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“Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare.”

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NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.

Business is Booming – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.  Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias. 

The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel —  the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing. 

“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”

Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist. 

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.

Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.  Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.

There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020,  6,027 of which were civilian casualties.

In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”

“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”

Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”

Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.

Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists.  This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. 

The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. 

The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes. 

Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.            

These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights. 

The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.  The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues. 

The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.

Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.”  “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.

Neocons and Other Malignancies in the American Body Politic

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They will never give up until we’re all dead

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

It is interesting to observe how, over the past twenty-five years, the United States has become not only a participant in wars in various places on the planet but has also evolved into being the prime initiator of most of the armed conflict. Going back to the Balkans in the nineteen-nineties and moving forward in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia there is almost always an American leading role where there is bombing and killing. And where there is no actual war, there are threats and sanctions intended to make other nations come to heel, be they in Latin America like Venezuela, or Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea in Asia. And then there is the completely senseless act of turning major competitors like Russia and China, as we are now seeing, into enemies, with a proxy war raging in Ukraine, threats over Taiwan, and the world moving one step closer to a nuclear disaster.

It seems to me that the transition from an America bumbling its way into war and the current situation where wars are pursued as a matter of course coincides with a certain political development in the United States, which is the rise of neoconservatives as the foreign and national security policy makers in both major parties. This has developed together with the evolution of the view that the United States can do no wrong by definition, indeed, that it has a unique and God-given right to establish and police the globe through something that it invented, exploits and has dubbed the “rules based international order.”

Who would have thought that a bunch of Jewish student-activists, mostly leftists, originally conspiring in a corner of the cafeteria in the City College of New York would create a cult type following that now aspires to rule the world? The neocons became politically most active in the 1960s and eventually some of them attached themselves to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, declaring their evolution had come about because they were “liberals mugged by reality.” The neoconservative label was first used to describe their political philosophy in 1973. Since that time, they have diversified and succeeded in selling their view to a bipartisan audience that the US should embrace an aggressive interventionist foreign policy and must be the world hegemon. To be sure their desire for overwhelming military power has been strongly shaped by their tribal cohesion which has fed a compulsion to have Washington serve as the eternal protector of Israel, but the hegemonistic approach has inevitably led to expanding conflict all over the world and a willingness to challenge, confront and defeat other existing great powers. Hence the support for a needless and pointless war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” and a growing conflict with China over Taiwan to do the same in Asia. To make sure that the Republicans do not waver on that mission, leading neocon Bill Kristol has recently raised $2 million to do some heavy lobbying to make sure that they stay on track to confront the Kremlin in Europe.

One of the leading neocon families is the Kagans, who have successfully penetrated and come to dominate the establishment foreign policy centers in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Victoria Nuland nee Nudelman, the wife of Robert Kagan, is entrenched at the State Department where she is now the Deputy Secretary, the number two position. Up until recently, she was one of the top three officials at State, all of whom were and are Jewish Zionists. Indeed, under Joe Biden Zionist Jews dominate the national security structure, to include the top level of the State Department, the head of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Intelligence, the President’s Chief of Staff, and the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nuland’s hawkish appeal is apparently bipartisan as she has served in senior positions under Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. As adviser to Cheney, she was a leading advocate of war with Iraq, working with other Jewish neocons Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at Defense and also Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office. As there was no actual threat to the US from Saddam Hussein she and her colleagues invented one, the WMD that they sold to the media and to idiots like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nuland is also considered to be close to Hillary Clinton and the recently deceased ghastly former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. All of her government assignments have included either invading or severely sanctioning some country considered by her and her colleagues to be unfriendly. She particularly hates the Russians and anyone who is hostile to Israel.

Apparently, Nuland’s record of being seriously wrong in the policies she promoted has only served to improve her resume in Washington’s hawkish foreign policy establishment and when Biden came into the presidency she found herself appointed to the number three position at the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her return to power with the Democrats might also be due in part to the activism of her husband Robert, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, who was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Robert famously has never seen a war he disapproved of and, while urging Europe to do more defense spending, commented that “When it comes to use of military force “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.” Robert’s brother Frederick, a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and Frederick’s wife Kimberly, who heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War, are also regarded as neocon royalty.

Nuland is particularly well known for her being the driving force behind the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 that replaced the fairly-elected but friendly-to-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych with a selected candidate more accommodating to the US and Western Europe. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has been unstable ever since and the current war, also initiated by interference from the US and UK, has brought about the deaths and wounding of an estimated half million Ukrainians and Russians.

Nuland was recently in Africa, stirring up developments in Niger, which has experienced a recent military coup that removed a president who was corrupt but also a friend of the US and France, both of which have troops stationed in the country. As I write this, a number of African nations (ECOWAS) friendly to US and French interests in the region are gathering together their own military force to reverse the coup, but there is little enthusiasm for the project. We will see how that turns out, but predictably Nuland is advertising a possible intervention as a “restoration of democracy.”

And there is more over the horizon with neocons like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Nuland in charge of US foreign policy and supported by most of congress and a Jewish dominated media and entertainment industry. Joe Biden is too weak and too much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby to pursue any policies that would be beneficial to the American people in general, so the course will be set by the current crop of zealots, just as Donald Trump was guided by his Christian Zionist advisers.

