Tag Archives: North Korea

Countering NATO’s Efforts to Destroy China

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NATO’s efforts to destroy Russia’s Black Sea fleet is a practice run to destroy China’s, Declan Hayes writes.

By Declan Hayes

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

NATO’s efforts to destroy Russia’s Black Sea fleet is a practice run to destroy China’s. Although some of the soldiers guiding those air and sea drones towards Crimea may be Ukrainians, most of them are undoubtedly British and American. As, of course, are the spy planes pinpointing their Russian targets.

Although Russia has adopted a softly softly approach to all this unprecedented aggression, our focus is on the longer game where NATO is trying to contain the Russian navy and coral the Russian army and air force. To NATO, Ukrainian sovereignty is of no account one way or the other. The main objective is to herd Russia’s Armed Forces into a strategic stockade from which they have no way to drive forward. That seems to be working a charm in this NATO naval guerilla campaign against Sevastopol where NATO has exploited the grain deal corridors in much the same way that the Israeli air force hides behind civilian planes to bomb civilian Syrian targets.

Having steadied their Russian front, NATO can then turn their attention to the Chinese front which they hope will play out in a similar fashion. Because the Chinese Army has no need to cross the Russian border, it is redundant to external calculations unless it once again crosses the Yalu River.

Should a token force of 100,000 crack CPLA advisors, with Pyongyang’s blessing, sweep southwards towards the 38th Parallel, that would considerably complicate matters for China’s American friends as more maritime waters than they could presently handle would then be in play. Given that North Korea has thrown its weight behind Russia, Pyongyang would undoubtedly welcome such military help as China could provide in upgrading their missile and related technologies.

As the war against China will undoubtedly be primarily a maritime war, the Korean peninsula may not be quite in the eye of the storm, which will zero in on breaking China’s main shipping routes. As things currently stand, North Korea is just a card China can keep in reserve until it is time to play it.

Josh Kozlov, the leader of the U.S. Army’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, and the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) are amongst the NATO worthies who have opined on the crucial role advanced electronic warfare is playing in the Black Sea and will play in the South China Sea. Given that Hansard has British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace on record calling Ukraine a “battle lab”, a good try out for the best of British hardware and software, no doubt Wallace will enjoy a good stress test against Blighty’s North Korean and Chinese electronic warfare peers.

Unelected European Union dictator Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, is complaining that China produces cheap electric cars. Those Chinese cads! How dare they copy Japan’s economic growth tactics.

Japan, remember Japan, when the U.S. Occupation troops used to buy their imitation watches and battery radios as a joke during the Korean war. Seiko, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Panasonic had the last laugh there.

As will the Chinese, unless von der Leyen’s American bosses implement a naval blockade on China and thereby cut China off from her shipping routes to protect obsolete European competitors and “the rules based order”.

Although the Yanks have proposed the alternative India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) with the backing of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, the world and his mother know that is all hot air to pretend that NATO has a viable alternative to China’s various economic infrastructural initiatives and that all this shadow boxing is a repeat of the prelude to The Great War when the rise of the German Navy’s dreadnoughts and the proposed Berlin Baghdad railway were seen as fatal threats to the Royal Navy’s maritime dominance.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the CIA hub of Jordan, which are all signed up to Team BRIICS, can expect plenty of NATO threats to come their way if they do not play ball and abandon the Chinese and, in Saudi’s case, the Indians as well, who would also want to send cargo through Saudi waters as part of China’s BRI initiative.

And though therailroad infrastructure linking Greece with Central Europe is a part of the BRI and Pakistan’s Gwadar Port is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), NATO would feel itself entitled to hijack them as part of their mercurial “rules-based order” just as, for the same Nordstream related reasons, the oil and gas pipes beneath the Black Sea are prime targets for NATO’s Ukrainian proxies.

This is no conjecture. Senator Tom Cotton’s report spells out in great detail that NATO need to decouple from China and the Cato Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center and Australian nut job Dr Ross Babbage have all kindly informed us how this war with China will play out more or less as we previously outlined.

Writing for AsiaNikkei, Admiral James Stavridis, who was formerly the 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, tells us that that, as in Ukraine, NATO’s key advantage is in its allies, in its Filipino, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese cannon fodder, in other words, and Forbes tells us that the key to success would be, as we said, a naval blockade.

Assuming, of course, China was not bullied into making the same mistakes Admiral Yamamoto’s Imperial Japanese Navy were forced to make when they attacked Pearl Harbor and the American colony of the Philippines. All American bluster about their god-like omnipotence aside, the Chinese High Command has a full and comprehensive appreciation of the capabilities of America’s military industrial complex and how it has progressed since China defanged it during the Korean war.

But let’s also not forget the Indo China wars where the Viêt Minh had their HQ in a Hanoi ice cream bar and the Viêt Cong had their HQ in a Saigon noodle shop and where the great British travel writer Norman Lewis made some very pertinent comments about the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Laotians and particularly the Vietnamese when he documented his experiences in French Indo China at the start of the Second IndoChina war.

Advantage at Sea—Prevailing With Integrated All-Domain Naval Power spells out how the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard will, like Britannia before Yamamoto showed up, rule the waves. Because NATO is making contingency plans to lace “the straits of Hormuz, Suez, Gibraltar, Malacca, Panama, and Dover” with mines to disrupt supply chains, so must China.

But, if we leave such primitively effective sabotage operations to one side, we can expect NATO to target the digital infrastructure which underwrites the movement of some six million containers transported in approximately 61,000 ships that comprise the world’s trade outside of oil, gas and raw materials. American puppet von der Leyen, as indicated above, has already hinted at that tactic which, given China’s disproportionate power over the infrastructure through which international trade flows, makes sense from the Pentagon’s viewpoint. As they have already run many such pilot programs in insurance and banking against Russia over Ukraine, such efforts must also be factored into China’s calculus which, given China’s geographic and economic size, will be monumentally global in nature.

But then, because all politics is local, China must entice rather than coerce North Korea and Vietnam into its orbit, leaving the Vietnamese in particular with as much ambiguity as those inscrutable masters of intrigue need to defend their own interests in the East (South China) Sea. And, after Vietnam comes the Philippines, which has suffered as much from the Americans as have the Vietnamese. As with Hanoi, so also must China quietly make major diplomatic and economic inroads with Manila, whilst going easy on the jingoism. More carrot, less stick, in other words.

As regards Taiwan, all major players know there is no Chinese hurry there and that it is America and America alone which is using Taiwan as a casus belli. Finally, as regards the long-suffering people of Okinawa and all of Japan Yamamoto, in case they have not heard, is dead, assassinated by the Yanks in 1943. Not only can Japan, with or without another Yamamoto, not prevail in another war but there is no need for Japan to engage in such adventurism as there are much easier ways to commit hara-kiri than picking an unwinnable war with China to the south and Russia to the north.

The Japanese, like the Chinese, should hone their diplomatic skills, perhaps with the help of their good friends in Hanoi and Bangkok and the good people of Taiwan, where Japan and the Japanese are both much admired.

