard,” and “Don’t prosecute journalists for just doing their jobs.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, US secretaries of state like Antony Blinken will have a much harder time selling their schtick when they say things like “On World Press Freedom Day, the United States continues to advocate for press freedom, the safety of journalists worldwide, and access to information on and offline. A free and independent press ensures the public has access to information. Knowledge is power.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, UK home secretaries like Priti Patel will be seen for the frauds they are when they say things like “The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.”

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they’ll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.

Assange accomplished this by planting his feet and saying “No,” even when every other possible option would have been easier and more pleasant. Even when it was hard. Even when it was terrifying. Even when it meant being locked away, silenced, smeared, hated, unable to fight back against his detractors, unable to live a normal life, unable to hold his children, unable even to feel sunlight on his face.

His very life casts light on all the areas where it is most sorely needed. We all owe this man a tremendous debt. The least we can do is try our best to get him free.

How Can the US Accuse Any Nation of Violating ‘Rules-Based International Order’?

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North Dakota’s Governor ordered the state’s National Guard to clear the protest encampment of Lakota Sioux water protectors and their supporters during the 2016-17 protests against a pipeline through tribal lands. Click on image to play video (video courtesy RT television)

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the US government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, it just too much to let pass.

The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a trained bird), accusing Russia not just of preparing for an “imminent invasion’ of Ukraine, but of violating international law and “rules-based international order,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken likes to put it.

The Biden administration’s top diplomat has made repeatedly blasted both Russia for threatening Ukraine with an invasion by moving troops and equipment to its border and to the border between Ukraine and Belarus, Russia’s ally to the west, and China for its threats to Taiwan and for a rights crackdown in Hong Kong, a Chinese Special Administrative Region that had been promised 30 years or “no change” but was put under new stricter national security laws following violent student protests and university occupations in 2019-20.

But how can the US make such accusations against the Russians and the Chinese governments when the US for nearly eight years, has been bombing, launching rocket and drone attacks, and sending troops, under both CIA and Pentagon control, against both ISIS and Syrian government troops and aircraft — even attacking and killing Russian mercenary troops at one point, who, unlike the US, were in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.

US military actions in Syria are completely outside of any “rules based international order.”

International rules, when it comes to warfare, are crystal clear, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which is an international treaty signed and ratified by the US government along with most other nations of the world and incorporating all the laws of war. The primary law, violation of which is described as the gravest war crime of all “because it contains with in it all other war crimes.” Called a Crime Against Peace, it states that no nation may attack another except if that nation faces an “imminent threat” of attack.

There are no codicils expanding on or getting around that proscription.

The US has committed that  Crime Against Peace countless times, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Somalia, in Sudan, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in Cuba, in Niger, in the Congo, in Panama, in Grenada — indeed in so many places I’m sure I’m not remembering them all. Suffice to say that my whole life (I was born in 1949), my country has been a violator of the UN Charter’s ban on launching illegal wars.

Rules-based order? What the F**k is Blinken talking about? The US makes its own rules. In fact, whenever the US launches some illegal invasion or air attack against a country, the biggest complaint we hear in the US is that the president has ordered up and launched a war “without Congressional approval”

The implication is that if Congressional approves an illegal war or act of war, that makes it legit.  It doesn’t.

What makes it worse when the US makes such accusations against Russia and China is that it is accusing two countries which, as objectionable as their actions or threats might be,  at least have a better argument for their legality than does the US.

Let’s start with China. The government in Beijing stands accused by Blinken and the US government under a series of presidents, with threatening Taiwan, an island that historically was a part of China, but became functionally independent in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party won its revolution on the mainland, founding the People’s Republic of China, and the remnants of the Nationalist Party and its army fled to Taiwan, murdering tens of thousands of local Taiwanese and Hakka Chinese people, and establishing a brutal dictatorship under Nationalist leader and major domo Chiang Kai-Shek. China has never acknowledged the independence of Taiwan, which for 50 years prior to the end of World War II had been a colony of Japan, a spoil of victory in the China-Japan War won by Japan against the Ching dynasty in 1895.

The US initially recognized Taiwan, after the Chinese Communist revolutionary victory in 1949, as an independent country, but Richard Nixon, in a slick realpolitik maneuver masterminded by his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in order to recognize China and drive a wedge between that country and the Soviet Union, agreed to cease recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation, removed the US embassy from the island, and set one up in Beijing. In other words, at that point, from the US point of view at least, Taiwan’s status became an internal affair of China’s, not an international affair.