If you want to understand just how what remains of our republic is in a bus being driven over the cliff by a group that has no regard for most of the citizens of the country that they reside in, one only has to read some of what passes for neocon analysis of what must be done to make America “safe.” Not surprisingly, it also involves Israel and a war on behalf of the Jewish state.

One astonishingly audacious article that appeared on August 13th in The Hill entitled “If Israel strikes Iran over its nuclear program, the US must have its back,” gives Israel the option of starting a war for any or no reason with the United States compelled to join in in support. It was written Michael Makovsky, a well-known Jewish neocon, and Chuck Wald. Makovsky is President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) while Wald is a former general who also is affiliated with that group as a “distinguished fellow,” which means he is getting paid generously to serve as a mouthpiece providing credibility for the group. For those unfamiliar with The Hill, it is an inside the beltway defense contractor funded online magazine that pretends to be serious but which is actually an integral part of the status quo Zionist and war-on-demand network. That the Jewish Institute for National Security is “of America” is, of course, a characteristically clever euphemism.

The article begins with “The Biden administration should learn from its unpreparedness for the Russia-Ukraine war and begin to prepare for a major Israel-Iran conflict. The administration needs to set aside its differences with the Israeli government, overcome its aversion to conflict with Iran, and begin to work closely with Jerusalem to prepare for the growing likelihood that Israel will feel it has no choice but to initiate a military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. In ‘No Daylight,’ a new report from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)…retired senior military officers and national security experts explain that whatever differences the US might now have with Israel over Iran policy, our two countries’ interests will be aligned after an Israeli strike. Consequently, in preparing its response, the U.S. guiding principle should be ‘no daylight with Israel,’ to ensure Israeli military success, mitigate Iranian retaliation and limit the scope of the conflict — vital interests for both countries.”

That war with Iran is a “vital interest” for the United States is, of course, not really explained as the point is to let Israel to decide on the issue of war and peace for the United States. The article then trots out the old “credibility” argument, i.e. that if we don’t go to war no one will ever trust our security guarantees: “A US betrayal of its close Israeli ally, at a time of great peril for the Jewish state, would be ‘one of the greatest catastrophes ever,’ an Arab leader told us privately recently. Because Israel is widely perceived as a close American ally, the US stance as Israel risks thousands of casualties in defense of its very existence, will resound broadly. Strong American support will reassure allies from Warsaw to Abu Dhabi and Taipei; American equivocation will shred Washington’s credibility and embolden adversaries from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing.”

One would love to know who the anonymous Arab leader so concerned about Israel is and, of course, the Jewish state is not in fact an American ally apart from in the fertile imaginations of congressmen, the media and the White House. And Israel will, of course, need more weapons and money from the US taxpayer to include “expediting delivery to Israel of KC-46A tankers, precision-guided munitions, F-15 and F-35 aircraft, and air and missile defenses…. Washington should accelerate building integrated regional air, missile and maritime defenses against persistent Iranian threats.” And America must be prepared to expand the war: “Privately, Iranian and Hezbollah leadership should be warned that heavy retaliation against Israel…will prompt severe Israeli and/or American responses that could threaten their very grasp on power. Upon commencement of an Israeli strike, the United States should promptly resupply Israel with Iron Dome interceptors, precision-guided munitions, ammunition and spare parts, and deploy Patriot air defenses to Israel…”

So the United States must be prepared to turn over its national security to Israel in exchange for what gain for Americans? In part it would apparently involve “finding a permanent solution to Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program” which is based on a lie even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for over 20 years that Iran is only six months away from a weapon. Both the CIA and Mossad have confirmed that Iran has no such program while Israel does have a secret illegal nuclear arsenal built using enriched uranium and nuclear triggers stolen from the US. The article concludes with another reference to the non-existing program, claiming “the most effective way to address Iran’s nuclear program already has been articulated by President Biden and communicated by America’s ambassador in Jerusalem: ‘Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with it, and we’ve got their back.’”

Supporting Israeli war crimes is not the way to go. As Chris Hedges puts it correctly, there is no compelling American interest in damaging itself by supporting Israel blindly, quite the contrary: “The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of US dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless. Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars.”

And, of course, while Israel engages in slaughter and torture it always portrays itself as the victim only engaged in fighting against “terrorists.” I have a better idea for where we should go with all of this. President Joe Biden should be impeached for ignoring war powers legislation and indicating that he is willing to sacrifice US interests and kill American soldiers, few or plausibly none of whom will actually be Jewish since it is not an occupation that attracts them, to please and support a manifestly evil foreign government. And Donald Trump should also be punished for having done much the same type of pandering to a foreign country while in office. Meanwhile, haul Makovsky and Wald together with their buddies at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) down to the Justice Department and put them in jail for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) in that they are willfully acting as agents of a foreign government and are operating corruptly to serve the interests of that government. The criminals at AIPAC are already using their associated PACs to oust targeted members of Congress up for re-election in 2024 who have in any way been critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian. And while you’re at it Mr. Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, please have Mr. Blinken and Ms. Nuland pop by for a chat just for starters and see how far you can make the laws apply to those in power. There is some confusion evident here as Israel is not part of the United States, no matter how politically dominant and wealthy its lobby might be. Time to put an end to this nonsense and call it out for what it is – it is treason.