The governments of China, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and those close to them have much more important things to attend to than killing each other to enhance the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin, Northrop, and BAE Systems and ensure further kickbacks for the Capitol Hill war hawks those gangsters bribe. The way forward for all of them is to work together for mutual and mutually respectful economic development, to enhance their military capabilities as needed and to ignore, as much as they can, the tone deaf war drums the Yanks and their toadies are never done beating to death.

War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.” But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending. Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors—Transdigm, for example—managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!” (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.)

It would be one thing if each defense contractor simply took its cut off the top, but instead there is an entire food chain of defense contractors, all of which are legally required, no less, to maximize profits for their shareholders. More than 28,000 companies are involved, but the actual first-tier defense contractors with which the Pentagon places 2/3 of all defense contracts are just the Big Six: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynmics, BAE Systems and Boeing. All the other companies are organized into a pyramid of subcontractors with five levels of hierarchy, and at each level they do their best to milk the tier above them.

The insistence on market-based methods and the requirement of maximizing profitability turns out to be incompatible with defense spending on a very basic level: defense spending is intermittent and cyclical, with long fallow intervals between major orders. This has forced even the Big Six to make cuts to their defense-directed departments in favor of expanding civilian production. Also, in spite of the huge size of the US defense budget, it is of finite size (there being just one planet to blow up), as is the global weapons market. Since, in a market economy, every company faces the choice of grow or get bought out, this has precipitated scores of mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly consolidated marketplace with a few major players in each space.

As a result, in most spaces, of which the report’s authors discuss 17, including the Navy, land forces, air force, electronics, nuclear weapons, space technology and so on, at least a third of the time the Pentagon has a choice of exactly one contractor for any given contract, causing quality and timeliness to suffer and driving up prices.

In a number of cases, in spite of its industrial and financial might, the Pentagon has encountered insoluble problems. Specifically, it turns out that the US has only one shipyard left that is capable of building nuclear aircraft carriers (at all, that is; the USS Gerald Ford is not exactly a success). That is Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport, Virginia. In theory, it could work on three ships in parallel, but two of the slips are permanently occupied by existing aircraft carriers that require maintenance. This is not a unique case: the number of shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines, destroyers and other types of vessels is also exactly one. Thus, in case of a protracted conflict with a serious adversary in which a significant portion of the US Navy has been sunk, ships will be impossible to replace within any reasonable amount of time.

The situation is somewhat better with regard to aircraft manufacturing. The plants that exist can produce 40 planes a month and could produce 130 a month if pressed. On the other hand, the situation with tanks and artillery is absolutely dismal. According to this report, the US has completely lost the competency for building the new generation of tanks. It is no longer even a question of missing plant and equipment; in the US, a second generation of engineers who have never designed a tank is currently going into retirement. Their replacements have no one to learn from and only know about modern tanks from movies and video games. As far as artillery, there is just one remaining production line in the US that can produce barrels larger than 40mm; it is fully booked up and would be unable to ramp up production in case of war. The contractor is unwilling to expand production without the Pentagon guaranteeing at least 45% utilization, since that would be unprofitable.

The situation is similar for the entire list of areas; it is better for dual-use technologies that can be sourced from civilian companies and significantly worse for highly specialized ones. Unit cost for every type of military equipment goes up year after year while the volumes being acquired continuously trend lower—sometimes all the way to zero. Over the past 15 years the US hasn’t acquired a single new tank. They keep modernizing the old ones, but at a rate that’s no higher than 100 a year.

Because of all these tendencies and trends, the defense industry continues to lose not only qualified personnel but also the very ability to perform the work. INDPOL experts estimate that the deficit in machine tools has reached 27%. Over the past quarter-century the US has stopped manufacturing a wide variety of manufacturing equipment. Only half of these tools can be imported from allies or friendly nations; for the rest, there is just one source: China. They analyzed the supply chains for 600 of the most important types of weapons and found that a third of them have breaks in them while another third have completely broken down. In the Pentagon’s five-tier subcontractor pyramid, component manufacturers are almost always relegated to the bottommost tier, and the notices they issue when they terminate production or shut down completely tend to drown in the Pentagon’s bureaucratic swamp.

The end result of all this is that theoretically the Pentagon is still capable of doing small production runs of weapons to compensate for ongoing losses in localized, low-intensity conflicts during a general time of peace, but even today this is at the extreme end of its capabilities. In case of a serious conflict with any well-armed nation, all it will be able to rely on is the existing stockpile of ordnance and spare parts, which will be quickly depleted.

A similar situation prevails in the area of rare earth elements and other materials for producing electronics. At the moment, the accumulated stockpile of these supplies needed for producing missiles and space technology—most importantly, satellites—is sufficient for five years at the current rate of use.

The report specifically calls out the dire situation in the area of strategic nuclear weapons. Almost all the technology for communications, targeting, trajectory calculations and arming of the ICBM warheads was developed in the 1960s and 70s. To this day, data is loaded from 5-inch floppy diskettes, which were last mass-produced 15 years ago. There are no replacements for them and the people who designed them are busy pushing up daisies. The choice is between buying tiny production runs of all the consumables at an extravagant expense and developing from scratch the entire land-based strategic triad component at the cost of three annual Pentagon budgets.

There are lots of specific problems in each area described in the report, but the main one is loss of competence among technical and engineering staff caused by a low level of orders for replacements or for new product development. The situation is such that promising new theoretical developments coming out of research centers such as DARPA cannot be realized given the present set of technical competencies. For a number of key specializations there are fewer than three dozen trained, experienced specialists.

This situation is expected to continue to deteriorate, with the number of personnel employed in the defense sector declining 11-16% over the next decade, mainly due to a shortage of young candidates qualified to replace those who are retiring. A specific example: development work on the F-35 is nearing completion and there won’t be a need to develop a new jet fighter until 2035-2040; in the meantime, the personnel who were involved in its development will be idled and their level of competence will deteriorate.

Although at the moment the US still leads the world in defense spending ($610 billion of $1.7 trillion in 2017, which is roughly 36% of all the military spending on the planet) the US economy is no longer able to support the entire technology pyramid even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. On paper the US still looks like a leader in military technology, but the foundations of its military supremacy have eroded. Results of this are plainly visible:

• The US threatened North Korea with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.

• The US threatened Iran with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.

• The US lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and once the longest military conflict in US history is finally over the political situation there will return to status quo ante with the Taliban in charge and Islamic terrorist training camps back in operation.

• US proxies (Saudi Arabia, mostly) fighting in Yemen have produced a humanitarian disaster but have been unable to prevail militarily.

• US actions in Syria have led to a consolidation of power and territory by the Syrian government and newly dominant regional position for Russia, Iran and Turkey.

• The second-largest NATO power Turkey has purchased Russian S-400 air defense systems. The US alternative is the Patriot system, which is twice as expensive and doesn’t really work.

All of this points to the fact that the US is no longer much a military power at all. This is good news for at least the following four reasons.

First, the US is by far the most belligerent country on Earth, having invaded scores of nations and continuing to occupy many of them. The fact that it can’t fight any more means that opportunities for peace are bound to increase.

