Paul Rigby

February 18, 2023 How the Wolfowitz Doctrine Shaped Putin’s Outlook A misguided effort to pursue American supremacy at all costs has had its consequences. Sameed Basha https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-wolfowitz-doctrine-shaped-putin’s-outlook-206225 Sameed Basha is a defense and political analyst with a master’s degree in international relations from Deakin University, Australia. He specializes in Asia-Pacific regional dynamics and conflict & security studies. He tweets at @SameedBasha. Image: Shutterstock.

Until the last Ukrainian TAMÁS PILHÁL https://magyarnemzet.hu/ahelyzet/2023/02/az-utolso-ukranig US President Joe Biden unexpectedly arrived in Kiev yesterday. It was so unexpected that the person concerned could certainly have been thoroughly surprised by his own arrival to who knows where. But then, I think, he was told that the people he sometimes confuses with Iranians live here. As they used to say, they show the poor guy where to find the microphone, the exit stairs, where to try to get around the boxwood. It can be really exciting to live like this. Every minute of every day is full of surprises and unexpected encounters. “Hey, who are they? And where am I anyway?” You can laugh at him, of course, except that he is the leader of a world empire that is armed to the hilt, stationing soldiers in every corner of the Earth, scanning every square meter with spy satellites, becoming increasingly paranoid, and dangerous to life even when he is drunk. It's not at all funny, it's rather ominous that this uncle who stumbles here and there and goes back and forth has the atomic codes. In principle, with him - in practice, perhaps more with those who push him around like a fern, and who write his increasingly blood-steamed, World War II-smelling speeches. These are the warmongers who previously forced the indiscriminate bombing of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria ("democracy export"), and now they are beating the table for more weapons, demanding an even longer war, and not wanting to hear about a cease-fire or peace. That is why the already half-finished peace plan was drilled last spring. Because they decided: they will make Ukraine fight until the last Ukrainian sitting on the arm. There is no stopping, even the one-legged and the three-eared are rounded up and sent to the front. Although they know: this will doom this young state drawn on a desk. And why? It's no secret, it has been said many times, most recently by former US Defense Minister Mark Esper: the Ukrainians will do the "dirty work" of weakening Russia instead of them. This is their goal, they subordinated everything to it. It doesn't matter how many people die from it. They overturned the status quo adopted in 1991, broke their promise that NATO would not expand towards Russia, and forcibly pushed into the Russians' innermost sphere of interest. All the provocations of the past two decades—the Orange “revolutions,” the five-billion-dollar Nuland coup, the systematic persecution of nationalities, the Bandera cult, the threat of joining NATO and the rest - all aimed at this. To make it a war. Became. Yesterday, the old man was sent to speak to the penis pianist so that the show, the war, would definitely continue. - Today I am in Kiev to meet with President Zelensky and to confirm our unwavering and unwavering commitment to the democracy, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine - Joe Biden said yesterday. As we know, sovereignty and territorial integrity belong to everyone - unfortunately, not everyone does. Those who are well placed in the West will have it, but the others will have to put up with Samantha Power... Another interesting observation is that those who are now the most vocally concerned about the borders of Ukraine, were the ones who redrew half the world in the last century without any inhibitions or decency, throwing a fit over ethnic relations . This is what the United States is up against: how dare anyone push the boundaries without its permission? That's our way - at least that's what they imagine.

John Helmer, the journalist who has the honour of being denounced as a KGB agent by the world’s least convincing Social Democrat*, has the following excellent take on where Hersh is coming from, and what his informants seek to achieve. This in an extract only: SEYMOUR HERSH DEFENDS CIA IN PLOT TO ATTACK BIDEN RE-ELECTION – HERSH ALSO ATTACKS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS WITH HIS OWN PLOT TO FEED THEM “CRUMBS” http://johnhelmer.org/seymour-hersh-defends-cia-in-plot-to-attack-biden-re-election-hersh-also-attacks-investigative-journalists-with-his-own-plot-to-feed-them-crumbs/ By John Helmer, Moscow, and George Eliason, Donetsk @bears_with Seymour Hersh, a US journalist, has just broadcast his defence of a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to sabotage President Joseph Biden’s re-election campaign before it gets under way. In a German video podcast from Germany, Hersh has made a string of telltale mistakes of fact at the same time as he has attacked those journalists who have been following up his report of February 8, investigating errors Hersh has been asked to correct in his follow-up. Instead, according to Hersh’s new publication, he and his sources have “le[ft] enough breadcrumbs for them to be able to write as a couple already have, ‘Oh this couldn’t have happened because…’ So we took care of them.” Click to read: Min. 14:45. The reporters whom Hersh took care of, those who have published endorsements of his initial report, have been misled. Hersh concluded the new interview with his personal endorsement of CIA sources who, he reports, have criticized Biden and his White House and State Department allies “for choosing to keep you [Germany] cold for their short-range political [re-election goals]… That horrified [them].” Hersh added: “I’m talking about people who are intensely loyal to the United States. Intensely loyal. And they understand – and in the CIA it is understood… even in that community it’s appalling that he [Biden] chose to keep Europe cold” (Min 31-32). Hersh published a story he entitled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline” on February 8. The first analysis of Hersh’s errors appeared on February 10; click to read. In the TNT Radio War of the Worlds broadcast on February 11, Hersh heard a fresh account of his mistakes of commission and omission, including his failure to identify the British, Polish, and Ukrainian roles in the Nord Stream bombing operation. Click to listen. Three days later, Hersh and his quoted source corrected their mistake in calling the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) and the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) by the 45-year old anachronism PFIAB dating from the Carter Administration, in an interview published in the Berliner Zeitung on February 14. Hersh and the same German reporter, Fabian Scheidler, have repeated this correction in a second videotaped interview. Hersh reiterated several of his original mistakes and added new ones. He also opened an attack on other investigative journalists, intimating that he intentionally included in his text a trail of “breadcrumbs” to deceive them. Watch the full Hersh-Scheidler interview here. The CIA loyalty pledge appears from Minute 30… Helmer & Elliason discussion: https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/war-of-the-worlds-18-february-2023/ * William Niederhut

