Tag Archives: Russia

Russiagate: The Miserable Truth

Posted on by
1

in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Barry Kissin

Source: OpEdNews.com

Introductory Disclaimer: I have never voted Republican for Federal office and I deplore most of what Fox News has to offer. I am currently registered Democrat in order to vote in the Presidential primary for either Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard.

Going on three years ago, on Nov. 12, 2016, my local newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, published my letter that stated: “Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. In an effort to deflect attention from the DNC rigging of her primary contest with Bernie Sanders, she resorted to somehow blaming the Russians. This was part of a pathological pattern, whose ultimate purpose was and is to remove the main obstacle (Russia under Putin) to neo-con schemes for global domination.”

We do not want to further demonize Russia (or Iran). This is unwarranted and dangerous to human survival. Its purpose is to aggressively assert American Empire against all limitations and to justify the astronomical sums we spend on war and weapons.

Hillary touted that all of our 17 intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that the Russians meddled in our election for Trump’s benefit. False. The assessor was John Brennan, then spy-in-chief, who put together a secret panel of his choices from FBI, CIA and NSA in order to produce his miserable invention of the who, how and why the Russians did their dastardly meddling.

See Washington Post, June 23, 2017: “CIA Director John Brennan first alerts the White House in early August [2016] that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an operation to defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump” based on what Brennan claimed was some source “deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign”. Which source had supplied “Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives”? No evidence has ever been produced backing up any of this.

Enter Mueller, a “deep state” hack if there ever was one. It bears mentioning that Mueller is the grandnephew of Richard Bissel, second in command at the CIA when JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Mueller is married to the granddaughter of General Charles Cabell, third in command at the CIA, also fired by JFK; Mueller’s wife is also a grandniece of Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas when JFK was assassinated there, who was recently uncovered to have been a CIA asset. Small world.

Mueller’s career is replete with the production of disinformation and cover-ups. My community, home of Fort Detrick, got a dose of Mueller at work in the Amerithrax investigation. That investigation is the one in which Mueller framed Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins for sending the anthrax letters in order to cover up that the weaponization of the anthrax attack was a unique CIA technology.

On behalf of his current handlers, Mueller sang and danced his way into various indictments, most of which truly had nothing to do with Russiagate, but he couldn’t pull off even trying to nail Trump for collusion.

Of course, this isn’t the end of it. Pathetically, Democrats are pretending that Russiagate was nevertheless worthwhile (thus compounding the stupidity) on the basis that Trump obstructed justice, and also that we now know we have to protect our precious Presidential election from the Russians.

Obstructed what? Obstructed an investigation into the fabricated charge of collusion? Mueller just testified (on July 24) that whatever Trump did, it neither curtailed nor hindered his investigation, which after more than two years could neither find nor manufacture any evidence of collusion.

But now let’s drill down into this mantra of Russian meddling. According to the Mueller report, there were two facets: 1.) hacking of the DNC emails then sourcing to Wikileaks; and 2.) social media campaign. The social media campaign is a joke. The hacking story is more serious.

According to Mueller, it was the Russian company Internet Research Agency (IRA) that on behalf of the Russian government conducted the Facebook campaign. At page 25 of Vol. 1, Mueller informs us that this Russian company purchased 3,500 ads for a total expenditure of $100,000, which I ask you to compare to the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

It’s sillier than that. According to Facebook’s testimony before Congress, most of the ads the IRA purchased were after the election and most said nothing about either Hillary or Trump. But they tended to promote “divisiveness” according to Mueller. Absurd!

We also now have a recently unsealed ruling by the U.S. District Court for D.C. that ordered Mueller to cease and desist from claiming that IRA was acting on behalf of the Kremlin – his linchpin claim — supported by no substantive evidence.

The most credible analyst of the hacking story has been completely (and deliberately) ignored by mainstream media. The implications of his analysis are so unsettling (dangerous) that even most alternative media avoid acknowledging him. But I believe “unsettling” is necessary to the process of waking up from the fairy tales Americans rely on, so I will lay out the truth about the stolen emails. This truth is simple and clear and unsettling.