Second, once the news sinks in that the Pentagon is nothing more than a flush toilet for public funds its funding will be cut off and the population of the US might see the money that is currently fattening up war profiteers being spent on some roads and bridges, although it’s looking far more likely that it will all go into paying interest expense on federal debt (while supplies last).

Third, US politicians will lose the ability to keep the populace in a state of permanent anxiety about “national security.” In fact, the US has “natural security”—two oceans—and doesn’t need much national defense at all (provided it keeps to itself and doesn’t try to make trouble for others). The Canadians aren’t going to invade, and while the southern border does need some guarding, that can be taken care of at the state/county level by some good ol’ boys using weapons and ammo they already happen to have on hand. Once this $1.7 trillion “national defense” monkey is off their backs, ordinary American citizens will be able to work less, play more and feel less aggressive, anxious, depressed and paranoid.

Last but not least, it will be wonderful to see the war profiteers reduced to scraping under sofa cushions for loose change. All that the US military has been able to produce for a long time now is misery, the technical term for which is “humanitarian disaster.” Look at the aftermath of US military involvement in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and what do you see? You see misery—both for the locals and for US citizens who lost their family members, had their limbs blown off, or are now suffering from PTSD or brain injury. It would be only fair if that misery were to circle back to those who had profited from it.

Suddenly West is Failing to Overthrow “Regimes”

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By Andre Vltchek

Source: New Eastern Outlook

It used to be done regularly and it worked: The West identified a country as its enemy, unleashed its professional propaganda against it, then administered a series of sanctions, starving and murdering children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. If the country did not collapse within months or just couple of years, the bombing would begin. And the nation, totally shaken, in pain, and in disarray, would collapse like a house of cards, once the first NATO boots hit its ground.

Such scenarios were re-enacted, again and again, from Yugoslavia to Iraq.

But suddenly, something significant has happened. This horrific lawlessness, this chaos stopped; was deterred.

The West keeps using the same tactics, it tries to terrorize independent-minded countries, to frighten people into submission, to overthrow what it defines as ‘regimes’, but its power, its monstrously destructive power, has all of a sudden become ineffective.

It hits, and the attacked nation shakes, screams, sheds blood, but keeps standing, keeps proudly erect.

What we are experiencing is a great moment in human history. Imperialism has not yet been defeated, but it is losing its global grip on power.

Now we have to clearly understand ‘Why?’, so we can continue our struggle, with even greater determination, with even greater effectiveness.

First of all, by now we know that the West cannot fight. It can spend trillions on ‘defense’, it can build nuclear bombs, ‘smart missiles’ and strategic warplanes. But it is too cowardly, too spoiled to risk the lives of its soldiers. It either kills remotely, or by using regional mercenaries. Whenever it becomes clear that the presence of its troops would be required, it backs up.

Secondly, it, the West, is totally horrified of the fact that there are now two super-powerful countries – China and Russia – which are unwilling to abandon their allies. Washington and London do all they can to smear Russia and to intimidate China. Russia is being provoked continuously: by propaganda, by military bases, sanctions and by new and newer bizarre mass media inventions that depict it as the villain in all imaginable circumstances. China has been provoked practically and insanely, ‘on all fronts’ – from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and the so-called ‘Uyghur Issue’, to trade.

Any strategy that could weaken these two countries, is applied. Yet, Russia and China do not crumble. They do not surrender. And they do not abandon their friends. Instead, they are building great railroads in Africa and Asia, they educate people from almost all poor and desperate countries, and stand by those who are being terrorized by both North America and Europe.

Thirdly, all the countries in the world are now clearly aware of what would happen to them, if they give up and get ‘liberated’ by the Western empire. Iraq, Honduras, Indonesia, Libya and Afghanistan, are the ‘best’ examples. Submitting themselves to the West, countries can only expect misery, absolute collapse and the ruthless extraction of their resources. The poorest country in Asia – Afghanistan – has totally collapsed under NATO occupation.

The suffering and pain of the Afghan and Iraqi people is very well known to the citizens of Iran and Venezuela. They are not giving up, because no matter how tough their life is under sanctions and the West-administered terror, they are well-aware of the fact that things could get worse, much worse, if their countries were to be occupied and governed by the Washington and London-injected maniacs.

And everyone knows the fate of the people living in Palestine or Golan Heights, places which have been overrun by the closest ally of the West in the Middle East, Israel.

Of course, there are other reasons why the West cannot get any of its adversaries to kneel.

One is – that the toughest ones are left. Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Syria and Venezuela are not going to run away from the battlefield. These are the most determined nations on earth. These are the countries that have already lost thousands, millions, even tens of millions of their people, in the fight against Western imperialism and colonialism.

If one is following the latest attacks of the West carefully, the scenario is pathetic, almost grotesque: Washington and often the EU, too, are trying hard; they are hitting, they are spending billions of dollars, using the local mercenaries (or call it ‘local opposition’), and then they quickly withdraw after wretched but anticipated defeat. So far, Venezuela has survived. Syria survived. Iran survived. China is fighting horrible Western-backed subversions, but it is proudly surviving. Russia is standing tall.

This is a tremendous moment in human history. For the first time, Western imperialism is being not only defeated, but fully unveiled and humiliated. Many are now laughing at it, openly.

But we should not celebrate, yet. We should understand what and why this is happening, and then continue fighting. There are many, many battles ahead of us. But we are on the right track.

Let them try. We know how to fight. We know how to prevail. We have already fought fascism in many of its forms. We know what freedom is. Their ‘freedom’ is not our freedom. Their ‘liberty’ is not our liberty. What they call ‘democracy’ is not how we want our people to rule and to be ruled. Let them go away; we, our people, do not want them!

Evidence Indicates Link Between North Korean Embassy Break-In And Christchurch Attacks

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Screenshot from video showing two men with baseball caps and assault rifles in Christchurch.

By William Craddick

Source: Disobedient Media

As the world reels from the tragic terrorist attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, much attention has been given to sensational information about the single named suspect, Brenton Tarrant. However, the hyperfocus on Tarrant distracts from the fact that the Australian national was arrested along with other suspects.

An investigation and analysis by Disobedient Media indicates that Tarrant and the group he worked with likely have professional military connections, are part of the same cell that perpetrated a February 22nd break-in of the North Korean embassy in Spain and potentially have intelligence ties to various agencies that cooperate under the UKUSA Agreement popularly known as Five Eyes (FVEY).

I. Signs Of Professional Military Connections

Despite the characterization of Tarrant in the media, he was no run-of-the-mill white supremacist. Images posted by Tarrant online just before the attack to a Twitter account which had been dormant until March 12 showed that he was in possession of high-capacity magazines and a semi-automatic assault rifle. The weapon and magazines would have been classified as either a “restricted weapon” or a “military-style-semi-automatic” (MSSA) under New Zealand law. A person who possesses or uses a firearm in New Zealand needs to hold a firearms license issued by police. Licenses normally last for ten years unless revoked. Foreign nationals may apply from overseas for a one year license based on their possession of an existing license in their home country.