The decline of America is becoming an accepted fact

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By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

On July 5 of this year, the New York Times published an article titled “America Lives on Borrowed Money.”

It states that borrowing is expensive. A rising portion of federal earnings, money that could be utilized to help the American people, is returned to investors who buy government bonds in the form of interest payments. Instead of collecting taxes from the rich, the government pays the rich to borrow their money.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the government will spend more on interest than on national defense by 2029, and interest payments will account for 3.6 percent of national GDP by 2033.

The authors of the article believe that the situation is becoming more and more alarming and painful, and therefore radical decisions should be made.

However, with the growing division of US political forces, these alternatives are no longer visible, especially since “Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic,” according to the British-based Economist.

The fact that President Biden has been indicted with impeachment by the Republican-led House of Representatives cannot be overlooked: On June 22, the House voted 219 to 208 to send two articles of impeachment to the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, one for abuse of power and the other for dereliction of duty.

What is interesting is the evaluation of the current scenario made not only by Americans but also by political analysts from emerging countries. For example, the Saudi-based Arab News reported on June 25 this year that the United States’ political system is in disarray and the country is extremely fragmented.

The author puts the current problem in the United States on a par with the fall of the Roman Empire: “You cannot be a world leader if your society is crumbling and your leadership is divided, indecisive, and weak.” Especially when the media, once lauded as a strong weapon of truth, has devolved into a tool of political bias motivated by profit rather than principle, and free speech is dead in America.

According to the author, American influence in South America and Africa is likewise dwindling: America has never been weaker than it is today in its relatively short history.

On June 19, this year, Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst for Al Jazeera TV, noted that signs that the American-dominated world order was crumbling had become increasingly visible over the previous decade and that America’s political and economic decline had affected its global influence and credibility.

Attempts to resurrect US leadership through the so-called “rules-based international system,” according to the author, have failed. This system was perceived as a rigged arrangement that benefited the West over the rest of the world and violated international law.

Back in the spring, well-known American journalist Ross Douthat determined that the elites of the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia favor Russia and China, and that public opinion in emerging countries is more sympathetic to Russia and China than to America.

Richard Haas, a respected American political analyst who led a prominent think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, for more than 20 years, went even further in his analysis: “The collapse of the American political system means that for the first time, the internal threat has surpassed the external threat. Instead of being a reliable anchor in an unstable world, the United States has become the deepest source of instability and an unreliable model of democracy.”

In September 2022, current US President Joe Biden spoke of American democracy being on the verge of collapse, clinging by a thread.

In response to this, Gulf News, one of the UAE’s leading publications, said that America today is a house divided. More and more Americans acknowledge that the country’s current status is abnormal.

The summer of 2020’s street violence and instability revealed the actual mental state of the world’s most powerful nation. The United States has long had one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, and deteriorating public order has expedited the spread of firearms. The United States ranks first in the number of privately owned guns. Researchers at the Small Arms Survey estimated that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million available civilian guns, about 46% of the world’s civilian gun stockpile. According to the same publication, there are 120 guns per 100 Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, 48% of Americans believe that gun violence is a major issue in the country.

According to polls, only 17% of Americans believe the US criminal justice system treats everyone fairly, according to the USA Today website.

Currently, the issue of migration in America has seriously escalated.

Of course, there will be ups and downs in American domestic politics, but one of the most notable trends in recent years has been the growing polarization of the elite, which could lead to a major split of the country.

A new presidential election will be held in 2024, and many objective observers believe that both parties, Republicans and Democrats, will protest the results. Since 2000, contesting presidential elections has been a tradition.

When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, the Democratic Party functionaries became full-time election deniers, emphasizing that the Democratic Party leadership and journalists, its supporters, had done nothing wrong: Vladimir Putin and the Russians were to blame, having hacked the election.

In 2020, Trump claimed that his loss to Biden had been the result of election fraud: the election had been stolen. Within weeks, the Republican Party’s mantra became “stop the stealing.”

A recent study found that more than half of Americans now expect another civil war “within the next couple of years,” with numerous forecasts for the end of America.

One of them says that if Trump, or any other Republican, occupies the White House, Californians are taking serious steps toward withdrawing from the United States.

Another scenario that is being seriously studied assumes that red, or Republican states will launch an independence movement if the Democratic Party wins, including Biden’s second term.

Many analysts are debating the prospect of a significant civil conflict in the United States. Meanwhile, some political analysts have noticed a discernible strengthening of the so-called neoconservative positions among the American ruling elite, who are adamant that Washington should be in charge of the entire world and harshly punish those who disagree with them. Their stance on the Ukraine issue has the potential to push the world to the verge of a nuclear war. This group’s careless acts have already generated a sizable number of issues and fresh crises.