The meeting between the Bungmeister and the Cokehead in CIA-occupied Kiev presumably focused on such important matters as which country has the most political prisoners*; and how to leg it to the airport with suitcases stuffed with cash. To follow, the funniest and most pointed take on this meeting of the global far-right that I've so far seen: Until the last Ukrainian TAMÁS PILHÁL https://magyarnemzet.hu/ahelyzet/2023/02/az-utolso-ukranig US President Joe Biden unexpectedly arrived in Kiev yesterday. It was so unexpected that the person concerned could certainly have been thoroughly surprised by his own arrival to who knows where. But then, I think, he was told that the people he sometimes confuses with Iranians live here. As they used to say, they show the poor guy where to find the microphone, the exit stairs, where to try to get around the boxwood. It can be really exciting to live like this. Every minute of every day is full of surprises and unexpected encounters. “Hey, who are they? And where am I anyway?” You can laugh at him, of course, except that he is the leader of a world empire that is armed to the hilt, stationing soldiers in every corner of the Earth, scanning every square meter with spy satellites, becoming increasingly paranoid, and dangerous to life even when he is drunk. It's not at all funny, it's rather ominous that this uncle who stumbles here and there and goes back and forth has the atomic codes. In principle, with him - in practice, perhaps more with those who push him around like a fern, and who write his increasingly blood-steamed, World War II-smelling speeches. These are the warmongers who previously forced the indiscriminate bombing of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria ("democracy export"), and now they are beating the table for more weapons, demanding an even longer war, and not wanting to hear about a cease-fire or peace. That is why the already half-finished peace plan was drilled last spring. Because they decided: they will make Ukraine fight until the last Ukrainian sitting on the arm. There is no stopping, even the one-legged and the three-eared are rounded up and sent to the front. Although they know: this will doom this young state drawn on a desk. And why? It's no secret, it has been said many times, most recently by former US Defense Minister Mark Esper: the Ukrainians will do the "dirty work" of weakening Russia instead of them. This is their goal, they subordinated everything to it. It doesn't matter how many people die from it. They overturned the status quo adopted in 1991, broke their promise that NATO would not expand towards Russia, and forcibly pushed into the Russians' innermost sphere of interest. All the provocations of the past two decades—the Orange “revolutions,” the five-billion-dollar Nuland coup, the systematic persecution of nationalities, the Bandera cult, the threat of joining NATO and the rest - all aimed at this. To make it a war. Became. Yesterday, the old man was sent to speak to the penis pianist so that the show, the war, would definitely continue. - Today I am in Kiev to meet with President Zelensky and to confirm our unwavering and unwavering commitment to the democracy, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine - Joe Biden said yesterday. As we know, sovereignty and territorial integrity belong to everyone - unfortunately, not everyone does. Those who are well placed in the West will have it, but the others will have to put up with Samantha Power... Another interesting observation is that those who are now the most vocally concerned about the borders of Ukraine, were the ones who redrew half the world in the last century without any inhibitions or decency, throwing a fit over ethnic relations . This is what the United States is up against: how dare anyone push the boundaries without its permission? That's our way - at least that's what they imagine. * The Cokehead lost, as his uniformed nutters have a deplorable tendency to murder their prisoners.

Consortium News Live - Seymour Hersh on American Sabotage [of the Nord Stream pipelines]: further revelations on US state terrorism https://youtube.com/live/4wI38E9bJzk?si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