Suspicions are inevitably raised over how exactly Tarrant and his alleged co-conspirators managed to stockpile the military-grade weapons and ammunition used in the attack in a country with comparatively strict gun laws. Tarrant, who supposedly began to radicalize starting in 2016 and was allegedly unemployed would have had his radical tendencies discovered with a proper background investigation. Police say that another suspect in the shooting was an individual who acquired the necessary Category A license and began to legally stockpile weapons used in the attack.

Additional reports have also established that Tarrant trained at the Bruce Rifle Club in Dunedin. Although the club’s website and YouTube channel have been scrubbed from the internet, an archive shows that it explicitly catered to users and collectors of military rifles.

The Australian also engaged in extensive travel abroad to a number of areas that should have raised red flags with intelligence services. Countries visited by Tarrant included Pakistan, North Korea, Turkey, parts of Africa, Portugal, Spain, France, Afghanistan and Xinjiang, China. The extensive travel and access to military grade firearms should have made detection by law enforcement and intelligence services nearly impossible to avoid.

II. Similarities Between Spain And New Zealand Operations

There are a number of analogous facts shared by the attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and the terror event in Christchurch which suggest that the same team was involved in both incidents. In both cases the perpetrators showed that they were well versed in “breach and clear” tactics against buildings filled with people. In both cases the buildings were cleared efficiently and quickly even though the goal of the North Korean incident was focused on intelligence gathering as opposed to mass murder. Aerial analysis of the North Korean embassy in Spain, the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre show that all buildings are of similar size and each would have required the same know-how and training to breach.

In securing a getaway from the North Korean embassy, the attacking team of approximately ten individuals utilized two luxury vehicles. In the Christchurch attack, the suspects used two vehicles for transport in which live explosive devices were found. The similar number of vehicles used in both incidents points to a common number of participants.

III. In Both Attacks, Perpetuators Are Likely Military Cells

The groups involved in both the Spain embassy break-in and the Christchurch terror attacks appear to be military or paramilitary in nature. The March 13, 2019 exposé of the embassy break-in by El País directly cited sources involved with the investigation who stated that the attackers were likely a “military cell” with at least two members who were tied to the CIA. Sources such as the New York Post and Washington Post have both run stories attempting to attribute the break-in to a shadowy group of North Korean dissidents. But this explanation is unconvincing since this group would not not have the practical military know-how or muscle required to breach and clear the embassy in such an efficient manner.

Analysis of documentation of the Christchurch terror attack also indicates that the perpetrators were part of a military style cell. Although much has been made of Brenton Tarrant’s live-streamed attack, no other individuals were featured in the film. Video footage being distributed online shows two individuals carrying firearms during the attacks. Both are wearing baseball caps. This means that neither can be Tarrant, who was filming himself during the attack and wore a helmet with a mounted camera, not a hat.

Police speculated during the attacks that there were up to three suspects. But footage and photos that have emerged along with early reports of other suspected locations where incidents occurred indicates that the number of attackers was likely larger. One image shows a man with shaven head in military-style camouflage fatigues being detained by New Zealand police as the attack was contained and halted. Another video shows police standing around a suspect lying on the pavement. As the individual videoing the scene passes, officers roll the apparently lifeless man over onto his back, showing his arm flop as he moved. If the suspect had been alive then police would have restrained him with handcuffs before moving him. Authorities have made no announcement about casualties among the attackers.

There were also rumors of other incidents which suggest that the attack might have been larger than is being disclosed. Maori News noted reports that an additional shooting was ongoing at Christchurch Hospital. This went largely unacknowledged by the international media. In the aftermath of the attacks, police in Auckland, New Zealand also responded to a bomb scare at Auckland train station.

These facts all indicate that the Christchurch terror attacks were perpetrated by a larger group that would be similar in size to the one involved with the break-in at the North Korean embassy. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has expressed similar opinions, stating on March 15 that the attack was “no individual act” and that he was sending an official delegation to New Zealand to gather further information about the groups behind the attack. Turkish state-owned media source TRT World has cited anonymous officials who claimed that Tarrant entered the country “to carry out a terror attack and/ or an assassination.” Tarrant’s visits to Turkey occurred on March 17-20, and September 13, 2016. Erdoğan survived a coup attempt that began July 15, 2016.

It is also worth noting that the location of police stations in and around Christchurch shows that there were several just a few blocks away from the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre. This is about a seven to eight minute drive with normal traffic. But witness statements say that police took over 20 minutes to arrive at the scene (the police response time was actually an even longer 36 minutes). Ambulance services took over half an hour to arrive at the scene despite the fact that hospitals were in even closer proximity to the attack locations than police stations.

The failure of police to deploy with greater haste or intercept the attackers while they moved from their first target to the second raises serious questions about the reasons for inadequate law enforcement reactions. Normally an incident on such a scale would trigger an immediate lockdown of the affected city and a total isolation of the affected area.

If any attackers were not filming themselves, resupplying from their vehicles or firing on innocent civilians while driving in transit as Tarrant did it is likely that they would have been able to effect an escape.

IV. Potential Connection To Organizations Affiliated With FVEY

Many of the countries visited by Tarrant play host to the operations of agencies with connections to FVEY. FVEY members include the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. FVEY also have a number of Tier B nations who participate in “focused cooperation” on computer network exploitation, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

Outside of the UKUSA Agreement, FVEY members are known to cooperate with Tier B nations on their own. Great Britain has had a deep relationship with Spain since World War II, when Britain bought off the Spanish to remain neutral and then used the country as an escape route for downed Allied airmen. British agency GCHQ also collaborates independently with counterparts in Germany, France, Spain and Sweden. British-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was also revealed to have been collaborating with Spanish intelligence officers in the years leading up to his poisoning in 2018.

Brenton Tarrant’s travels to Turkey, France, Spain and Portugal raise questions about potential connections to intelligence services who collaborate loosely under the FVEY intelligence sharing agreement. Additionally, his time spent in Pakistan, a country with a long history of deep CIA involvement creates an even stronger possibility that Tarrant might have had ties to military or intelligence organizations.

Since Tarrant had at least one New Zealander acting as an accomplice, it is possible that there may have been other New Zealand nationals associated with his group. Outside of their collaboration through the FVEY framework, New Zealand’s Special Air Service has been deployed to Afghanistan where they worked directly under the CIA at a base in Bamiyan province according to claims published in 2011.

If individuals who had a past or present affiliation with New Zealand’s intelligence or military services were involved with a military cell that participated in the embassy and Christchurch attacks, it would provide a potential explanation for the extraordinarily slow police response time which caused an increased number of casualties. It would also give context to reports that New Zealand police are refusing to provide footage of Brenton Tarrant’s attack to US authorities who are seeking it for training purposes.