The same applies to the Chinese crackdown on rights in Hong Kong. Since July 1997, Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony, and reverted to being part of China. Now it’s true there were negotiations between the Beijing government and departing British government.  During those years of transition, Hong Kong’s appointed colonial Governor Chris Patten, former head of the British Conservative Party, carefully avoided allowing Hong Kongers to obtain long-sought universal suffrage to elect all members of the territory’s legislative council, Legco, before the British departure (a move which would at least have left the Beijing facing a local government that actually represented all the people of Hong Kong, instead of Legco representatives representing various business sectors like banking, the legal profession, the retail industry, property owners, etc).

China agreed during those negotiations to gradually increase the number of Legco members elected from geographic constituencies, and to leave basic freedoms of speech, press, etc. untouched “for 30 years.” But when students rose up to protest the arrests of Hong Kong residents and their deportation to face trials in China, it set in motion a confrontation between democracy advocates in Hong Kong and authoritarians in Beijing, and ultimately to a new Beijing-imposed national security law for Hong Kong that has turned the city into essentially just another bit of China. But again, while it was certainly a draconian over-reaction to legitimate local protests, that action by China is not a violation of international law — just violation of an agreement between a departing (and loathed) colonial power, a legacy of the European Opium War against China, and a new vastly more powerful China. It’s a bit like the US’s brutal crackdown on immigrants at the Mexican border or on Native defenders of water rights in North Dakota. Disgusting, and perhaps criminal under US law, but hardly a violation of some kind of “rules-based international order.”

As for Russia, even the plebiscite in Crimea, some 97% of the population there voted that they wanted to leave Ukraine and return to being part of Russia, as the peninsula had been until 1954, when new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, as a gift to the region he had grown up in, transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet to the Ukrainian Soviet, which the US has criticized as somehow fraudulent (Crimea is about 85% ethnic Russian). With 85% of eligible people voting, that plebiscite provided Russia with the justification for reclaiming  jurisdiction over Crimea. Russia’s action, criticized by the US as “aggression,” is less of a violation of democratic norms though than the massive disenfranchisement of blacks and other people of color in Republican-run “red” states of the US — a process that is now being accelerated to warp speed with the approach of the 2022 off-year Congressional elections. If the Biden administration really cared about justice and democracy it would be laser-focused on defending voter rights, not on shipping deadly weapons to Ukraine.

If the US government cared about following a “rules-based international order,” the it would pull all US military forces out of Syria, pull the US Navy out of the Persian Gulf, stop using drones to kill people in Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, stop sending US Special Forces wherever the president wants to send them, and rejoin the World Court and respect its adjudication of violations of international rules and laws.

Then we wouldn’t have to listen to all the hypocritical crap uttered by Biden, Blinken and their ilk.

Someday, I’m sure there will come a reckoning, when US leaders will finally be held to account for their long record of crimes against humanity. Until then, we will have to endure all this epic hypocrisy.

Ukraine and U.S. War Propaganda

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

The 2014 U.S. sponsored coup against the elected government of Ukraine must be the starting point for any discussion of the current crisis. That crisis has been manufactured by Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration point person in using Ukraine as a means of destabilizing Russia.

The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win. In 2014 a U.S. backed coup put a far-right clique in power. The people of the Donbass region in the east, largely ethnic Russians, wanted no part of the new anti-Russian government and sought autonomy. The resulting war has killed some 30,000 people.

Now the Biden team who publicly insulted the Chinese government and withdrew from Afghanistan without even being able to secure a major airport, have moved on to opening the proverbial can of whoopass with the world’s other major nuclear power. They are using Ukraine in an ill-advised effort to instigate what could lead to disaster.

The 2014 coup against an elected Ukrainian president took place because the Russians were asleep at the wheel. They roused themselves quickly however and annexed the Crimea, yet another region of Ukraine with close connections to Russia. The U.S./NATO regime change effort came at a steep price for Ukraine. Thanks to Atlanticist meddling it is now the poorest country in Europe that won’t get the NATO and EU membership it was promised. It remains a pawn between two powerful countries.