The “most credible analyst” is named William Binney. He is a 32-year veteran of the NSA who, when he left the NSA in 2001, was the “Technical Leader” for intelligence, the senior technical analyst at the NSA. Binney resigned and blew the whistle when he discovered that his surveillance program was being used to spy on Americans without probable cause. Binney went on to co-found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) comprised of our smartest and bravest intelligence veterans whose very first effort in Feb., 2003 was to debunk Colin Powell’s UN presentation and to warn against “a war [upon Iraq] for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

The VIPS forensic analysis of the hacking story in all of its painstaking detail can be accessed at ConsortiumNews.com. Here is a takeaway: On July 5, 2016, the intrusion into the DNC emails transferred data at an average speed of 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed that far exceeded the capability of the Internet as of July 2016. The speed of that data transfer corresponds with the speed of copying to a thumb drive (memory stick). Thus, there was no hack via the internet; it was a leak by someone with physical access to a DNC computer or server, most probably an insider.

We know who that insider was. His name, Seth Rich; a 27-year old DNC staffer who supported Bernie Sanders, and who was murdered in Washington, D.C on July 10, 2016. Two gun shots in the back. D.C. police said Rich was the victim of a “random burglary,” but nothing was taken, not his expensive watch, nor his money, nor his credit cards, nor his cell phone.

On August 9, 2016, Julian Assange was interviewed on Dutch TV in a segment available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg Without violating the Wikileaks cardinal rule of never revealing sources, Assange came as close as he could to identifying Seth Rich as the source of the DNC emails. On that same date, Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer or killers.

William Binney informs us that in response to a FOIA request seeking records of communications between Seth Rich and others including Julian Assange, the NSA revealed that it has 15 documents, 32 pages of relevant records, but that it is all classified.

Next witness, Seymour Hersh. Wikipedia: “Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered Watergate for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award. More recently, Hersh uncovered that Obama, and Trump in 2017, blamed chemical attacks in Syria on Assad as a pretext for bombing Syria when in fact the chemical attacks were staged by the “rebels” we support.

In Nov. 2016, when Hersh did not realize he was being recorded, the recording became available months later on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwMKFnzLoxQ , here’s what Hersh said: “All I know comes off an FBI report”. Paraphrasing : The D.C. police got a warrant to search Rich’s apartment. They seized his computer and turned it over to the FBI’s cyber unit. What the [FBI] report says is that sometime in late spring/early summer, [Seth Rich] makes contact with Wikileaks. That’s in his computer; [Rich]; had submitted some juicy emails from the DNC. He offered an extensive sample”, and said, “I want money; anyway Wikileaks got access.

Hersh goes on to say: “Brennan’s an a**hole. I’ve known all these people for years. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy. It’s a Brennan operation. [Russiagate] was an American disinformation operation.”

Seth Rich had to be eliminated before Russiagate could be perpetrated.

Mass Media Delusions

Posted on by
1

By Dmitry, Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

For anyone who lives in the West (the US, the EU and its various adjuncts such as Australia, New Zealand) and wants to know what really goes on in the world, a major hindrance is the powerful filter imposed on reality by Western mass media. It uses two methods to prevent reality from leaking through to the public, one active, one passive.

The passive method uses omission and obfuscation: certain events and facts are simply not reported. Some are willfully suppressed, others carefully underemphasized, yet others are presented in a context designed to disguise their significance. For example, anybody attentive enough could have easily ascertained that Robert Mueller is senile and in no way shape or form was ever capable of running any sort of investigation or writing a report. And yet this salient fact was not reported at all; that’s willful suppression.

But now that Mueller has provided six hours of congressional testimony to prove this fact before anyone who cared to watch, outright suppression has become impossible and context substitution has come into play: those who draw attention to Mueller’s obvious senility are accused of being right-wing extremists. But how can a readily observable medical fact be dismissed as political bias? How could he have failed to recall important details from a report he supposedly wrote (or at least read)? Mind you, I am just using the Mueller disaster as a handy example. As I have explained many times, it doesn’t matter who is president and the entire ridiculous witch-hunt is an instance of fiddling while Rome burns.

The active method is to label all those who try to circumvent their filter as “conspiracy theorists”—a derogatory term that is easy to apply, although making it stick is rather tricky. It is easy to fall into the trap by insisting on a certain version of events without being in possession of specific physical proof. But it is equally easy to act as an independent collector and connoisseur of conspiracy theories (which are popular because they are interesting) in which case your accusers must be on par with you in their depth of knowledge of conspiracies or else be ready to forfeit their position as preeminent authorities on all things conspiratorial.