V. Conclusion: Tragedy Exploited By Special Interests

Whether or not one believes that the Christchurch terror attacks have more to them than meets the eye, it is undeniable that the tragedy is now being exploited by various parties for personal gain. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has taken the opportunity to promote increased gun control with a total ban on semi-automatic weapons. Ardern formerly worked as a policy advisor to Tony Blair, who has himself been a willing collaborator with British intelligence services. Ardern has not yet commented on the fact that New Zealand security and emergency services caused the death toll to rise substantially higher than needed due to an incredibly slow response time.

In addition to the debate about gun control, pundits have begun to harass President Donald Trump, accusing him of having some kind of ideological connection to Brenton Tarrant due to the suspect’s fascist loyalties. These efforts only serve to intensify efforts to derail the ongoing crisis involving the Korean peace process.

With the operational similarities between the the Spanish embassy and Christchurch attacks in mind one cannot help but observe that global attention has been ripped away from potential peace talks between the US and North Korea. The gross showmanship of the Tarrant in broadcasting murders for the world to see was an intentional attempt to capture attention and shift global discussion by committing a heinous act of terror. As the Christchurch attacks unfolded, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui made an announcement blaming US administration officials for a breakdown in denuclearization talks and threatened to break off negotiations to resume testing. These comments were immediately highlighted by Russian news agency TASS and the international press. Other comments clarifying that personal relations between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were still good and their chemistry “mysteriously wonderful” were almost totally ignored in coverage of the press conference.

The official facts of the Christchurch terror attacks will likely shift over time in the same way that official narratives fed to the public by federal investigators changed constantly in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. But the apparent military and intelligence connections of perpetrators in the attack, the discrepancies between the official reports about the size of the group of suspects and footage of the event as it unfolded and the operational similarities to the North Korean embassy incident will continue to erode confidence that the public is being given all the facts.

 

3/17/2019: This article was updated with new details regarding emerging facts and clarification about police response times. Unfortunately, the New Zealand government has engaged in unprecedented censorship of the event and videos of the incident have all been taken offline.

The Skripal Poisonings and the Ongoing Vilification of Putin

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By Gary Leupp

Source: CounterPunch

Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent on March 4 on a park bench in Salisbury, England.

Skripal had been a Russian double agent, a spy who turned over 300 names of Russian spies to British intelligence from 1995 to 2004. He was (not so surprisingly) arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He was released in a spy-swap in 2010, settled in the UK and became a British citizen.

I see no reason to judge his moral character, although some might reflect that in Kantian general terms what he did was rather bad. (In precisely the same sense that it would be bad for a British citizen to become a double agent for Russia.) Double agents are often punished harshly; this is the way of the world.

Skripal posed no further threat to the Russian state. There is at least one report that he sought to return to Russia recently. It’s hard to comprehend why at this time Moscow would poison him and his young daughter visiting from Russia with a nerve agent (Novichok) created in the USSR from the 1970s but subsequently banned and destroyed under international supervision. Cui bono? Who profits from these poisonings?

In all the outrage, expressed in Britain and elsewhere, about this attack, there is precious little analysis. The Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said, “This is nonsense. This has nothing to do with us.” The group of military-grade nerve agents called Novichok have been described in academic literature such that many different actors could produce Novichok. The Russians say they have long since destroyed their stocks and suggest the Czech Republic could be the source of the substance used.

But this attack on Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter (by somebody) is highly useful to those who want to vilify Vladimir Putin, just as the use of chemical weapons in Syria last April (by somebody) was useful for those wanting to further vilify Bashar Assad and justify a U.S. missile strike. Have you noticed that we live in an age of constant disinformation, misinformation and “fake news”?

The most annoying thing is, once these unproven causal relations are posited, embraced by cable news directors, such that they become Truth, discussion centers solely on how the U.S. and allies should respond. Why, pundits ask, didn’t Trump raise the issue in his last chat with Putin? Why is Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn skeptical about the Russia link, suggesting the Novichok could have been possessed by East European mafia? Why isn’t everyone on board the obvious conclusion that Russia did it?

Which would mean: Putin—facing no threat from this traded ex-spy or his innocent daughter—ordered their killing, not because they threatened him, but rather to manifest his deep cruelty and evil to the world and his willingness to invite more and more sanctions against Russia. It doesn’t make much sense.

Putin is ex-KGB. Very rational and calm. He knows all about agents and double agents. I doubt that he is morally judgmental; he understands why people do what Skripal did. He made a deal for the man’s release eight years ago. His only motive to kill him at this point would be to punish Skripal for past sins and warn others not to ever sell secrets. But why would such a rational person incur global outrage by using a banned agent to attempt to murder a British citizen and his Russian daughter, for no compelling reason?

There are international legal processes for investigating charges of use of chemical weapons. Russia has asked Britain to observe them, providing evidence, samples, details. It urges adherence to rules established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to establish the facts. But London has merely announced it knows Putin was responsible for the state of these two on that park bench.

So the grand narrative now includes: Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 (somehow becoming in the process “adversaries” of the U.S.); alleged “threats” against the Baltic states; multiple political assassinations; dictatorial control of the Russian polity, economy and media; the accumulation of billions in illicit wealth. To say nothing of his brash exposure of his naked chest to his fandom, his judo, his hunting, his annoyingly high approval ratings.

I don’t know who attacked these two who now struggle for their lives in hospital. But I know that the response means nothing good for Russia, or the world. It is just another short chapter in the new Cold War, and like the old war, basically irrational. What is Putin’s motive? Fareed Zakaria says he’s trying to “undermine democracies” although why anyone would want to do that in principle puzzles me. Putin is not the Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight Batman film, just spreading chaos for its own sake.

Putin is not interested in heading a European movement towards isolationist nationalisms but rather in thwarting NATO expansion plans, which any rational Russian leader would want to do. To use the strange Skripal incident as a rationale for further Cold War-type confrontation is more than sad.  Yet in a supposed display of solidarity with Britain, which has kicked out Russian diplomats in response, the U.S. has suddenly expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed down the Russian consulate in Seattle. Trump, under constant criticism for not criticizing Putin, and not bringing up election meddling or the Skripal affair in his recent phone call, has approved the move without commenting on it.

If Trump planned for better relations with Russia to be a hallmark of his presidency, he has been stymied by his foes’ insistence that he express the traditional knee-jerk hostility. Why, they keep asking, when he criticizes his own cabinet members, does he never say anything bad about Putin? And from there, they proceed to the conclusion that the Russians have stuff on Trump and are blackmailing him…into not being default-mode hostile.

Trump is an ignorant man, uninterested in the world intellectually, unable to invest time in reading, clueless about the historical context of current crises. Part of his candidate persona was opposition to recent U.S. wars (not so much because they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, but because they have been expensive and not resulted in the U.S. taking the oil). But he loves men in uniform, surrounds himself with them, relies on them. These are men who grew up during the Cold War and can’t kick it from their minds. Baby-sitting what they surely see (with McMaster) as a “moron,” “idiot,” “dope,” “kindergartner” they see their minimal task the responsibility to remind him that Russia is an adversary.