The U.S. is pulling all the hybrid warfare schemes out of the tool box. For months they claimed that Russian troops were massed on the border, ready to invade. They have engaged in diplomacy but only to try and get their way. Russia has held firm on a guarantee of no further NATO encroachment and the removal of missiles from their border. The French and Germans are feckless and do what Washington wants. They should be pressuring Ukraine to live up to the Minsk II Agreement which requires talks with the breakaway Donbass region.

None of this information is conveyed to the American people who live in ignorance orchestrated by republicans, democrats, and their friends in corporate media. Republican senators who want to run for president outdo one another with nonsense about stopping the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that Germany, a U.S. ally, asked the Russians to build. Winter is coming, quite literally, and Europe needs Russia’s gas. But unless they stop following Uncle Sam’s bullying they will end up with nothing.

Now Washington is pulling the same ploy they attempted in Ethiopia. They have declared that the Russians are coming and have even announced an evacuation of embassy personnel families from the capital city of Kyiv. Vassal states Australia and the United Kingdom have followed suit, but a European Union official demurred , “We are not going to do the same thing because we don’t know any specific reasons.” The Ukrainian government, a de facto U.S. colony, wasn’t happy and called the evacuations “premature.”

If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, then one can only conclude that big lies are being told. The U.S. has been hoisted on its own petard and now has little more than dangerous bluster to get its own allies in line.

Biden himself is a part of this problem of his own making. In a recent press conference he  declared that Russia was on the verge of invading but then said a little invasion wouldn’t be so bad after all. It isn’t clear if he was speaking from his usual state of confusion or if he really meant what he said.

The Russians certainly mean what they say. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken rushes from Moscow to Berlin to London to Moscow, seemingly making things up as he goes along, the Russians dig in their heels and make clear that their days of being pushovers are in the past. The most committed puppet states like the U.K. go along with whatever Washington wants. They can be counted on to repeat an unsourced story of a Russian plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government or something else equally nonsensical. The people most likely to use a false flag event to justify going to war, instead claim that the other side will do so. The result is a situation that could go badly over the slightest provocation or even a perceived provocation.

The American people should just say no. The Biden administration is sorely mistaken if they think the public are in a mood for war with another nuclear power. They can call ammunition “lethal aid” if they want, but when the match is lit they can expect no support. Then again, the ginned-up conflict may be taking place for that very reason. Biden has failed in almost every respect and is facing electoral defeat for his party in November. Perhaps he thinks that he would be supported by people who have no faith in his ability or willingness to do anything on their behalf.

If hostilities are averted it will be because of forces outside of the U.S. Biden’s team of blood thirsty incompetents spent most of last year predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It isn’t clear if they grew bored or saw an easier opening in Ukraine.

No one should be fooled by these people. Russia and China are very close, “better than allies ,” as Xi Jinping said. Why shouldn’t they be? Both countries want to protect themselves from American aggression. People in this country had better hope for Russian and Chinese wisdom and experience. If the U.S. is allowed to do what it wants then the whole world is at risk. That statement is not hyperbole. The U.S. has withdrawn from decades old nuclear weapons agreements and now pushes the world toward the precipice.

The New York Times and Washington Post will play the role they did in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. They will repeat what spokespeople tell them to say and be a party to warfare. If ever there was a moment to break free from media disinformation this is it. They have nothing to offer except war propaganda and possibly war itself.

Blinken Props Up Biden in European Charade for New Cold War

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(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Blinken is staying close to his boss during the whirlwind tour, because Biden is liable to spin out of control and reap an embarrassing collapse.

It’s a big ask for a frail 78-year-old U.S. president to rally the world around a series of myths and falsehoods. Biden flies to Europe this week to galvanize allies under strong American leadership of supposed shared “democratic values” in a “historic confrontation” with the “autocracies” of China and Russia.

President Joe Biden’s worldview is so disconnected from reality that it is going to prove difficult mentally for him to consistently and coherently make the case over a series of summits in the next week.

That’s why he has his more youthful Secretary of State Antony Blinken (59) tagging along when Biden meets G7 leaders in England on June 11-13, followed by a NATO summit on June 14 in Brussels as well as top-level discussions with European Union leaders. After all that, Blinken is “to participate” in the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva, according to the U.S. State Department.