If none of the major Western news outlets reported a certain salient fact that can be readily exposed and attested by multiple sources by some people who, each one separately, do a bit of research, then how are these people conspiring, and how is that a theory? It can perhaps be argued that there is indeed a conspiracy—on the part of the major Western news outlets—to suppress this salient fact. That would indeed be a theory, but a difficult one to prove, and so why would anyone care to argue this point? Why not just let the salient fact speak for itself?

In short, the trick for avoiding the label of “conspiracy theorist” when reporting an unreported or underreported fact is to always couch it in the form of a question—“Here’s some evidence of something quite important, but Western mass media has failed to cover it; why?”—and leave Western mass media with the burden of proof that they didn’t conspire to suppress the coverage. Of course, no mass media outlet would ever accept such a challenge. Alternative responses include stony silence and, when that tactic starts looking ridiculous, resorting to ad hominem attacks and name-calling. But that leads to an inevitable loss of face because it automatically reduces to the childish game of “I know you are, but what am I?” As, for instance, in “Is refusing to report on Mueller’s obvious senility a sign of political extremism?”

Western mass media malfeasance doesn’t stop at suppression of facts; there is also its massive failing to provide any sort of meaningful analysis, or even to form rather obvious conjectures that we can then consider on their merits. For example, I might wildly conjecture that Robert Mueller was chosen as a senile stooge behind whose back Hillary Clinton’s political operatives conspired to unseat Donald Trump by a combination of falsified and coerced evidence, entrapment and various other forms of prosecutorial misconduct.

Again, I don’t have a dog in this race because I believe the US is in the process of flushing itself down the same golden toilet no matter who is its president. I have no particular love of “Donny, Putin’s man in Washington” (that’s a joke; Russians find it hilarious), but I do enjoy the comedic elements of watching this “Art of the Deal” president fail to close a single deal with anyone. In any case, I am perfectly happy to wait until the truth of the matter comes out. Sure, maybe it was Putin’s clever plan to make Americans spend four years beating each other up over an orange-haired buffoon who, as ordered by Putin, has been working tirelessly to wreck the relationship between the US and China and to ease China into an alliance with Russia, and also to wreck the relationship between the US and Europe, leaving a weakened and faltering US stranded all alone on the wrong side of the planet, but that’s just a conspiracy theory, isn’t it?

 

Russiagate as Organized Distraction

Posted on by
Reply

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Source: Consortium News

For over two years Russiagate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.

In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The Russiagate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated  by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.

Free and Open Exchange of Ideas

Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.

The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Russian Contacts Deplored

Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, Russiagate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

Even if we address Russiagate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

Who Benefits?

Why then does the Russiagate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

Russiagate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.

While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.

The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

 

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University. He is author of “RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media” London and New York (Routledge).

The Civil War Now in America

Posted on by
2

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Saker

America is controlled only by its wealthiest, and they are solidly in control of both political Parties. However, now that they are in control, they are fighting bitterly amongst one-another. They are on two sides. Concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Republican Party billionaires hate especially Iran, and especially all progressivism. By contrast, concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Democratic Party billionaires hate especially Russia, and accept some progressivism. (They need to do the latter so that they can be considered to be liberals and thus tolerated or even admired by Democratic Party voters. That’s necessary for them because, for example, Democratic Party voters would be just as turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the conservative Koch brothers, as Republican Party voters would be turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the liberal George Soros — and everybody knows that billionaires fund the major politicians; it’s not a totally hidden fact. Soros and other liberal billionaires can claim to be ‘public spirited’, which is necessary for them in order to be able to appeal to liberals; but the Koch brothers and other avowedly conservative billionaires have no need to make that pretense in order to appeal to conservatives.)

Actually, all  billionaires are conservatives, because they need to be that, in order to call a country like America “democratic” instead of “dictatorial,” and they need that myth of American ‘democracy’ in order to prevent a revolution, which would strip them of their power. (No American billionaire calls America a “dictatorship,” even though it is and each of them knows it, since they collectively are the dictators here, and since they don’t become involved in politics, at all, unless they want to remain in control over it. The richer a person is, the more conservative the person tends to be, and billionaires are the richest people of all, so all of them are actually conservatives. Even billionaire liberals are conservative, because otherwise the individual would be fomenting revolution, and none of them is doing any such thing — what would they be revolting against, if not themselves? They can pretend to be progressive, but only pretend. Furthermore, every study shows that the richer a person is, the more involved in politics the person tends to be. Poor people are the least involved in politics, and this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is a dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship by the richest, and throughout thousands of years that has been called an “aristocracy,” as opposed to a “democracy.”