That appears to be the case with Sinn Fein. Mind you, MI5 plays rough, and the options are limited: Murder, Lies and State Conspiracy https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/02/murder-lies-and-state-conspiracy/ February 17, 2023 Donald John Morrison was the last man to speak to Willie McRae, unless his murderer talked. He invited me warmly into his neat Benbecula home, where I was visiting with my friend, his cousin Donnie. Donald took my coat from me and hung it neatly in a cupboard. He then sat us in the front room, while he went to make us tea. On the wood and glass coffee table was a copy of Gareth Wardell’s Essays, thumbed and marked. Donald John returned with the tea and two slices of pizza, warm and crisp, with sweet fresh cherry tomatoes on top, their skins split from the oven. Donald John’s movements were fluid. He is remarkably spritely for a man in his late seventies, his back only slightly bowed, his eyes clear behind his spectacles, his hands deft and assured. There is a calm island lisp to his voice, but he speaks compellingly, assuredly, with the policeman’s eye for relevance and detail. He was a central Glasgow beat policeman for decades, in times when Glasgow was a tough and dangerous city – and when there were beat policemen. He comes across as more than friendly, positively kindly. But then at key points in his narrative, his eyes suddenly flash and you see the inner steel that he needed in the Glasgow polis. It happens when he is angry, and there are parts of this story that make him angry indeed. He knew Willie McRae professionally quite well, in the way that a policeman knows a lawyer. They would meet in court, and sometimes he would need to serve papers on McRae’s office on Bath Street. Everybody knew the office, it was on the first floor, the biggest law practice in the city, its door protected by a steel shutter on a roller. In early 1985 he saw Willie McRae more often than usual, because he had to attend on four separate occasions to burglaries of the law office. On every occasion cabinets had been forced and papers had been taken, but no money. On the same floor of the Bath Street building was an office belonging to a Director of Celtic. That too was burgled, and when he attended that one, the Director told him he believed the break-in was looking for papers belonging to Willie McRae. Then one day in March 1985, his sergeant came out to the beat and told Donald John and his partner that, whatever occurred, they were to stay away from the McRae offices that evening because a Special Branch and MI5 operation was in process. That night Donald John was pulling a “doubler” – a twelve hour shift. He found that McRae had been taken into custody and a police cell, for Driving Under the Influence (which to be fair could have been done to Willie McRae almost any day of the week). Donald John had seen this before. In those days, the personal effects of a prisoner in the police cells were put into a large brown envelope and sealed. Special Branch would take away the envelope from the custody sergeant, open it, remove the prisoner’s house keys, and before the custody court the next morning at 9.30am they would return them and reseal. It appears that evening the plan did not work, as Willie McRae did not have the roller shutter keys on him – they were in fact kept by the cleaner who came in and opened up at 7.30am every morning. Donald John grinned that he could have told Special Branch that, if they had asked him. Then on 7 April Donald John was walking his beat, when he spotted two men keeping surveillance on Agnews store. He immediately tagged them as policemen. One, a tall thin man of around forty years with prematurely white hair, was pacing up and down outside the barbershop, as though waiting for someone. The second, a shorter and stouter man with curly black hair, was pretending to look into a plate glass shop window. Occasionally they would glance to check on each other. Donald John was walking towards Agnews store, somewhat on guard, when Willie McRae emerged from the store and walked towards him. In each hand McRae held a bottle of Islay Mist whisky. Donald joked that he would have to breathylise him. Willie replied that in a few hours he would be enjoying the whisky by a warm fire in Kintail. They walked together to McRae’s car. Willie put one bottle on the roof while he opened the door, and Donald John caught it for him as it started to roll from the roof. Willie placed both bottles on the front seat next to a bulging briefcase. Donald moved them onto the floor of the car, suggesting they would be safer as they could fall off the seat. Willie looked at Donald John and patted the bulging briefcase, which had papers sticking out. “I have got them this time, Donald”, he said. Then he repeated: “I have got them this time”. They were probably the last words Willie McRae spoke. As McRae closed the car door, Donald John Morrison looked up and saw one of the police surveillance team signal to the other with outturned hands, as though to indicate he had no idea what was happening, why a uniformed policeman was speaking to McRae. I interrupted Donald John (the only time I needed to in the whole discourse) to ask him how McRae had seemed. He said he was neatly dressed and shaven, in a check shirt with a tie and a tweed jacket. He seemed on good form, “in fine fettle”. He had a sparkle in his eye and seemed to be relishing the idea of that drink by the fire in Kintail. Donald John said apparently there had been a blaze at McRae’s home earlier that day but he gave no indication of it. There was absolutely nothing in his demeanour to indicate he was troubled: quite the opposite. When he heard of the alleged suicide, Donald John was astonished and did not believe it. He had spoken to Roddy Mackay of Agnew’s Store, who had sold Willie the whisky, and he had also found McRae just as cheerful. Morrison gave a full statement to the investigation, including everything detailed here. He recommended they also take a statement from Roddy Mackay. A former beat collague of Donald John Morrison had joined Special Branch. He subsequently told Donald John that the whole investigation into McRae’s death was a cover-up and a tissue of lies by the police. Donald John also found that Roddy Mackay had never been interviewed. Over a decade later, once the Freedom of Information Act had passed, Donald John FOIA requested a copy of the report into the death of Willie McRae. Donald John Morrison was astonished to find that his entire statement had been falsified and replaced with a fake statement onto which his signature had been photocpied. In his “official” statement in the report there was nothing about surveillance, nothing about MI5 or Special Branch, and nothing about the whisky or the briefcase. The official version of the death of Willie McRae is that there was no whisky or briefcase in the car, and that he shot himself in the back of the head whilst driving along, the gun flying out of the car window. That remains the official story to this day. Donald John was absolutely furious about the forgery of his statement. As this was obviously a serious crime in itself, he went to the procurator fiscal in Elgin to try to get a prosecution commenced against the Special Branch officers involved. Eventually he was told that the Crown Office had ruled a prosecution would not be “procedurally correct”. Donald John Morrison believes that, from the death of Willie McRae on, he was a marked man in the police because of what he knew. Despite an exemplary record he was never offered promotion, though he says he did not want it. He was involved on three occasions in tackling and physically subduing armed robbers, but got not so much as a commendation. Frequently arrests he made were attributed to others. Morrison says that it was made absolutely plain to officers, by the senior command, that they were expected to join the Orange Lodge, which he did. There were only five Catholic officers – who he named – in his division. The McRae affair also caused him problems in the Orange Lodge, but that is a story, he suggested, for another day. Morrison is a compelling witness. His testimony is detailed and precise. He ventures nothing beyond what he himself saw and did. He had not a word to say on why McRae was killed, because he does not know. But he does know there was a bulging briefcase that McRae patted when he said “I have got them this time”. He knows that there were two bottles of Islay Mist. He knows that these things officially “disappeared”. He knows his statement was forged, and that it was done by Special Branch. He knows McRae was under British state surveillance. I know that I met an honest and brave man. As we left, he stood there, eyes twinkling, and insisted that next time we came to the island we were staying with him, “with your wife and bairns too”. It was a pleasure to be hosted by the remarkable Donald John Morrison. Just an honest beat cop, standing up against the murderers of the British state.