And so without even ascertaining the facts of the Skripal incident, Washington expels all these diplomats. TV pundits applaud: “absolutely the right thing to do, to defend western values” etc. , the system succeeds in maintaining, even strengthening, Cold War Russophobic mentality. The Skripal incident was a blessing to Trump’s critics, who want him with his child-mind to embrace this mentality. We have to support Theresa May in Britain, they told him. This was the first offensive use of  a nerve agent in Europe since World War II, they told him; very, very serious. A Russian attack on the UK.

Whoever administered that agent triggered a wave of sanctions on Russia, adding to those earlier imposed after the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the Russian response. Russia will respond proportionately. Whoever did this forces Trump to harden a political line against Russia. As his presidency teeters in the winds of scandal, he is prone to more crazy moves like the appointment of John Bolton. Trump’s sole saving grace in his campaign was his advocacy of better ties with Russia. This immediately upon his election became his chief fault. Pundits  demand that he  abandon any hope for cordial relations with Putin’s Russia and properly denounce him for multiple crimes.

Maybe that’s what’s in store. Trump’s unpredictable. He agrees to meet Kim Jong Un then appoints Bolton (advocate of war with North Korea, removed from negotiations with the DPRK  after Pyongyang called him “human scum”) as national security advisor. And why follow up that cordial call to Putin with the expulsion of so many diplomats? What the hell. Doesn’t make sense.

Had Hillary won, I would probably have found some logic and predictability in her evil. With Trump the evil unfolds erratically. He drops a MOAB on Afghanistan (or his generals do, without necessarily consulting). He attacks a Syrian army base in response to an unproven sarin attack. His cabinet members contradict him, espousing the gospel truth that Russia and its allies such as Syria are threats to U.S. national security, whatever that is. One feels that as his personal situation deteriorates, the president will be more prone to lean on his generals, and listen to their advice while also heeding the horrific Bolton. This is a very bad situation.

4/05 Update:
Double miracle as BOTH Skripals are now said to be recovering from deadly nerve agent attack. How?

Thinking Beyond Exceptionalism

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By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

Excepted from Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? (April, 2018).

Try this experiment: Imagine that space aliens really come to earth and really have, as I think is very unlikely, developed the ability to travel to earth while simultaneously remaining so primitive as to violently attack the places they visit. In contrast to the space aliens, could you identify as an earthling to such an extent as to diminish your other senses of identity? “Earthlings — F— Yeah!” “We’re Number 1!” “Greatest Earthlings on Earth!” And can you hold that thought, in the absence of the space aliens, and rid yourself of any notion of opposing any other or foreign group, while still holding that earthling thought? Alternatively, can you cast climate change and environmental collapse in the role of the evil alien Hollywood monster against whom humanity must unite?

Or try this one: Imagine that various species of humans survived to the current day, so that we Sapiens share the earth with the Neanderthals, the Erectus, the tiny little Floresiensis, etc.[i] Could you form your identity in your mind as a Sapiens? And then, can you hold that thought while either imagining the other species back out of existence or imagining learning to be as respectful and kind to the other species of humans as we should perhaps actually be attempting to be to other types of living human and non-human earthlings right now?

Perhaps the most powerful tool for altering habits of thought about groups of people is role reversal. Let’s imagine that for whatever reasons, beginning some seventy years ago North Korea drew a line through the United States, from sea to shining sea, and divided it, and educated and trained and armed a brutal dictator in the South United States, and destroyed 80 percent of the cities in the North United States, and killed millions of North USians. Then North Korea refused to allow any U.S. reunification or official end to the war, maintained wartime control of the South United States military, built major North Korean military bases in the South United States, placed missiles just south of the U.S. demilitarized zone that ran through the middle of the country, and imposed brutal economic sanctions on the North United States for decades. As a resident of the North United States, what might you think when the president of North Korea threatened your country with “fire and fury”?[ii] Your own government might have gazillions of current and historical crimes and shortcomings to its credit, but what would you think of threats coming from the country that killed your grandparents and walled you off from your cousins? Or would you be too scared to think rationally?

This experiment is possible in hundreds of variations, and I recommend trying it repeatedly in your own mind and in groups, so that people’s creativity can feed into the imagination of others. Imagine that you’re from the Marshall Islands seeking restitution for nuclear testing and/or the rising seas.[iii] Imagine you’re from Niger and less than amused that Americans first hear about your country when their government pretends that Iraq purchased uranium in your country, and that Americans only learn about their own military’s actions in your country when the U.S. president is rude to the mother of a deceased U.S. soldier.[iv] Imagine you’re my friends from Vicenza, Italy, who found local and national majority support for blocking the proposed construction of a U.S. Army base but couldn’t stop it — or similar people in Okinawa or Jeju Island or elsewhere around the globe.

And don’t just imagine you’re the other people. Learn and then re-tell the stories with all the details inverted. It’s not Okinawa. It’s Alabama. Japan is filling Alabama with Japanese military bases. The towns and state are opposed, but craven politicians in Washington, D.C., are going along. The military airplane crashes happen in Alabama. The spread of prostitution and drugs happens in Alabama. The local girls raped and murdered are Alabaman. The Japanese troops say it’s for your own good whether you think so or not, and they don’t really care what you think. You get the idea. This can be done with wealth distribution, with environmental impact, with militarism, with any issue under the sun. The danger of over-simplification should be resisted. The idea is not to stupidly convince yourself that all Americans are 100% evil while all Japanese are some sort of angels. The idea is to reverse some key facts and see whether anything happens to your attitudes. If not, then perhaps your attitudes were fair and respectful to begin with.

Another nominee for most powerful tool for altering habits of thought about groups of people is what goes by the very odd name “humanization.” This is the process wherein you supposedly take a human being or group of human beings, and by learning their names and facial expressions and little idiosyncrasies, you “humanize” them, and you come to the conclusion that these humans are . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . humans. Now, I’m 100 percent in favor of this to whatever extent it is needed and works. I think Americans (and probably most people) should read more foreign books, learn more foreign languages, watch more foreign films, and travel more in ways that truly involve them in foreign cultures. I think students should be required to spend a year as exchange students in foreign families and schools. I think a key test of childhood education in the United States should be: What have these children learned about all of humanity, including the 96% outside the United States?

I am hopeful that at some point we can jump the humanization and arrive squarely on the understanding that, in fact, humans are all humans, whether we know anything about them or not! It might help to pretend that all Hollywood movies have been made about and starring Syrians (or any other nationality). If that were so, if every favorite character from every film and TV show were Syrian, would anyone in the world have any doubt that Syrians were human beings? And what effect would that have on our perception of the reported Israeli government position, seemingly abetted by U.S. government policy, that the best outcome in Syria is for nobody to win but the war to continue forever?[v]

David Swanson’s forthcoming book from which this is excerpted is called Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? (April, 2018).

 

 

[i] This scenarios was suggested to me by this book: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Paperback (Harper Perennial, 2018).

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-korea-un-sanctions-nuclear-missile-united-nations.html (January 16, 2018).

[iii] Marlise Simons, “Marshall Islands Can’t Sue the World’s Nuclear Powers, U.N. Court Rules,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/world/asia/marshall-islands-un-court-nuclear-disarmament.html (October 5, 2016).