The first scientific study of whether the U.S. is a dictatorship or a democracy was published in 2014 and it found that America is a dictatorship and that its richest are in control over it. Only wealth and political involvement determined whether a person’s desired governmental policies get passed into law and implemented by governmental policies, the researchers found. Furthermore, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Consequently, the public’s desires are actually ignored  by the American Government. It’s not responsive to what the public wants; it is responsive only  to what the politically involved super-rich — the people who mainly fund politics — want. And those billionaires also control, or even own, all of the major ’news’media, and so their propaganda filters-out such realities as that the country is a dictatorship, no democracy at all.

Barack Obama was, from the very first moment when he became President, aiming to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, and the reason for that was never made clear, but some people thought it was because Syria is allied with Iran, and some of them thought that it was instead because Syria is allied with Russia. When the Democrat Obama negotiated and signed the multinational pact in which Iran guaranteed that it would produce no nuclear bombs and the U.S. and its allies would end their sanctions against Iran, the reality became clear that Obama didn’t actually hate Iran (which the Republican Trump clearly does). Obama was invading Syria because it’s allied with Russia, not because it’s allied with Iran. His successor, the Republican Donald Trump, is just as anti-Iran as Obama was anti-Russia. Whereas the Republican Party especially hate Iran, the Democratic Party especially hate Russia. And that’s because their billionaires do — the Democratic ones hate Russia the most, and the Republican ones hate Iran the most. That’s the biggest single difference between the two Parties.

The main personal difference between Obama and Trump (other than that Obama was intelligent and Trump isn’t) is that Obama was a much more skilled liar than Trump is. For example, he was able to string Vladimir Putin along until 2012 to hope that Obama’s ‘reset with Russia’ wasn’t merely a ploy. On 26 March 2012, Obama informed Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin that “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” However, it was all a lie. The fact is that, already, Obama was actually planning, even as early as 2011, to overthrow the neutralist Government right next door to Russia, in Ukraine, and to replace it with a rabidly anti-Russian regime on Russia’s doorstep, which he was planning to bring into NATO even though only around 30% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine to join NATO. But Putin had no way of knowing that Obama was planning this. And immediately after Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, around 60% of Ukrainians suddenly wanted Ukraine to join NATO. (That’s because the newly installed Obama regime propagandized hatred against Russia.) Obama won Ukraine as being an enemy of Russia; it’s as if Putin had wrangled a coup in Mexico and suddenly Mexicans turned rabidly hostile toward the U.S. But it was a Democrat who did this, not a Republican. And the Republican Trump is just as hostile to Iran as Obama was to Russia. These aren’t foreign governments that are interfering in America’s foreign policies; maybe Israel is doing that, and maybe Saudi Arabia is, and maybe UAE is, but certainly America’s 585 billionaires are. And they are allied with those three Middle Eastern countries. When America imposes sanctions against a country in order to wreck the target-nation’s economy, that target-nation is officially an ‘enemy’, and that’s because it is allied with or at least friendly toward either Russia, or Iran, or both. America’s 585 billionaires control America’s foreign policies, but disagree on whether America’s top enemy is (if the billionaire is a Republican) Iran, or (if the billionaire is a Democrat) Russia.

For example: If the next President is Biden, then conquering Russia will be the main foreign-policy goal, but if the next President is Trump, then conquering Iran will be.

Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire.

George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded.

Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.

Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.

Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert “Iraq has WMD” Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.

As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.

As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere. George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control’s central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage them; just compare how he’s doing to how Julian Assange is doing, for example.

But you see examples pop up every day:

  • The US State Department just got busted using a $1.5 million troll farm to manipulate public discourse on social media about Iran.
  • Video footage has just surfaced of the OPCW Director General admitting that the OPCW did indeed deliberately omit any mention in its official findings of a report from its own investigation which contradicts the establishment narrative about a chemical strike in Douma, Syria, an admission which answers controversial questions asked by critics of western imperialism like myself, and which the mainstream media have not so much as touched.
  • Mintpress News broke a story the other day about a new narrative management operation known as “The Trust Project”, a coordinated campaign by establishment-friendly mass media outlets for “gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major tech companies like Google and Twitter.”
  • In a new interview with The Canary, UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer explicitly named the mass media as largely responsible for Assange’s psychological torture, excoriating them for the way that they “have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange.”
  • In a new essay called “Freeing Julian Assange“, journalist Suzie Dawson reports that “Countless articles appear to have been obliterated from the internet” about Assange and WikiLeaks, amounting to some 90 percent of the links Dawson examined which were shared in tweets by or about WikiLeaks and Assange since 2010.
  • I just finished reading this excellent Swiss Propaganda Research essay about the little-known fact that “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”

Any one of these could have a full-length Caitlin Johnstone essay written about it. I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don’t have the time or energy to write full articles about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralized empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn fast, because they’re just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.