John, I had a brief email exchange with Preparata in July 2008, shortly after reading Conjuring Hitler, on the subject of the Bay of Pigs (I had proposed that it was a self-sabotaged smokescreen for the CIA's much bigger play, the Challe-fronted putsch against de Gaulle). I found him friendly, curious and well-informed. A thorough-going delight, in summary. And I have sympathy with your take on the NI peace process. The British are the masters of creating patronage networks via the creation of powerless new governing structures, stuffed to the gunnels with biddable mediocrities for whom publicity, pomp & lavish expenses are the highest goals, as the Scots are the latest nation to learn. Paul

A seminal work, here reviewed by David McGregor: https://guidopreparata.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/McGregorConjuringHitler-2016_07_28-21_21_30-UTC.pdf A similarly profound work, this time on the causes of World War I, is Gerry Docherty & Jim Macgregor's Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

With the intra-elite war within America over Ukraine now gone public, the most obvious and important question arises: how will this bitter struggle be resolved? By what we have witnessed so far - selective revelation, presumably followed by a succession of ever more hair-rising exposes, culminating in a limited, public, political inquiry terminated by backstairs agreement and elite realignment behind a new consensus? Likely, but by no means certain, for at least three reasons: the ruling faction’s control of mainstream media is now total; Bidenescu is no longer in full control of his temper (or mind), and thus the usual means of correcting the errant course of a typical Democratic machine-pol – bully the bully a la LBJ in 1968 – may well not work; and he is merely a figure-head for a more diverse and deeply entrenched set of forces that might reasonably grouped under the term Neocon. How to deal with this cabal? Will they be picked off individually or collectively? I was trying to think of a home-grown analogy for the position in which the US elite currently finds itself. The one that springs to mind is the intra-elite war in the British deep state over policy towards Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s. In response to intense US pressure, both direct and through proxies, London sought to change policy and conciliate Washington. The problem was that securicrats in MI5 and the Ulster special branch, the controllers of the apparatus of repression in the province, refused to countenance change. The solution was the Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash of 2 June 1994. Is the war within the US elite going to take a similarly dramatic turn?

A move that may portend another front opening in the war against Bidenescu the terrorist: Vera Mikhailenko has been appointed head of the US-created Anti-Corruption Court (SACC) of Ukraine. The significance? The same Mikhailenko, in her capacity as a judge working for SACC, had the temerity to open an investigation into Nikolai Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, for which foolishness she was sacked and penalised. Will Mikhailenko once again venture into Hunter Biden land?

NORD STREAM UPDATE: In lengthy interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Seymour Hersh offers more intriguing details about his source's account of the attack https://www.eugyppius.com/p/nord-stream-update-in-lengthy-interview America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. The mainstream German press have responded with uniform scepticism. Most reports followed the example of the wire services, in leading with the blanket denials of American officials and noting that the story was well-received in Moscow. A few operations, like the state media outlet Tagesschau, attempted a more comprehensive debunking, in this case by asking experts to pick holes in the details of Hersh’s story – with less than impressive results. The other major tactic has been to attack Hersh’s credibility, along similar lines as the American press. The latest headline here is that Bob Woodward thinks Hersh’s story is bunk, and because Woodward is also a famous American journalist, that means checkmate for Hersh, or something. The biggest development is an interview that Hersh gave to the Berliner Zeitung. It was published yesterday and contains many new details. For example, Hersh tells his interviewer that the plan was to detonate “eight bombs … near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea,” of which only “six…went off.” This is the first confirmation we’ve had anywhere of an obvious point, namely that the operation wasn’t fully successful, and that this is the only reason that Pipe B of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact. He’s also more explicit on the involvement of Denmark and Sweden, saying “I was told that they did what they did [to facilitate the planting of explosives] and they knew what they were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe nobody ever said ‘yes.’” Hersh also provides more operational detail: [T]there was a decompression chamber, and we used a Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines. One problem was how to deal with Baltic Sea surveillance. The Baltic is monitored very thoroughly, there’s a lot of freely available data, so we took care of that, there were three or four different people for that. And what was done then is very simple. For 21 years, our Sixth Fleet … has been conducting [BALTOPS] … [F]or the first time in history, the NATO exercise in the Baltic had a new programme. It was to be a twelve-day exercise to drop and detect mines. A number of nations sent out mine teams, one group dropped a mine and another mine team went out to find it and blow it up. So there was this period of time when things were exploding, and during that time the deep-sea divers could operate and attach the mines to the pipelines. The two pipelines run about a mile apart, they’re a little buried under the silt on the seabed, but they’re not difficult to get to, and the divers had practised it. It only took a couple of hours to place the bombs … [T]hey did it towards the end of the exercise. But at the last minute, the White House got nervous. The president said he was afraid to go ahead. He changed his mind and gave new orders, so they had the ability to detonate the bombs remotely at any time. You do it with normal sonar, a Raytheon product by the way, you fly over the spot and drop a cylinder. It sends a low-frequency signal, you could say it sounds like a flute, you can set different frequencies. The fear, however, was that the bombs wouldn’t work if they stayed in the water too long. This is actually what happened with two of the bombs. So there was concern within the group about finding the right way, and we actually had to turn to other intelligence agencies, which I’ve deliberately not written about. There were still active explosives on the sea bed as the pipes were leaking their gas, which explains why partially complicit Denmark and Sweden closed the whole area and denied all access, until they themselves had removed everything. Hersh also clarifies further the chronology of Biden’s order, and appears to suggest that at least some of those involved believed they were planting explosives only as part of a negotiating tactic, and that they’d never be used. (How this is to be harmonised with Hersh’s insistence that the sonar trigger was a last-minute plan, I can’t imagine): Joe Biden decided not to blow them up back in June, it was five months into the war. But in September he ordered it done. The operational staff, the people who do “kinetic” things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon he could use in negotiations. But at some point, after the Russians invaded and then when the operation was completed, the whole thing became increasingly repugnant to the people who were doing it. These were people who worked in top positions in the intelligence services and were well trained. They turned against the project, they thought it was crazy. Shortly after the attack, after they had done what they were ordered to do, there was a lot of anger about the operation and repudiation among those involved. That’s one of the reasons I learned so much. And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’ll tell you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines all know the story. I didn’t get the story from them, but I quickly learned that they know. Elsewhere, Hersh says that the discontent with Biden’s attack is specifically within the CIA, where participants in the operation are “appalled that Biden decided to expose Europe to the cold in order to further a war he will not win.” As I said before, it seems obvious that what happened to Nord Stream is an open secret in security and government circles, and that the truth simply can’t be acknowledged, because nobody in the German government wants to live with the political consequences. The only really interesting detail that all the debunkings have in common, is their refusal to address what I see as the central problem with Hersh’s story. As I said before, he says divers planted explosives at a point where the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines run just one mile apart from each other. This only describes the location of the second cluster of explosions on 26 September. The first explosion hit Pipe A of Nord Stream 2 well to the south, at a point where the two pipelines are perhaps 15 km apart. This detail appears particularly important, in light of flight data which seems to confirm Hersh’s account that a Norwegian P8 dropped a sonar buoy into the Baltic northeast of Bornholm sometime around 4am on the morning of 26 September. Crucially, this data has the P8 arriving too late to trigger the first Nord Stream 2 explosion, which happened at 2:03 am local time. It looks for all the world like somebody organised two totally separate operations, involving two separately triggered pipeline attacks, and that Hersh’s source only knows about one of them.