[iv] David Caplan, Katherine Faulders, “Trump denies telling widow of fallen soldier, ‘He knew what he signed up for’,” ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-denies-telling-widow-fallen-soldier-knew-signed/story?id=50549664 (October 18, 2017).

[v] Jodi Rudoren, “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/middleeast/israel-backs-limited-strike-against-syria.html?pagewanted=all (September 5, 2013).

Spies, Lies and War Propaganda: The Making of Another Conspiracy Theory

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

What is insane is how Western governments and the mainstream media (MSM) is that they can tell you that they have the proof that their enemies committed an act of war, or how they interfere in the affairs of other countries but cannot release the evidence due to national security issues or they just outright know in their gut instincts that their enemies did whatever it is that they did, and then they expect us to believe them. While we in the alternative media can show you mountains of evidence including government documents, photos, quotes from world leaders, reports and analysis from respected journalists and researchers from all over the world who represent the facts, yet we are called conspiracy theorists by the same Western governments and the MSM.

Russia is now accused of poisoning another former Russian spy, this time it’s Sergei Skripal (the late Alexander Litvinenko was the last victim) and his daughter Yulia who was living in the Salisbury section of the UK with a military-grade nerve agent produced by..drum roll, please… Russia! How convenient, especially during a time when the U.S. and its allies accuse the Syrian government of launching chemical attacks on civilians, but in reality (which has been proven time and time again) it was the US-backed terrorists or who they call the “rebel forces” who launched the chemical attacks. It’s amazing how Western governments and the MSM constantly link their adversaries to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). For example, The New York Times published an article on February 27th titled ‘U.N. Links North Korea to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Program’ suggesting that North Korea shipped supplies to Syria to produce chemical weapons due to an investigation by United Nations:

North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.

The evidence of a North Korean connection comes as the United States and other countries have accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons on civilians, including recent attacks on civilians in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta using what appears to have been chlorine gas.

The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers, according to a report by United Nations investigators. North Korean missile technicians have also been spotted working at known chemical weapons and missile facilities inside Syria, according to the report, which was written by a panel of experts who looked at North Korea’s compliance with United Nations sanctions

O.K. So now North Korea is shipping supplies to help the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to produce chemical weapons? What is interesting about the accusation is that The New York Times reviewed the report, but would not release it themselves. The authors and other members of the UN security council would also not comment on the report:

The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes, according to the report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Neither the report’s authors nor members of the United Nations Security Council who have seen it would comment, and neither would the United States’ mission to the international agency. It is unclear when, or even whether, the report will be released

Of course they are not even sure if they would release the report to the public because it would most likely be criticized by the alternative media who would view it as a propaganda plot to demonize Kim Jung-Un. We can call The New York Times article for what it really is, and that is fake news. North Korea would not get involved in a Middle East conflict because it would not be in their interest, politically or economically. It would give the US and South Korean governments more reasons to threaten North Korea with a military strike if something like that was true, but it’s not. Kim Jung -Un does not have a relationship with ISIS and other terrorist groups who have been launching chemical attacks throughout Syria since the start of the conflict, the U.S. and its allies do. So it’s ludicrous accusation.

On March 12th, British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke at the House of Commons about the Skripal incident in Salisbury, UK:

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal

The case of Sergei Skripal is becoming another farfetched conspiracy theory just like the Alexander Litvinenko case. If you remember Alexander Litvinenko who allegedly drank a cup tea at a business meeting with two other Russians (who were charged with his murder) which contained a fatal dose of Polonium-210. The editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo wrote an article on the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko titled ‘The Craziest Conspiracy Theory of Them All: The British government’s report on the death of Alexander Litvinenko reads like a bad thriller’:

To those of us who grew up during the cold war years, it’s just like old times again: Russian plots to subvert the West and poison our precious bodily fluids are apparently everywhere. Speaking of poisoning plots: the latest Russkie conspiracy – and the most imaginative by far – was the alleged assassination by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko , a former agent of the Russian intelligence services who fled to the West to become a professional anti-Russian propagandist and conspiracy theorist with a talent for the improbable. According to his fantastic worldview, the many terrorist attacks that have occurred in Russia have all been committed by … Vladimir Putin. Aside from championing the Chechen Islamo-terrorists who actually committed these crimes, Litvinenko’s stock-in-trade was an elaborate conspiracy theory in which he regularly accused Putin of blowing up Russian apartment buildings and murdering schoolchildren and then diverting attention from his own nefarious plots by blaming those lovable Chechens. Not very believable – unless one is predisposed to believe anything, so long as it casts discredit on those satanic Russians.

The conspiracy theory promulgated by the British government – and now memorialized in this official report – surpasses anything the deceased fantasist might have come up with. According to the Brits, Litvinenko was poisoned on British soil whilst imbibing a cup of tea spiked with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210 – and, since Russia is a prime source of this rare substance, and since the Russians were supposedly out to get Litvinenko, the FSB – successor to the KGB – is named as the “probable” culprit.

Looking at the report, one has to conclude that they don’t make propaganda the way they used to: the certitude of, say, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Robert Welch has given way to the tepid ambiguity of Lord Robert Owen, the author of this report, whose verdict of “probably” merely underscores the paucity of what passes for evidence in this case

Raimondo made his case with a common-sense approach to the conspiracy theory:

To begin with, if the Russians wanted to off Litvinenko, why would they poison him with a substance that left a radioactive trail traceable from Germany to Heathrow airport – and, in the process, contaminating scores of hotel rooms, offices, planes, restaurants, and homes? Why not just put a bullet through his head? It makes no sense.

But then conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense: they just have to take certain assumptions all the way to their implausible conclusions. If one starts with the premise that Putin and the Russians are a Satanic force capable of anything, and incompetent to boot, then it’s all perfectly “logical” – in the Bizarro World, at any rate.

The idea that Litvinenko was a dangerous opponent of the Russian government who had to be killed because he posed a credible threat to the existence of the regime is laughable: practically no one inside Russia knew anything about him, and as for his crackpot “truther” theories about how Putin was behind every terrorist attack ever carried out within Russia’s borders – to assert that they had any credence outside of the Western media echo chamber is a joke. So there was no real motive for the FSB to assassinate him, just as there is none for the FBI to go after David Ray Griffin

To assassinate Litvinenko with a dose of radioactive polonium-210 in his cup of tea is an incredibly ridiculous allegation by both the British and American establishment. Another anti-Putin crusader is the Hudson Institute’s own senior fellow, David Satter who wrote ‘The Russian State of Murder Under Putin’ in 2016 and said:

It is now imperative not only for the West but for the future of Russia that the Litvinenko inquiry set a precedent for the objective international review of the cases of political terrorism in Russia. These include the bloody sieges at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004, the assassinations of journalists and opposition leaders and, above all, the deadly 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Mr. Putin to power.