Because whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

Power used to be much easier to identify in our society: just look for the fellow with the sparkly hat made of gold sitting in a really big chair and bossing everyone around. As our society advanced philosophically, however, people began to tire of having every aspect of their society determined by some schmuck in a golden hat, and started fighting for ideals called “freedom” and “democracy” in their respective nations. And, as far as our parents and teachers have taught us, freedom and democracy are exactly what we have now.

Except that’s all crap. Freedom and democracy only exist within the western empire to the extent that it keeps up appearances. Because the trouble with democracy, it turns out, is that human minds are very hackable, as long as you’ve got the resources. Wealthy and powerful people do have the resources, which means that it’s very possible for wealthy and powerful people to manipulate the masses into voting in a way that consistently benefits the wealthy and powerful. This is why billionaires and narrative control consistently go hand-in-hand.

This dynamic has allowed for western power structures to operate in a way that western democracy was explicitly designed to prevent: for the benefit of the powerful instead of for the benefit of the voting populace. So now we’ve got people in so-called liberal democracies voting to maintain governments which advance wars which don’t benefit them, to advance intrusive surveillance and police state policies which oppress them, to advance austerity policies which harm them, to advance labor policies which exploit them, and to maintain ecocidal environmental policies which threaten the very survival of our species. All because the wealthy and powerful are able to use their wealth and power to manipulate the way people think and vote.

This is why I pay far more attention in my work to narrative control than to politics. Politics is downstream from narrative control, which is why the 2020 US presidential race is already a contest to see what level of Democratic corporatist warmonger will be running against the incumbent Republican corporatist warmonger. The narrative-controlling class does its level best to hide the fact that anything’s fundamentally wrong with the system, then when people notice it’s deeply broken they encourage them to use completely impotent tools to fix it. “Don’t like how things are run? Here, vote for our other puppet!”

The root of all our problems right now is the fact that human minds are very hackable with enough resources, combined with the fact that war, oppression, exploitation and ecocide are highly profitable. This dynamic has caused human collective consciousness to generally dead-end into a kind of propagandized, zombified state in which all our knowledge and all our thinking moves in alignment with the agendas of existing power structures. It’s much easier to continue believing the official narratives than to sort through everything you’ve been told about your society, your nation and your world since grade school and work out what’s true and what’s false. Many don’t have the time. Many more don’t have the courage.

We will remain in this collective dead-end, hurtling toward either Orwellian dystopia or extinction via climate collapse or nuclear armageddon, until we find a way out of it. It won’t come from the tools our rulers have given us, and it won’t come from repeating any of the old patterns which got us here. In order to escape from the increasingly adept narrative control matrix that is being built around our collective mind by the powerful, we’re going to have to change our relationship with narrative altogether. We will either pass this great test or we will fail it, and we absolutely have the freedom to go either way.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

After getting curb stomped on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim “Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?” Ryan posted a statement decrying the Hawaii congresswoman’s desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as “isolationism”.

“While making a point as to why America can’t cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,” the statement reads. “When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making— about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11 attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn’t know who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard’s isolationism and her misguided beliefs on foreign policy. We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it’s ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.”

Ryan’s campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said “When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.” At best, Ryan can argue that when he said “they” he had suddenly shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can’t legitimately claim that Gabbard “contorted” anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.

More importantly, Ryan’s campaign using the word “isolationism” to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn’t accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.

This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In his farewell address to the nation, war criminal George W Bush said the following:

“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”

A few months after Bush’s address, Antiwar‘s Rich Rubino wrote an article titled “Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism“, explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.

“Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world,” Rubino explained. “In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent.”

“A non-interventionist supports commercial relations,” Rubino contrasted. “In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations.”

“A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations,” wrote Rubino. “In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences.”

Calling an aversion to endless military violence “isolationism” is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people “agoraphobia”. Yet you’ll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus “war on terror” implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism; Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.