The latter detail in the busy itinerary – Biden’s first overseas trip since taking office in January – is the most salient. It is unprecedented that the U.S. foreign secretary should “participate” in what was previously billed as a one-on-one meeting between the American and Russian leaders. There is no indication so far from Russian media reports that Sergei Lavrov – Blinken’s counterpart – is to take part in the Geneva summit.

What this unusual arrangement suggests is that Biden is not up to the task of dealing with Putin in an equal setting. The American president’s health and mental acuity have been under the media spotlight after several public gaffes in which Biden has forgotten names of his aides and has seemed befuddled in recalling details. The Democrat-supporting U.S. media have been criticized for giving Biden an easy time from their soft approach towards the president.

This raises further questions about Biden’s health condition when he has to have his top diplomat at his side during the forthcoming summits, especially the final one with Putin whom the American president disparaged previously as a “killer”.

It is all the more taxing on Biden given that his mission is more about contriving a narrative than actually engaging with reality. The contrived narrative is the attempt to rally European and other Western allies under American leadership against “autocratic adversaries” China and Russia. In other words, fabricating a new Cold War. The trouble is the fabrication is based on myths, falsehoods, smears, delusions, and outright lies. All in all, that’s a tall order for a president who tends to get people and names mixed up and who appears to struggle at finishing press conferences with coherent thoughts.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post before his big tour of Europe, Biden presented his mission thus: “My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies”.

In a familiar mantra of the 46th president, he demarcated the world into two camps: one under “strong American leadership” with “shared democratic values”, and the other purportedly represented by rival “autocracies” of China and Russia. This is nothing but the recreation of a Cold War whereby Washington polarizes the world into hostile entities in order to give itself a position of “moral leadership” as a guise for imperialist hegemony.

To accept this mythical framing of the world, then it is necessary to demonize the designated adversaries. Lamentably, the European allies of America (more accurately, “vassals”) are all too credulous in accepting the provocative fantasies.

Nevertheless, sometimes self-interests intrude and the Europeans find the American depiction of the world too much to bear. Hence, there is pushback from the European Union on Biden’s attempts to sabotage the economic partnership between the 27-member bloc and China. There are limits to which the EU will go in damaging the landmark Comprehensive Investment Agreement it signed with Beijing in December.

Likewise, Germany is not tolerating any attempts by the Biden administration to scupper the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia which will be vital for fuelling German industry. Again, self-interest kicks in to bring mundane common sense into conflict with the American mythology of a Cold War.

Notwithstanding, Biden’s itinerary is purposed to orchestrate an adversarial transatlantic position towards Russia and China.

In his Washington Post op-ed, Biden pointedly outlines how his first meetings are aimed at drumming up American leadership pitted against Moscow.

The president wrote: “So, when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States, and with whom we have renewed our connections and shared purpose. We are standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security, starting with its aggression in Ukraine, and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”

Note the inane assertion as if fact that Russia is threatening Europe’s security and is aggressing Ukraine, when in reality it is the U.S. and NATO powers that are weaponizing a rogue regime in Kiev against Russia. The U.S. has supplied $2 billion in weaponry to Kiev since the Western-backed coup d’état in 2014 and NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine. It is NATO forces building up offensive power around Russia, not the other way around.

Biden threw in a few bromides such as “the United States does not seek conflict” with Russia, and he mentioned his extension of the New START treaty back in February (preventing an arms race is hardly a claim to virtue). But these platitudes aside, Biden went on to make lame accusations about Russia’s “interference in our democratic elections”.

It can be confidently posited that President Putin will demolish the baseless claims that Biden is attempting to put forward in Geneva. It will be an intellectual slamming match, not simply due to Putin’s formidable command of detail and argumentation, but largely because the American side has an untenable case owing to its fundamental fallacies.

Let’s just say, the American case against Russia and China is a weak charade of myths and lies, full of hypocrisy and contradiction. It would be hard enough for an agile mind to maintain the implausible narrative that underpins America’s bid for global hegemony. It’s all the more difficult for an aging president to keep up the performance.

That’s why Blinken is staying close to his boss during the whirlwind tour. Because Biden is liable to spin out of control and reap an embarrassing collapse.

The State Department said Biden will be coming from his meeting with allies with “the wind at his back” as he goes on to challenge Putin. More accurately, it should be said, with Blinken propping up the president by reminding him of the dubious script.