In order to find a way out of the current impasse in international affairs, more and more developing countries are turning to Russia and China. They place their expectations in this respect, above all, on the approaching BRICS conference, where the enlargement of this association may be announced.

Why Kim Dotcom Connects The DNC Email Leak To The Murder Of Seth Rich

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By: b

Source: Moon of Alabama

Last week we learned a new fact about the DNC email leak in 2016 and of the events that likely led to the killing of Seth Rich.

A quite aggressive Wikipedia page discusses the Murder of Seth Rich:

The murder of Seth Rich occurred on July 10, 2016, at 4:20 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Rich died about an hour and a half after being shot twice in the back. The perpetrators were never apprehended; police suspected he had been the victim of an attempted robbery.

The 27-year-old Rich was an employee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and his murder spawned several right-wing conspiracy theories, including the false claim, contradicted by the law enforcement branches that investigated the murder, that Rich had been involved with the leaked DNC emails in 2016. It was also contradicted by the July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents for hacking the e-mail accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials and by the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion the leaked DNC emails were part of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Fact-checking websites like PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org stated that the theories were false and unfounded. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post wrote that the promotion of these conspiracy theories was an example of fake news.

Well, that is not what really had happened.

Yes, Seth Rich worked as IT administrator for the Democratic National Committee. He was a fan of Bernie Sanders. During the 2016 primaries DNC functionaries did their best to work against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary Clinton. To make that public Seth Rich collected an archive of all DNC emails, copied it onto an USB stick and looked for someone who would publish them.

UPDATE 20:00 UTC

The former British ambassador Craig Murray said that he was given the USB stick by an intermediary of a disgusted Democratic whistleblower and brought it from Washington DC to Wikileaks which eventually published the emails. The data involved were not only from the DNC but also from Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta:

WikiLeaks made the DNC messages public in July and the incriminating emails from Podesta were published in October. The messages predominantly showed that DNC officials were bent on sabotaging the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton. Murray insisted that the information was leaked and not hacked by Russia.

“Neither of the leaks came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks…leakers were motivated by disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.”

/End Update/

Craig Murray did not mention Seth Rich. Up to last week we did not know if Seth Rich really made contact with Wikileaks.

But we did know that the DNC was never ‘hacked’ by anything Russia. The date/timestamps of the leaked files were consistent with local copying and inconsistent with an internet transfer. The company Crowdstrike which was hired to protect the DNC’s networks and which did an investigation into the case never observed an actual ‘Russian’ hack or any data exfiltration from the DNC network. As ITwire wrote in May 2020:

The controversial American security firm CrowdStrike, which was called in to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in 2016, had no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated despite public assertions that this had occurred, according to the transcript of an interview released by the US Government a few days ago.

The transcript was from an interview conducted with CrowdStrike’s president of services and chief security officer Shawn Henry by the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, but only released to the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller who conducted a two-year inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential poll.

While the exfiltration of emails from the DNC server has been accepted as a proven fact, Henry’s answers to queries from committee members make it clear that this was definitely not the case.

In one typical exchange, Henry was asked, “What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?” To this Henry responded, “There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence – but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”

PolitiFact, Snopes and FactCheck.org are, unsurprisingly, wrong with their assertions.

But how did the emails find their way to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. Assange has never explained that. But Wikileaks set out a $20,000 reward for finding the killer of Seth Rich. That made it obvious that there was a connection between them but no one gave further explanations of it.

It took until last week for the world to learn more about what really happened. On April 21 some rather pungent NAFO activist, Pekka Kallionniemi, launched a Twitter thread with an attack on a person well known in IT circles:

Pekka Kallioniemi @P_Kallioniemi – 10:09 UTC · Apr 21, 2023

In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a German-Finnish entrepreneur, conspiracy theorist and propagandist, Kim Dotcom. He’s best-known for his illegal online activities and projects, for his hate towards the US, and for his unwavering support for Putin’s imperialism.
1/18
[…]
In 2017, Dotcom claimed that he worked with Seth Rich, a US citizen and employee on the Democratic National Committee who was murdered during a suspected robbery.His death spawned..
10/18
[…]
..several conspiracy theories stating that he was a whistleblower who had leaked documents damning Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta. The hack-and-leak operation was actually conducted by Russian intelligence service GRU’s hacker group called Fancy Bear.
11/18

Who is Kim Dotcom you might ask:

Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz; 21 January 1974), also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur and political activist who lives in Glenorchy, New Zealand.
…
Dotcom is the founder and former CEO of the defunct file hosting service Megaupload (2005–2012). In 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized its website and pressed charges against Dotcom, including criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud. Dotcom was residing in New Zealand at the time; at the request of US authorities, New Zealand police raided his home in 2012 and arrested him. Dotcom posted bail and has been going through legal proceedings ever since to avoid extradition to the United States.
…
In 2017, Dotcom played a role in spreading conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich.

In May 2017 the Washington Post wrote:

When Seth Rich’s Gmail account received an alert this week from Mega.com, attempting to start a new account on a website created by the New Zealand-based Internet businessman and convicted hacker Kim Dotcom, his family knew that something was off.