Another dishonest label you’ll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is “pacifism”. “Some wars are bad, but I’m not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary,” supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They’ll say this while defending Trump’s potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.

This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible circumstances; anyone who claims that they can’t imagine any possible scenario in which they’d support using some kind of coordinated violence either hasn’t imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.

Another common distortion you’ll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism “isn’t anti-war” because they don’t oppose all war under any and all circumstances. This tweet by The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria’s sovereign right to defend itself with the help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan’s own country of Britain with extremist militias who’d been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.

The label “anti-war” can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire, because they understand that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today’s environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label “isolationist” comes nowhere close.

It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn’t have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the “end” of colonialism we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country’s will and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.

Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange

Posted on by
1

By Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture

Source: Medium

I know, you may think I am deluded. How could life in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard ever amount to torture? That’s exactly what I thought, too, when Assange first appealed to my office for protection. Like most of the public, I had been subconsciously poisoned by the relentless smear campaign, which had been disseminated over the years. So it took a second knock on my door to get my reluctant attention. But once I looked into the facts of this case, what I found filled me with repulsion and disbelief.

Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the US had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, two women made the headlines in Sweden. One of them claimed he had ripped a condom, and the other that he had failed to wear one, in both cases during consensual intercourse — not exactly scenarios that have the ring of ‘rape’ in any language other than Swedish. Mind you, each woman even submitted a condom as evidence. The first one, supposedly worn and torn by Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure. The second one, used but intact, supposedly proved ‘unprotected’ intercourse. Go figure, again. The women even texted that they never intended to report a crime but were ‘railroaded’ into doing so by zealous Swedish police. Go figure, once more. Ever since, both Sweden and Britain have done everything to prevent Assange from confronting these allegations without simultaneously having to expose himself to US extradition and, thus, to a show-trial followed by life in jail. His last refuge had been the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Alright, I thought, but surely Assange must be a hacker! But what I found is that all his disclosures had been freely leaked to him, and that no one accuses him of having hacked a single computer. In fact, the only arguable hacking-charge against him relates to his alleged unsuccessful attempt to help breaking a password which, had it been successful, might have helped his source to cover her tracks. In short: a rather isolated, speculative, and inconsequential chain of events; a bit like trying to prosecute a driver who unsuccessfully attempted to exceed the speed-limit, but failed because their car was too weak.

Well then, I thought, at least we know for sure that Assange is a Russian spy, has interfered with US elections, and negligently caused people’s deaths! But all I found is that he consistently published true information of inherent public interest without any breach of trust, duty or allegiance. Yes, he exposed war crimes, corruption and abuse, but let’s not confuse national security with governmental impunity. Yes, the facts he disclosed empowered US voters to take more informed decisions, but isn’t that simply democracy? Yes, there are ethical discussions to be had regarding the legitimacy of unredacted disclosures. But if actual harm had really been caused, how come neither Assange nor Wikileaks ever faced related criminal charges or civil lawsuits for just compensation?

But surely, I found myself pleading, Assange must be a selfish narcissist, skateboarding through the Ecuadorian Embassy and smearing feces on the walls? Well, all I heard from Embassy staff is that the inevitable inconveniences of his accommodation at their offices were handled with mutual respect and consideration. This changed only after the election of President Moreno, when they were suddenly instructed to find smears against Assange and, when they didn’t, they were soon replaced. The President even took it upon himself to bless the world with his gossip, and to personally strip Assange of his asylum and citizenship without any due process of law.

In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

Very well, you may say, but what does slander have to do with torture? Well, this is a slippery slope. What may look like mere «mudslinging» in public debate, quickly becomes “mobbing” when used against the defenseless, and even “persecution” once the State is involved. Now just add purposefulness and severe suffering, and what you get is full-fledged psychological torture.

Yes, living in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard may seem like a sweet deal when you believe the rest of the lies. But when no one remembers the reason for the hate you endure, when no one even wants to hear the truth, when neither the courts nor the media hold the powerful to account, then your refuge really is but a rubber boat in a shark-pool, and neither your cat nor your skateboard will save your life.

Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.

This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek.

None responded positively.