What does the Nord Stream pipeline gas leak mean for the environment? DW News http://youtube.com/watch?v=6Vm0WpzIsq0&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

Ben, There can't be peace in Ukraine while Biden and his fellow-Neocons remain in power. Biden, in and of himself, would be an insurmountable obstacle as he's vain, corrupt, compromised, bellicose, over-committed, and hubristic. In terms of his politics, he's essentially a descendant of those urban, machine-pol, frequently Catholic, Democrats of the 1930s who supported Franco and opposed FDR. I agree with you on Obama. Paul

The pipeline had not been commissioned by Berlin at the time of American demolition, thus it was NOT funding Putin's liberation of the Donbass. You can't even get that obvious fact straight. Second, the N2 pipelines were not merely or even primarily a Russian project: Germany wanted them as cheap and abundant gas was the basis of its shift to a greener energy future and the foundation of its economic prosperity. America, in conjunction with self-interested Norwegian quislings, has has now destroyed both. Third, Putin isn't committing mass murder of civilians in Ukraine: the most remarkable feature of Russian missile attacks on the dual-use infrastructure of the puppet junta are their precision and thus the small number of civilian casualties. To the contrary, the appalling casualties among Ukrainian forces are the direct responsibility of Washington, which refused to honour binding agreements (Minsk I & II), continued to direct the bombardment of the Donbass, sabotaged negotiations mediated by Turkey and Israel, and continues to throw ill-armed, forcibly conscripted late middle-aged men into battles they can't win. Fouth, what democracy in Ukraine? There was a US-managed, corrupt, oligarchical Russophobic farce post-coup, predicated upon torture, assassination and blackmail. In short, a standard CIA-controlled nightmare. Fifth, your history of the US' involvement in inter-war Europe conveniently neglects the massive increase in Wall Street and corporative investment in Germany following Hitler's accession to power; and the continued support of US business for the National Socialist war-machine throughout the period 1941-1945.

Garland Nixon in fine form: Biden is facing political civil war https://youtube.com/live/r06F-Auyx3U?si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

Radio War Nerd EP #366 — Seymour Hersh on US Bombing Nord Stream Pipelines Recorded: February 11, 2023 We talk to legendary Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh about his latest bombshell scoop: the United States, on President Biden's orders, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were foundational to Germany's export economy until last year. https://www.patreon.com/radiowarnerd/posts

What Hersh Got Wrong MIKE WHITNEY • FEBRUARY 11, 2023 https://unzmag.net/mwhitney/what-hersh-got-wrong/ Extract: Washington doesn’t care about Germany’s pathetic contribution to the war effort. What Washington cares about is power; pure, unalloyed power. And Washington’s global power was being directly challenged by European-Russian economic integration and the creation of a giant economic commons beyond its control. And the Nord Stream pipeline was at the very heart of this new bustling phenomenon. It was the main artery connecting the raw materials and labor of the east with the technology and industry of the west. It was a marriage of mutual interests that Washington had to destroy to maintain its grip on regional power.