Over seven frenzied days, Dotcom had become a leading purveyor of the theory that Rich, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead near his home in Northeast Washington last summer, had supplied DNC documents to WikiLeaks and was killed as a result. Multiple security analysts and an FBI investigation have tied the release to hackers with ties to Russia. D.C. police have said repeatedly that they think Rich was slain in a random robbery attempt.

According to experts and Rich’s family, the emailed invitation from welcome@mega.nz appeared to be an attempt to gain access to Rich’s email. Joel Rich, who monitors his late son’s Gmail account when new emails come in, did not click the link. Dotcom had not worked at Mega itself for years, but he was promising on Twitter to prove that the younger Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks — and Fox News host Sean Hannity was telling his 2.37 million Twitter followers to be ready for a ­revelation.

Hannity had invited Dotcom to appear on his show for what he said on Twitter would be a “#GameChanger” interview. The implication: that Dotcom would finally offer evidence of his claim that Rich had sent internal DNC documents to WikiLeaks before his death.

All that began to unravel Tuesday afternoon when Fox News retracted a story that had claimed the same Rich-WikiLeaks connection, telling readers that the article was “not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” Fox News did not respond to a request for comment, but Dotcom wrote on his website that he would not speak further about his allegations.

Since then little on the issue was heard from Kim Dotcom. There was no explanation why he was involved in the Seth Rich issue in the first place.

But after Pekka Kallionniemi’s attack was widely retweeted Kim Dotcom contested it:

Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom – 0:41 UTC · Apr 22, 2023

🧵 NAFO bullying exposed

I’m responding to an attempted character assassination by NAFO troll @P_Kallioniemi who prides himself with having attacked over 150 “pro-Russian actors and propagandists.”

His problem is that he picked the wrong guy for his cyber bullying.

Who is Pekka? A research fellow at Tampere University in Finland and a self-proclaimed disinformation expert. Ironic because most of the claims in his attack against me are false. I’m tagging the Dean of Tampere University @SaariJuho to make him aware of Pekka’s NAFO bullying.

First of all I’m in good company because some of the people Pekka has bullied on Twitter are @ggreenwald, @mtaibbi, @rustyrockets & @jimmy_dore. None are “Russian propagandists” or “grifters looking to make some easy money” as Pekka claims. They are truth-tellers, like myself.

False claim 1: Kim was deported from Thailand to Germany.<

Truth: I was never deported from Thailand. I left voluntarily.
[…]
False claim 6: Dotcom claimed that he worked with Seth Rich.

Truth: Seth Rich contacted me and offered information about the DNC. I rejected receiving the data personally and forwarded him to someone close to Wikileaks. That’s how Wikileaks got the DNC and Hillary Clinton leaks.

False claim 7: The (DNC) hack and leak operation was conducted by Russian intelligence.

Truth: A forensic analysis of the leaked DNC data by former US intelligence officials proved that it wasn’t remotely transferred. The meta data shows that the files were transferred locally.

The bold part is significant as it is first time that we learn:

  • That there was a direct connection between Seth Rich and Wikileaks.
  • Why Kim Dotcom had involved himself in the Seth Rich case after Rich had been killed.

You may say that the first claim is not new because many had presumed that. But no one involved had ever actually publicly made the claim. Dotcom’s assertion of this connection through him is new.

After contacting Kim Dotcom Seth Rich was pointed to someone else near to Wikileaks. Eventually Wikileaks asked Craig Murray to fly to DC and to bring the files to Wikileaks. The  Clinton server emails were published by Wikileaks in March 2016. The DNC emails were published in June and July 2016. The Podesta emails were published in October 2016.

I hope that Kim Dotcom will one day write down the complete sequence of events that are related to Seth Rich and the publishing of the Clinton, Podesta and DNC leaks by Wikileaks.

Journalistic Malpractice on Trial: What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods

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By Nolan Higdon

Source: Project Censored

“This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of the ‘volume of the evidence and as to the directness of the evidence.’” This sentiment was echoed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe who noted, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues.”

In the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems accuses Fox News Channel of falsely reporting that Dominion’s voting machines fraudulently delivered victory to Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Court documents attained by other media outlets reveal that hosts and other high-ranking Fox News Channel officials – including the Chairman and CEO of Fox’s parent company News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch – knew these reports were false, but aired them because they were more concerned with confirming their audience’s belief that Donald Trump won the election.

The evidence presented in the court documents speaks to the journalistic malpractice that plagues the cable news industry. Journalistic malpractice refers to professional journalists who privilege ideological bias and profits over truth in their reporting. Fox News Channel is patient zero for the plague of journalistic malpractice. It was created in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes, a media consultant for several Republican presidents, as a political project to sell conservative culture and policy to the American public with pro-conservative propaganda disguised as journalism. For example, Fox News Channel has

  • falsely claimed that other media outlets did not cover the conservative Tea Party rallies;
  • utilized videos out of context to inflate the perceived size of conservative protests;
  • labeled former President Barack Obama a racist;
  • declared Osama bin Laden as a John Kerry supporter;
  • perpetuated discredited reports on the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq;
  • introduced digitally altered photos to fabricate Black Lives Matter violence and make New York Timesreporters appear to be revolting.   