False-Flagging the World to War: A Gulf of Tonkin Incident in the Gulf of Oman

Posted on by
Reply

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Washington is playing false flag again, but this time, in the Gulf of Oman as Washington has accused Iran of attacking two commercial tanker ships from Japan and Norway while tensions in the region are at an all-time high. Why would Iran attack commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman belonging to Norway and the other to Japan in the first place?  Keep in mind that just hours before, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were going to meet in an attempt to ease the ongoing crisis between Iran and the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported that “The attacks, including on a Japanese tanker, came just hours before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan met in Iran with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to try to ease the standoff.” the report also said that “Mr. Abe has attempted to work as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, but Mr. Khamenei dismissed Mr. Abe’s effort, darkening prospects for dialogue. “We don’t believe these words at all because honest negotiations will not come from an individual such as [President] Trump.” An ABC news report stated that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo introduced Washington’s assessment that basically declared Iran is guilty as charged:

“It is the assessment of the United States government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today. This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication”

Pompeo also said that the U.S. “will defend its forces, interests and stand with our partners and allies to safeguard global commerce and regional stability.”So what proof does Washington have? The report from ABC news said that “Some of the intelligence that Pompeo referred to includes overhead images taken by a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance craft that shows Iranians on small boats alongside the Kokuka Courageous attempting to remove an unexploded mine that they had previously attached to the ship, a U.S. official told ABC News. While the images themselves weren’t disclosed, the descriptions suggested that the Iranians were attempting to remove evidence that would link them directly to the tanker attacks.”

Scripted: The Gulf of Tonkin and the Gulf of Oman

It is the same script that was once used on August 2nd, 1964 in what was to become the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ which based on a false claim of an alleged attack by North Vietnam on a U.S. ship, the USS Maddox. Washington’s official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched an “unprovoked attack” against the U.S.S. Maddox that was allegedly on “routine patrol” but the truth was that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering and that it was involved in coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by both the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force. Then two days later, North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly launched a “deliberate attack” on two U.S. destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy with 22 torpedoes but it was all a lie. There was no evidence to suggest that there was an attack or any damage by North Vietnam. However, US Congress wanted retribution against North Vietnam so they passed The Tonkin Gulf Resolution a couple of days later which gave President, Lyndon B. Johnson authority to enter Vietnam’s civil war and give its full support to South Vietnam. The resolution stated that “Congress approves and supports the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The Vietnam War lasted for about 10 years costing the lives of 55,000 US soldiers and roughly 3 million Southeast Asians including men, women and children.

The recent incident in the Gulf of Oman resembles the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. On August 5th, 1964, The New York Times published ‘The President Acts’ and stated the following:

President Johnson went to the American people last night with the somber facts of an enlarging crisis in Vietnam. He announced new steps in reply to “open aggression on the high seas.”. Air action by the United States is being executed against North Vietnam gunboats and supporting installations.

The President will put to the Congress a resolution expressing our united determination in support of the cause of freedom in Southeast Asia: He will put this grave situation before the Security Council of the United Nations. He has sought—and received—from Senator Goldwater, the Republican nominee for President, the assurance of bipartisan support in this critical hour.

The attack on one of our warships that at first seemed, and was hoped to be, an isolated incident is now seen in ominous perspective to have been the beginning of a mad adventure by the North Vietnamese Communists. After offensive action against more vessels of our Navy the President has backed up with retaliatory fire the warnings that North Vietnam chose frequently to ignore

Johnson called on congress to declare that “The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia” according to a Politico article titled ‘Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: Aug. 7, 1964′ stated that “The resolution gave the president the right to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” LBJ gave a speech following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident:

My fellow Americans: – As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.

The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes. The destroyers and supporting aircraft acted at once on the orders I gave after the initial act of aggression. We believe at least two of the attacking boats were sunk. There were no U.S. losses.

The performance of commanders and crews in this engagement is in the highest tradition of the United States Navy. But repeated acts of violence against the Armed Forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Viet-Nam which have been used in these hostile operations.

In the larger sense this new act of aggression, aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in southeast Asia. Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Viet-Nam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.

The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Viet-Nam will be redoubled by this outrage. Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.

I have instructed the Secretary of State to make this position totally clear to friends and to adversaries and, indeed, to all. I have instructed Ambassador Stevenson to raise this matter immediately and urgently before the Security Council of the United Nations. Finally, I have today met with the leaders of both parties in the Congress of the United States and I have informed them that I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making it clear that our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia.

I have been given encouraging assurance by these leaders of both parties that such a resolution will be promptly introduced, freely and expeditiously debated, and passed with overwhelming support. And just a few minutes ago I was able to reach Senator Goldwater and I am glad to say that he has expressed his support of the statement that I am making to you tonight.