In the Litvinenko case, the alleged assassins, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were accused by the British inquiry of slipping polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s tea. A radioactive trail was left all over London. Traces of polonium were found in Mr. Lugovoi’s hotel room, at a sushi restaurant where Litvinenko dined with the two men, and on the seat occupied by Mr. Lugovoi on a British Airlines flight from Moscow to London

Satter’s view concerning Putin’s killing machine apparatus that uses chemical weapons to silence its opposition is pure nonsense. There are many ways to murder an individual if they really wanted to, so why would they use ‘Novichok’ a nerve agent that can be traced back to Russia? Novichok was produced in the former Soviet Union and then in Russia until 1993.

So who would benefit from such an attack? Putin himself? not really, it would somehow benefit the Anglo-American establishment by continuing the demonization of the Russian government. Sergei Skripal, was a former Russian military intelligence colonel who was found guilty of passing state secrets to the U.K. and was sentenced to 13 years in prison back in 2006. If Putin really wanted Skripal dead, he would have had him executed while in custody. The Western powers including the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France want to maintain their “International Order” as Prime Minister May had mentioned in a statement she gave last Monday:

“The UK does not stand alone in confronting Russian aggression. In the last 24 hours I have spoken to President (Donald) Trump, Chancellor (Angela) Merkel and President (Emmanuel) Macron. We have agreed to cooperate closely in responding to this barbaric act and to co-ordinate our efforts to stand up for the rules based international order which Russia seeks to undermine”

So Who Could Have Possibly Poisoned Sergei Skripal and his Daughter?

On March 4th, 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench by a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who happened to be passing by (what are the chances that happening?). It was soon discovered by a medical staff at the Salisbury District Hospital that Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent. They both remain in critical condition. Three police officers investigating the scene were also hospitalized. The poison discovered on the Skripal family was apparently ‘Novichok.’ According to a New York Times report titled ‘In Poisoning of Sergei Skripal, Russian Ex-Spy, U.K. Sees Cold War Echoes’ basically says Russia is the culprit:

With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and earlier episodes from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed Crimea, destabilized eastern Ukraine and propped up the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, all while being accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within Western democracies.

“This is a form of soft war that Russia is now waging against the West,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament. British officials have accused the Kremlin of only one assassination on British soil in recent years, but the Russian government has been suspected of being behind numerous other mysterious deaths in Britain and elsewhere.

In Mr. Litvinenko’s case, the weapon is believed to have been a poisoned teapot later found to contain polonium 210, a radioactive isotope; his death was slow and agonizing

Russia along with several other nations are not following the globalist’s blueprint because they want their sovereignty respected and therefore it is seen by the West as a threat to its World Order. If the Russian agents did poison Sergei Skripal (which is obviously, a false accusation) with a deadly military-grade nerve agent that can spread throughout the Salisbury community and traced back to Russia, then they must be the most idiotic and most incompetent intelligence agency on planet earth. There is no evidence of the Russian government being involved in Mr. Skripal’s poisoning, in fact, it sounds like a false-flag attack by using Mr. Skripal to blame Russia. Any of the Western intelligence agencies including MI6 or the CIA could have obtained the nerve agent or something close to it in order to poison Skripal. It is also most likely that we would never find out who actually committed the crimes against Skripal and Litvinenko, but according to the West, its Russia. The Alexander Litvinenko story told by the British government and the MSM (in this case, BBC News) is like a bad thriller and so does the Sergei Skripal case. Both cases will most likely make it to the big screen in the future since many of films produced by Hollywood is based on propaganda against America’s enemies including Russia (many Hollywood films, especially since the Cold War usually portray Russia as the enemy) and recently, North Korea made it to the big screen with the 2013 film, ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ about a North Korean terrorist organization who takes over the White House (yes, another really bad thriller). Rest assured, the Sergey Skripal case as well as the murder of Alexander Litvinenko will most likely make its way to the big screen someday.

The UK government along with its Western partners are spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories, but the MSM will cover their lies and deceit and tell you that it is the alternative media who needs to be censored because we are the ones who are spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. The American and the British governments accused Saddam Hussein of having “weapons of mass destruction” which as we all know, was not only a lie, but a lie that destroyed Iraq. Sooner or later, the facts of the Sergei Skripal case will show the world who are the liars and the conspiracy theorists really are, and once again, the Anglo-American establishment and its MSM representatives would lose even more credibility. In my opinion, they lost all of their credibility a very long time ago.

The most perilous time in world history got worse

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

Events ongoing should terrify everyone—things likely heading for greater war than already.

Most Americans, Brits, and others in NATO countries are unaware of the danger posed by hardline Western extremists in charge of policymaking—notably in Washington, London and Israel, the Jewish state an alliance Mediterranean Dialogue member.

Businessman Trump was co-opted to be a warrior president—neocon generals in charge of geopolitical policies, their agenda hardened by Mike Pompeo replacing Rex Tillerson at State, along with torturer-in-chief Gina Haspel appointed new CIA director.

An unholy alliance of US extremist policymakers allied with likeminded ones in partner countries risks war winds reaching gale force, a terrifying prospect if confrontation with Russia, Iran or North Korea occurs—the possibility increased by recent events.

Earlier this week, US Defense Secretary Mattis and UN envoy Haley threatened Russia and Damascus.

Russia vowed to retaliate against US attacks on Syrian forces in East Ghouta or elsewhere endangering its personnel in the country.

Anti-Russia hysteria in Britain over the Sergey Skripal poisoning affair, most certainly Moscow had nothing to do with, soured bilateral relations more than already.

In response to British PM Theresa May demanding swift Russian answers to questions posed about the incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman (speaking for her government) replied sharply saying, “One does not give 24 hours notice to a nuclear power,” adding the “Skripal poisoning was not an incident but a colossal international provocation,” addin, not a “single international legal mechanism [exists] to probe the Skripal case.”

Russia’s embassy in London said “Moscow will not respond to London’s ultimatum until it receives samples of the chemical substance to which the UK investigators are referring.”

“Britain must comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention which stipulates joint investigation into the incident, for which Moscow is ready.”

“Without that, there can be no sense in any statements from London. The incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia.”

“Any threat to take ‘punitive’ measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that.”

“Not only is Russia groundlessly and provocatively accused of the Salisbury incident, but apparently, plans are being developed in the UK to strike Russia with cyber weapons.”

“Judging by the statements of the prime minister, such a decision can be taken at tomorrow’s meeting of the National Security Council.”

Given the gravity of the situation, the above comments by Russian diplomats were uncharacteristically strong.

Sergey Lavrov warned Washington that “[i]f a new [US] strike . . . takes place [against Syrian forces], the consequences will be very serious,” adding, “I simply don’t have any normal terms left to describe all this.”

What’s coming remains to be seen. Hostile rhetoric from US and UK officials, along with hawkish extremists Pompeo in charge at State and Haspel appointed new CIA chief likely signal more war, not less.

What’s ongoing assures no possibility of improving dismal bilateral relations with Russia, China, Iran and other sovereign independent countries.

Talks with North Korea could either be scuttled or confrontational if they take place.

Given very disturbing ongoing events, the perilous state of world conditions reached a new low.

Be scared about what may follow—be very scared!

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.