Liberals were right to assert that such chicanery was propaganda, not journalism. But before liberal readers scold Fox News viewers, they should remind themselves that the plague of journalistic malpractice has also infected the liberal leaning cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC. Researchers and scholars have noted that the advent of cable and then the internet saw news media outlets shift from attaining the largest audience possible to focusing on a more specific or narrow demographic of the audience. While Fox News Channel sought to cater to Republican Party voting viewers, CNN and MSNBC did the same for Democratic Party voters. This gave the Democratic Party influence over programming that was tantamount to what the Republican Party long enjoyed at Fox.

When Senator U.S. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential bid posed a threat to their desired candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, leaders from the Democratic Party admitted they worked to undermine his campaign. Pro-Democratic party outlets like MSNBC and CNN aided in this effort by

  • creating an unfavorable debate schedule;
  • giving Clinton twice as much and more favorable coverage;
  • publishing 16 negative articles about Sanders in Washington Post (owned by major Democratic Party funder Jeff Bezos) in 16 hours;
  • ghost editing previous news articles to diminish Sanders’ quarter century of accomplishments;
  • inviting his opponent’s surrogates to attack his character under the auspices of being objective journalists.

Their smear of Sanders continued in 2020 when

  • the Democratic Party-leaning news outlets misled the public about Sanders’ polling numbers;
  • CNN’s Abby Phillips drew gasps for ignoring Sanders’ claim that he never said a “woman could not be president;”
  • James Carville on MSNBC made the baseless claim that Russia was supporting Sanders;
  • MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Sander’s primary victories to the Nazi’s defeat of the French, an unfortunate comparison as Sanders’ family was murdered in the holocaust.

Journalistic malpractice also plagued Covid-19 coverage. Starting in 2020, CNN’s Chris Cuomo utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to host his brother, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The jovial segments seemed like campaign advertisements as Chris treated Andrew as the anti-thesis to then President Trump: a competent executive who took decisive action to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Although, the Democratic versus Republican framing attracted partisan audiences, in reality, Andrew Cuomo and Trump were all too similar: both concealed the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in their jurisdiction, both put patients at risk with kickbacks to industry partners, and both utilized media contacts to stifle press reports about their alleged sexual crimes.

The partisan falsehoods in cable news includes the production of powerful, long- running false stories designed to convince their audiences that the other party is wrong and crazy. For years now, conservatives and Fox News Channel perpetuated the baseless Qanon conspiracy, which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles – mainly in the Democratic Party – runs global affairs but Trump will break up the conspiracy. The absurdity of this conspiracy is tantamount to liberal leaning news media’s reporting on Russiagate, which sought to discredit Republicans. Since 2016, Russiagate – the story that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – was perpetuated by a series of false stories from Democratic Party-friendly media including

  • Russia hacking a Vermont power plant;
  • putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan;
  • shifting election outcomes around the world;
  • turning Trump into an asset since 1987;
  • labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story as fake news.

Conservatives rightly see this reporting and believe liberals are insane.

Both factions need to look in a mirror. While audiences can clearly see the insanity in other networks’ viewers, they rarely seem to see it in themselves. Indeed, in the same week that CNN and others were having a schadenfreude moment over the Dominion v. Fox case, they hosted a commentator on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio without disclosing that he had lobbied for the train company Norfolk Southern. This example of hypocrisy and journalistic malpractice is not only costly to CNN’s credibility, but our democracy as well.   

Without a robust media system that privileges truth over preaching to the choir, the public will have endless debates devoid of facts on key issues such as critical race theory, vaccine efficacy, the origins of the COVID-19 virus, climate change, transgender issues, Ukraine, mysterious balloons, and more. Democratic discourse will be reduced to seeing Republicans as MAGA-hat wearing, blue lives matter-flag waving, gun nuts, and Democrats as medical mask wearing, “this house cares about everything” front-lawn sign adorning, professional victims and virtue signalers. These caricatures have never really been accurate, but as long as the nation is infected with the plague of journalist malpractice they will surely be perpetuated.

While the courts are unlikely to deliver solace from political party propaganda disguised as journalism, they have provided some wisdom. Both Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson of MSNBC and Fox News Channel respectively, have been brought to court for spreading false information and were exonerated because the judges concluded that no reasonable person would believe either of them were telling the truth. That is good advice, and viewers would be wise to remember it every time they consider watching cable news.

The Lords of Chaos

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The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

We’re Number One – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China. 

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes. 

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq. 

“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”

Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine.

“I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. 

There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. 

Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal and murderous, but in terms of a body count, we far outstripped his killings, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country, devastated its modern infrastructure, wiped out its thriving and educated middle class, gave birth to rogue militias and installed a kleptocracy that uses the country’s oil revenues to enrich itself. Ordinary Iraqis are impoverished. Hundreds of Iraqis protesting in the streets against the kleptocracy have been gunned down by police. There are frequent power outages. The Shi’ite majority, closely allied with Iran, dominates the country. 