Video: America is at War with Europe By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, February 11, 2023 Luxmedia and Global Research https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-america-is-at-war-with-europe/5808102 “Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’” “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.” (How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline, By Seymour M. Hersh, February 08, 2023, emphasis added) *** Unfolding “Political Nightmare” The evidence amply confirms that The Nord Stream was the object of an act of sabotage ordered by President Joe Biden. Nord Stream –which originates in Russia– transits through the (maritime) territorial jurisdiction of four member states of the European Union. In international law, “Territorial Integrity” extends to “properties” located within the territorial waters of the Nation State. From a legal standpoint (International Law: UN Charter, Law of the Sea) this was a U.S. Act of War against the European Union. The deliberate destruction of said “properties” within a country’s territorial waters by or on behalf of a foreign state actor constitutes an act of war. Germany’s Prosecutor General Peter Frank confirmed in an in-depth investigation that: “there is no evidence to blame Russia for the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines”. If it Wasn’t Russia, Who was Behind it? According to the Prosecutor General: “[The suspicion] that there had been a foreign sabotage act [in this case], has so far not been substantiated” Peter Frank casually dispels the role of the US president (which is amply confirmed) (see below). The Attack is “Traceable”. It’s an Act of Economic and Social Warfare against the European Union. The US act of sabotage coupled with the sanctions regime has created social havoc and hardship throughout the European Union. Inflation spearheaded by rising energy costs has gone fly high. People are freezing, unable to pay their heating bills. While media reports fail to acknowledge the social and economic impacts of the US act of sabotage, official EU sources confirm (without mentioning the cause) that: “the number of its citizens living in energy poverty could be as high as 125 million” (28% of its total population). Europe is in Debt Crisis. The Welfare State is being dismantled. Destabilizing the EU Economy The EU economy which has relied on cheap energy from Russia is in a shambles, marked by disruptions in the entire fabric of industrial production (manufacturing), transportation and commodity trade. A string of corporate bankruptcies resulting in lay-offs and unemployment is unfolding across the European Union. Small and medium sized enterprises are slated to be wiped of map: “Rocketing energy costs are savaging German industry”… “Germany’s manufacturing industry — which accounts for more than one fifth of the country’s economic output — is worried some of its companies won’t see the crisis through. …” “Industry behemoths like Volkswagen (VLKAF) and Siemens (SIEGY) are grappling with supply chain bottlenecks too, but it is Germany’s roughly 200,000 small and medium-sized manufacturers who are less able to withstand the shock [of rising energy prices] These companies are a vital part of the “Mittelstand,” the 2.6 million small- and medium-sized enterprises that account for more than half of German economic output and nearly two-thirds of the country’s jobs. Many are family-owned and deeply integrated into rural communities” https://rumble.com/v291ufc-michel-chossudovsky-american-is-at-war-with-europe.html

How did the US produce a generation of European leaders whose fealty lies with Washington and not their own people? Three case studies for three different European colonies: Declassified UK: Secretive US embassy-backed group cultivating UK left Matt Kennard 24 NOVEMBER 2022 https://declassifieduk.org/the-secretive-us-embassy-backed-group-cultivating-the-british-left/ The British-American Project (BAP), founded in the 1980s with US embassy funding in response to CIA concerns about 'anti-American' drift in the Labor Party, has recently added senior Labor politicians to its secret membership rolls, according to Declassified. How Did the German Greens Become the Party of Warmongers? by Conor Gallagher Posted on February 10, 2023 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/02/how-did-the-german-greens-become-the-party-of-war-mongers.html Unlocked: Young Jens: What Was Stoltenberg Doing at Age 15? https://www.patreon.com/posts/unlocked-young-78471711 The consequences for Europe of America’s attempt to cling on to global hegemony: The Newly Poor in Germany https://youtube.com/watch?v=6dgE7Lp5j_w&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE Ukraine War means "dark times" for the UK by Andrew Marr for The New Statesman podcast: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2mrgfkIS6PQ&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE Companies in UK Are Hitting the Wall at Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis Posted on February 3, 2023 by Nick Corbishley https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/02/companies-in-uk-are-closing-their-doors-at-fastest-rate-since-global-financial-crisis.html

And a brief reminder of how the CIA's goons in Ukraine dealt with the anti-coup opposition, here in Odessa: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wu2tXG2Yo-g&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

Neocons are very found of the word freedom, but not so fond of the practice. Craig Murray on the attempts to suppress opposition to NATO in the UK; and the consequences of the Anglo-American deep state's successful purge of the Labour Party's left-wing. We are back to the days of the British invasion of the Boer Republics and the Jingo mobs organised to smash public protests against that brutal imperial war: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/02/sy-hersh-and-the-way-we-live-now/ The extirpation of the Left within the UK Labour Party: https://youtube.com/watch?v=njyIauSPQc0&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE

Does a long war favour the Bidenescu regime? Not according to two studies - by Rand & CSIS (links below) - as noted by this shrewd Indian observer: FEBRUARY 9, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR Waiting for Biden’s definition of victory in Ukraine https://www.indianpunchline.com/waiting-for-bidens-definition-of-victory-in-ukraine/ There was an air of magical realism in the daylong visit to Kiev last Friday by the EU’s policy commissioners comprising the executive branch of the group — the so-called College — led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. At the end of the day in Kiev on Friday, during a joint press conference in Kiev with President Volodymyr Zelensky, all that the EU’s super bureaucrats would promise was that “Ukraine’s future is in the EU.” However, as the BBC reported, “Typically, it takes years for countries to join — and the EU has declined to set a timescale, describing the sign-up process as “goal-based.” It all depends now on what sort of Ukraine emerges out of the war. Surely, there is a pall of gloom in the western media lately about the war storms gathering on the horizon. A Ukrainian military officer told the BBC that the Russian forces have occupied a third of the highly strategic Bakhmut city, the hub of the so-called Zelensky Line in Donbass. Since then, there have been reports of more Russian successes. The Ukrainian defence line is cracking through which an elephant can pass to the steppes en route to the Dnieper River. An AP report quoting Ukrainian officials in Kiev says, “Russian forces are keeping Ukrainian troops tied down with attacks in the eastern Donbass region as Moscow assembles additional combat power there for an expected offensive in the coming weeks.” Reuters too reports that Russian forces have been advancing “in relentless battles in the east. A regional governor said Moscow was pouring in reinforcements for a new offensive that could begin next week.” Writing for Bloomberg, Hal Brands at the American Enterprises Institute, drastically trims the Biden Administration’s priorities to “reluctance to further inflame Putin’s ire.” Hal sums up: “Washington’s goal is a Ukraine that is militarily defensible, politically independent and economically viable; this doesn’t necessarily include retaking difficult areas such as the eastern Donbass or Crimea.” There is no more talk about destroying the Russian “war machinery” or an insurrection against the Kremlin and a regime change. Two recent think tank reports that appeared in the US last month — Avoiding a Long War by the Rand Corporation (affiliated to the Pentagon) and Empty Bins by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies — epitomise a rude awakening. The Rand Corporation report starkly warns that given the NATO countries’ indirect involvement in the war — “breathtaking in scope” — keeping a Russia-NATO war below the nuclear threshold is going to be “extremely difficult.” It introduces another chilling thought that a protracted war in Ukraine, which “many” in the Beltway subscribe to as a means to degrade the Russian military and weaken the Russian economy, “would also have consequences for US foreign policy,” as the US’ ability to focus on other global priorities — particularly, competition with China — will remain constrained. The Rand report argues that “Washington does have a long-term interest in ensuring that Moscow does not become completely subordinated to Beijing.” The report concludes that the paramount US interest lies in avoiding a long war, since “the consequences of a long war — raging from persistent elevated escalation risks to economic damage — far outweigh the possible benefits.” The report presents a frank assessment that “it is fanciful to imagine that it [ Kiev] could destroy Russia’s ability to wage war.” Its most astounding finding, perhaps, is two-fold: firstly, the US does not even share Ukraine’s drive for retrieving “lost” territories”; and, secondly, that it is in the American interest that Russia remains independent of China with a measure of strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the US-China rivalry. On the other hand, the CSIS report, authored by the well-known strategic thinker Seth Jones (formerly at the Rand) is a wake-up call that the US defence industrial base is grossly inadequate for the “competitive security environment that now exists.” The report has a chapter titled Ukraine and the Great Awakening, which underscores that the US arms supples to Ukraine have “strained the [US] defence industrial base to produce sufficient quantities of some munitions and weapon systems.” Jones represents the duality of the US military-industrial complex, which is disinterested in the objective of the war in Ukraine as such. His grouse is that the US defence industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war, although, as the UK newspaper Sunday Times wrote last week, “All wars spawn profiteers, and the Ukraine conflict is no exception… The enormous supply of western arms to Ukraine has bolstered all weapons manufacturers, mainly in restocking Nato’s own arsenals and fulfilling the big orders from countries now spending more on defence….In the US, Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop are among the big arms and jet fighter manufacturers with bulging order books.” The Rand and CSIS reports appeared at a time when the war has reached a tipping point. Thus, within the last month, the US has announced three of the largest aid packages to Ukraine in a sign of ongoing support as the war nears its one-year mark. And on Friday, the Biden Administration announced yet another new Ukraine security package worth approximately $2.2 billion that includes longer-range missiles with a range of 90 miles for the first time. Herein lies the paradox. On February 1, four senior Defense Department officials reportedly told the US House Armed Services Committee lawmakers in a classified briefing that the Pentagon doesn’t believe Ukraine has the ability to force Russian troops out of the Crimean peninsula. After the briefing, the House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) asserted in an interview that the war “needs to end this summer.” Senator Rogers said: “There’s a school of thought … that Crimea’s got to be a part of it. Russia is never going to quit and give up Crimea… What is doable? And I don’t think that that’s agreed upon yet. So I think that there’s going to have to be some pressure from our government and NATO leaders with Zelensky about what does victory look like. And I think that’s going to help us more than anything to be able to drive Putin and Zelensky to the table to end this thing this summer.” This is the first time that a top US political personality has called for a timeline for the war. It came as no wonder, as Senator Bob Menendez the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who presided over the hearings on Ukraine on January 26 — also addressed the core issue in a question for the record to the US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland who was testifying. The influential senator bemoaned that Washington has “no definition of victory,” and sought an answer from Nuland, who was rendered speechless. But it must have rankled her, for, at the fag-end of the hearing, she volunteered a reply: “If we define winning as Ukraine surviving and thriving as a cleaner democratic state, it can, it must, it will.” Period. Nuland fudged. But that is also what President Biden did in his State of the Union address on Wednesday by sticking to his tiresome mantra — that the US will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” That said, significantly, Zelensky has taken off for a tour of major European capitals to discuss what could possibly constitute peace. Indeed, all this is a far cry from Von der Leyen’s rhetoric as she set out for Kiev last week: “With the visit of the College to Kyiv, the EU is sending today a very clear message to Ukraine and beyond about our collective strength and resolve in the face of Russia’s brutal aggression. We will continue supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. And we will continue to impose a heavy price on Russia until it ceases its aggression. Ukraine can count on Europe to help rebuild a more resilient country, that progresses on its path to join the EU.” There is something that either Von der Leyen doesn’t know about, or doesn’t want to talk about. Meanwhile, Biden seems closer to her than to Rand and the CSIS or Senator Menendez and Nuland — leave alone Republican Senator Rogers. That must be an optical illusion. Avoiding a Long War: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment-challenge-us-defense-industrial-base