It is a solemn responsibility to have to order even limited military action by forces whose overall strength is as vast and as awesome as those of the United States of America, but it is my considered conviction, shared throughout your Government, that firmness in the right is indispensable today for peace; that firmness will always be measured. Its mission is peace

Washington released a video claiming that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) removed an unexploded mine from one of the two tankers. Last Thursday, Navy Captain Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US military’s Central Command, said in a statement “At 4:10pm local time (00:10 GMT) an IRGC Gashti Class patrol boat approached the M/T Kokuka Courageous and was observed and recorded removing the unexploded limpet mine from the M/T Kokuka Courageous.”

The New York Times headlined with ‘Trump Accuses Iran in Explosions That Crippled Oil Tankers’ detailing what Trump had said in relation to the Gulf of Oman incident “Well, Iran did do it,” the president said in a telephone interview on “Fox & Friends” in his first comments since the ships were damaged. “You know they did it because you saw the boat. I guess one of the mines didn’t explode and it’s got essentially Iran written all over it.” The New York Timesweighed in on the accusation by claiming that Iran’s proxy groups have increased attacks in the region, in a way siding with Trump:

In fact, some Iranian proxy groups in the region have stepped up attacks lately. The Houthi faction in Yemen, which has been supported by Iran, has attacked Saudi oil pipelines and other targets. Just this week, a Houthi missile slammed inot the arrival halls of a Saudi airport, injuring 26 people, according to Saudi news. The Houthis reported launching a drone attack on the same airport on Friday but the Saudi military said it intercepted five Houthi drones and the airport was operating normally 

According to The New York Times one of the Japanese operators said that the tanker was hit by a flying object not by a limpet mine:

Doubts about the American version of Thursday’s events were raised by the Japanese operator of one of the damaged tankers, which said that it was attacked by air. “Our crew said that the ship was attacked by a flying object,” said Yutaka Katada, the president of the operator, Kokuka Sangyo 

Washington’s Hit List: Iran

It’s no secret that Trump is in the pockets of Israel and Saudi Arabia but that’s beside the point, the deep state insiders and the Military-Industrial Complex have been wanting a war with Iran since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which ousted the U.S. backed dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi also known as the Shah of Iran. But there are a number of reasons why the U.S. wants a war with Iran, one of them being the fact that Iran has dropped its use of the U.S. dollar in trade with several key countries including Russia and China disrupting the petrodollar system. Israel also plays an important part by having the ambitions of becoming the “Greater Israel” in the Middle East, but Iran and its allies including Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and the Palestinians are preventing that from happening.  If Israel can succeed in pushing the U.S. to attack Iran and destabilize the country as they did with Iraq, then managing the Middle East in its entirely would allow the Zionist state to expand on more Arab territory (Trump recently declared Syria’s Golan Heights as a part of Israel). Then Israel will become a major power in the Middle East armed with nuclear weapons, sort of a mini-empire with teeth.

However, the U.S., Israel and the Gulf States will have their hands tied when it comes to Iran’s military capabilities that includes an estimated 534,000 active personnel and an additional 350,000 reservists in the army, air force, navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It is also worth mentioning that Iran has the manpower which is close to 40 million eligible men and women who would unite no matter what side of the political spectrum they are on. They would rally around the Iranian flag and fight for their homeland. One certainty the U.S. and its allies would face is a nation that has much more people and a land mass that is at least four times larger than Iraq. According to Global Firepower Index, a military website ranked Iran at No. 13 out of 136 countries. Iran has more than 500 aircraft, 1,634 combat tanks, 2,345 armored fighting vehicles and 398 Naval assets including 34 submarines and 88 vessels. Iran recently produced an air defense system called the Khordad 15 that is “capable of tracking and shooting down six targets at the same time. The weapon was rolled out amid growing tensions around the Persian Gulf” according to a report by RT.com. The report said that “Iran unveiled its new domestically-designed air defense missile system Khordad 15 on Sunday. Equipped with long-range Sayyad 3 missiles, it can shoot down enemy jets and combat drones at a range of 120 kilometers, Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami said.” 

The U.S. war machine’s main objective is to destabilize and destroy Iran as a country so that the U.S., the Gulf states and especially Israel can dominate the Middle East and its oil supplies. It will also be a bonus for the Military-Industrial Complex who will profit from what will become a long-term war.