The occupation of Iraq, beginning 20 years ago today, turned the Muslim world and the Global South against us. The enduring images we left behind from two decades of war include President Bush standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier barely one month after he invaded Iraq, the bodies of Iraqis in Fallujah that were burned with white phosphorus and the photos of torture by U.S. soldiers. 

The U.S. is desperately attempting to use Ukraine to repair its image. But the rank hypocrisy of calling for “a rules-based international order” to justify the $113 billion in arms and other aid that the U.S. has committed to send to Ukraine, won’t work. It ignores what we did. We might forget, but the victims do not. The only redemptive path is charging Bush, Cheney and the other architects of the wars in the Middle East, including Joe Biden, as war criminals in the International Criminal Court. Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him. 

Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi civil service and army were not disbanded after the U.S. invaded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the U.S. could be the sole major power in a unipolar world. They ignore the massive military expenditures spent annually to achieve this fantasy. They ignore that the war in Iraq was only an episode in this demented quest. 

A national reckoning with the military fiascos in the Middle East would expose the self-delusion of the ruling class. But this reckoning is not taking place. We are trying to wish the nightmares we perpetuated in the Middle East away, burying them in a collective amnesia. “World War III Begins With Forgetting,” warns Stephen Wertheim.

The celebration of our national “virtue” by pumping weapons into Ukraine, by sustaining at least 750 military bases in more than 70 countries and by expanding our naval presence in the South China Sea, is meant to fuel this dream of global dominance.

What the mandarins in Washington fail to grasp is that most of the globe does not believe the lie of American benevolence or support its justifications for U.S. interventions. China and Russia, rather than passively accepting U.S. hegemony, are building up their militaries and strategic alliances. China, last week, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish relations after seven years of hostility, something once expected of U.S. diplomats. The rising influence of China creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who call for war with Russia and China, one that will have consequences far more catastrophic than those in the Middle East.

There is a national weariness with permanent war, especially with inflation ravaging family incomes and 57 percent of Americans unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party, who peddled the lies about Iraq, are war parties. Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat. The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.

The pimps of war, leaping from fiasco to fiasco, cling to the chimera of U.S. global supremacy. The dance macabre will not stop until we publicly hold them accountable for their crimes, ask those we have wronged for forgiveness and give up our lust for uncontested global power. The day of reckoning, vital if we are to protect what is left of our anemic democracy and curb the appetites of the war machine, will only come when we build mass anti-war organizations that demand an end to the imperial folly threatening to extinguish life on the planet. 

The Twitter Files reveal influence of Russiagate disinformation

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The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story shows how the Russian boogeyman is wielded to serve political goals and bury inconvenient facts.

(Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Since 2016, US audiences have been flooded with claims that Russia has waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to influence them, and that Donald Trump and a bottomless cast of associates were somehow complicit.

No “scandal” in US history has yielded such a lengthy rap sheet of falsehoods, debunkings, and retractions. The Mueller investigation and parallel Congressional inquiries found no evidence for the all-consuming theories of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. Allegations of Russian government email hacking and social media operations are equally dubious, most notably on the foundational allegation that Russian intelligence stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks.

Even if we were to ignore the evidentiary gaps and accept each assertion about “Russian interference” at face value, the totality could in no way justify even a shred of the multi-year Russia-mania. With no shame and without end, prominent political and media voices have imbued Russian bots, memes, and hackers — real or imagined — with the power to “sow chaos” in US society, swing election results, and even become worthy of comparison to the attacks of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Given the Iraq WMD-esque preponderance of hyperbole and outright lies in the incessant claims of Russian subterfuge, it is reasonable to conclude that the US intelligence officials and political-media actors who have spread them are waging exactly what they accuse Russia of: a politically motivated disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the general public.

The newly disclosed Twitter Files — a cache of internal communications from the social media giant — offer new evidence of one of the Russiagate disinformation campaign’s core functions: protecting the rule of domestic elites, particularly in the Democratic Party.

In two consecutive presidential elections, the Russian boogeyman has been invoked to stigmatize and silence reporting on the Democratic candidate. It began in 2016, when journalists who reported on the stolen DNC emails’ revelations about Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches or the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders were blamed for Trump’s victory and deemed to be unwitting Kremlin dupes promoting “disinformation” – in reality, factual material that embarrassed the pre-ordained winner.

Four years later, that same playbook was deployed for Clinton’s successor at the top of Democratic ticket, Joe Biden. In the weeks before the November 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post’s reporting about the contents Hunter Biden’s laptop on the grounds that the computer material could be “Russian disinformation.” The Post’s stories detailed how Hunter Biden traded on his family name to secure lucrative business abroad, and raised questions about Joe Biden’s denials of any involvement.

The US media responded to the suppression of the laptop story with indifference or even approval. In one notable case, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the outlet that he co-founded, The Intercept, after its editors attempted to censor his coverage of the laptop controversy. Even stories that had long been public — such as the unqualified Hunter receiving an $80,000-per-month Burisma board seat just months after his father’s administration helped overthrow Ukraine’s government – were effectively off-limits.

There was never a shred of evidence that Russia was behind the laptop story, but that was of no consequence. Dutiful media editors, reporters, and pundits took their cues from a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials, who issued a statement declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

These intelligence veterans’ claim was in fact a classic Russiagate disinformation operation, as the Twitter files newly underscore.

FTX & the Joke of US Democracy

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From its founding in 2017, the one-man company rose to a “partner organisation” of the WEF and second largest donor to Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election. It has now gone bust.

Sam Bankman-Fried during the Bitcoin 2021 conference. (Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Craig Murray

Source: Consortium News

NOTE: This is is what I think of as a signpost article — it points you to something the mainstream media is deliberately not giving the prominence it needs, but I have no personal expertise or inside knowledge to give you. I am just giving you a start to get going. Several readers will have a much better understanding than I, and I encourage you to give your thoughts in comments below.

The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors’ money with it.

That is some trajectory.

The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it:

I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust.

FTX was a one-man company belonging to Sam Bankman-Fried. The board consisted of him, an employee and the company lawyer. Over $20 billion of investors’ funds from FTX were funneled to a fund management company, Alameda Research, also owned by Sam Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried donated $37 million to the Democrats for the 2022 elections. Every penny of that originated with duped FTX investors. That is in addition to the $5 million given to the Biden 2020 campaign. FTX, of course, crashed instantly after those mid-term elections, which is interesting timing.

The BBC and The Guardian were constantly bombarding us with the term “democracy denier” in their coverage of the U.S. elections, strangely not in reference to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s ludicrous claims that Russian interference was the cause of her loss in 2016.

I view as a joke any notion that the U.S. is a democracy. Democracy is about giving citizens a choice of political direction. The 2022 elections saw a simply incredible expenditure on campaigning of $ 9.7 billion. Yes, nearly $10 billion. This is not democracy. It is a huge exercise in corporate control from which the ordinary citizen is frozen out.

Despite an aggressive tribalism which has stalemated the political system for decades, the difference in policy platform between Democrats and Republicans is highly marginal, with no alternative on offer to rampant and uninhibited commercial exploitation of the population by the super-wealthy.

The Democrats are marginally more keen on attacking other countries; the Republicans are marginally more against measures to curb carbon emissions. Vaunted differences on immigration and welfare turn out to be very small indeed, with very little changing when the White House does.

American elections are simply about the super-rich funneling in vast donations, expecting to benefit when their team gets its nose in the trough, or often donating to both sides to benefit either way.

I am not sure what the connection to democracy is supposed to be.

One simple fact illustrates the true nature of the bribery fest. By far the majority of the funds channeled through Political Action Committees, or PACs, are given to incumbents who face no serious threat to re-election anyway.

The PACs are interested in bribing those in power, not changing those in power. They are simply lobby groups with an opportunity for legal bribery. To illustrate that, the largest donating PACs are:

National Association of Realtors
National Beer Wholesalers Association
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
Credit Union National Association
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
American Crystal Sugar

It is worth noting that Bankman-Fried donated 10 times as much as the largest PAC donation. This brought access — he and his brother had meetings inside the White House on March 7, April 22 and May 12.

It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that FTX was involved in Ukraine, offering to exchange cryptocurrency for fiat and send it to Ukraine in an official partnership with the Ukrainian government. This from their press release

“Aid For Ukraine is cooperating with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX which converts crypto funds received into fiat and sends the donations to the National Bank of Ukraine. This marks the first-ever instance of a cryptocurrency exchange directly cooperating with a public financial entity to provide a conduit for crypto donations. Earlier this month, FTX already converted $1 million worth of SOL and transferred it to the National Bank of Ukraine.”

The collapse of the Bankman Fried scam was allegedly caused by hackers stealing what should have been a comparatively small portion of the assets of FTX, had they not been hived off elsewhere. Doubtless we will shortly hear from state salaried conspiracy theorists that this was Russia/Guccifer/an ISP address traced by Bellingcat to inside the Kremlin.
What we really have here is an Allen Stanford for 2022, with added political connections.
We would do well to heed the advice of crypto developer Nikolai Mushegian, who had as his Twitter profile: “Larpers who self-style as CEOs or CTOs or VCs are a bigger problem than the establishment. They can’t build anything and will sell you out in 2 seconds.”
His final tweet was posted on Oct. 28:

The next day he drowned in the sea off a beach in Puerto Rico, where he lived. He was fully clothed including a jacket. The police are not treating it as homicide so presumably their theory is suicide by wading out to sea.

States of course have a massive incentive to destroy non-fiat currencies, or convert them into a new category of regulation. I am interested in the current discussion on smart state digital currencies where the state can track, control and block any transaction and know in real time exactly where each citizen or entity is spending or keeping every penny.

It occurs to me this is the wrong way round. The state belongs to its citizens, not the citizens to the state. We should be able to track online every single penny of public money in real time and see how it is spent. Imagine being able to follow every penny of the billions the Tories spent on fraudulent PPE contracts, for example.

The only people whose personal currency should be able to be tracked are those who hold, or have held, positions of power in the state. Their wealth and dealings should be available in great detail to public view. As for the rest of us, our money is ours and we are entitled to privacy.