I wouldn't bother, it's boilerplate Deep State pap albeit with the rare distinction of having been tested - and found wanting - in court. Below, a selection of John Helmer’s (Dances with Bears website) exposes of Catherine Belton as Deep State transmission belt: Thursday, April 16th, 2020: http://johnhelmer.net/the-gospel-version-of-russia-catherine-belton-and-sergei-pugachev-preach-a-sermon-for-rupert-murdoch-to-sell-and-for-luke-harding-to-proselytise/ Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/reuters-russia-lies-put-to-truth-test-in-uk-high-court-rupert-murdoch-sergei-pugachev-catherine-belton-charged-by-roman-abramovich/ Wednesday, July 28th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/catherine-belton-loses-first-truth-test-rupert-murdoch-publisher-to-retract-apologise-reuters-pretends-it-isnt-so/ Monday, October 4th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/beltons-people-fbi-investigation-casts-new-shadow-over-catherine-beltons-book-in-court/ Investigations by US government officials, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), of Christopher Steele’s (lead image, right) Russiagate dossier have identified Catherine Belton (left) as one of the targets for his fabrications. Belton was herself investigated as one of the journalists Steele recruited to plant his allegations of Russian interference days before the 2016 presidential election. In her book Putin’s People, Belton repeats many of Steele’s allegations but she does not cite him or his consulting company Orbis as her source. Belton adds at the end of the book: “I’ll always be grateful to Chris [Steele] for his moral support.” After Belton’s book appeared in April 2020, Steele admitted to lawyers engaged in a London High Court lawsuit against him that Belton is “a friend, yes, she’s a friend”. Fresh evidence revealed in the indictment issued by the US Department of Justice on September 16, shows that the FBI has concluded Steele was lying when he and his American accomplices planted false allegations of Russian election interference through several named intermediaries, including a Russian bank and Russian émigrés in the US,. The New York Times and The Atlantic were identified in last month’s US court papers as willing outlets for the fabrications. Earlier litigation by the Alfa Bank group in the US has identified five New York Times reporters and David Corn of Mother Jones as collaborators in the scheme. Belton’s name, tagged with the note “London meeting”, has also surfaced in meeting notes taken at the State Department on October 11, 2016, when Steele met with Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and a deputy, Kathleen Kavalec. Kavalec’s meeting notes, partially declassified, reveal that Steele’s allegations of Russian election interference followed a briefing of the same allegations at the FBI a month earlier, on September 19, 2016, by Michael Sussmann, a lawyer working in secret for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Sussmann is now charged with lying then to the FBI. The Justice Department’s indictment says Sussmann was one of the plotters with Steele and others, including journalists, university academics, and IT experts in publishing false stories of Russian election interference; their plot aimed at hurting the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, by making it appear he was in cahoots with the Kremlin to hurt the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. “In or about late October 2016 – approximately one week before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election – multiple media outlets reported that U.S. government authorities had received and were investigating allegations concerning a purported secret channel of communications between the Trump Organization, owned by Donald J. Trump, and a particular Russian bank (‘Russian Bank-I’).” The Kavalec notebook also reveals that Steele claimed there were “3 distinct channels” for this Russian operation “run by Kremlin, not FSB, Ivanov, Peskov, Putin.” In addition to accusing Alfa Bank as the first channel “Alfa-Trump-Kremlin-comms”, Steele told Nuland that Serge Millian, a Russian émigré businessman in the US, was the second; Carter Page, a wannabe Trump campaign adviser, was the third. In the sequence of Kavalec’s notes. Steele told Nuland there were “hackers out of R[ussia] – acting in US – [payments out of the state] pension fund Miami consulate payments – implants. Operations Paige [sic], Millian (émigrés?), Manafort.” Steele then mentioned the London meeting with Belton whom he identified as “FT [Financial Times]”. Reporting by Belton in the Financial Times followed days after her meeting was mentioned by Steele to Nuland. In Belton’s published report, she named Serge Millian as the channel Steele had alleged at State and the FBI. “Now, “ Belton claimed on November 1, one week before Election Day, “the US administration has formally accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the US electoral process through the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, Mr Millian’s activities — and his ties to the Republican presidential nominee — are coming under increasing scrutiny.” Belton did not identify her sources for her allegations against Millian. She implied, however, that they were US intelligence agents and the FBI. “Mr Millian came on to the FBI’s radar”, Belton reported. “The FBI probe was part of a wake-up call for US intelligence over suspicions that Russia was activating networks long thought defunct after the end of the cold war.” Millian avoided Belton for an interview and she reported. “He declined repeated requests for an interview and left the US for Asia on a business trip in early October.” Two weeks before, Steele had told Nuland, according to Kavalec’s transcript, Millian was “now in China.” According to Belton, Millian had been a real estate broker for Trump, selling Trump organisation properties to Russians. Steele had told Nuland “real estate entities used for massive set of purchases by Russians. Set up espionage network in FL[orida] – to buy a lot of properties for POTUS [Trump’s] businesses through a R[ussian] brokage. 100’s of real estate transactions.” Two months ago, on July 28, Belton was exposed as a xxxx and fabricator of her source material by her British publisher, HarperCollins. Settling the High Court case brought against them both by Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven of Alfa Bank, the publisher said there was “no significant evidence” for Belton’s allegations of KGB connections in the early careers of Fridman and Aven; and that she had failed to check her claims with Fridman and Aven before publishing them. The publisher agreed to delete Belton’s allegations from the book. The terms of that settlement, and the ongoing High Court case in London, have stopped Macmillan, the US publisher of the book, from issuing the paperback edition, according to industry sources. Once Belton’s allegations against the Alfa Bank group were abandoned by HarperCollins, lawyers for the remaining plaintiffs – Roman Abramovich, Rosneft and Shalva Chigirinsky – are now focusing on Belton’s acknowledged dependence on Steele – and on the fabrications Steele got Belton to print before the US election. Tuesday, October 19th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/computer-analysis-reveals-catherine-beltons-book-has-another-author/ Wednesday, November 24th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/british-high-court-judge-rules-against-catherine-belton-harpercollins-in-double-barreled-blast/

Richard Hofstadter 😅

And I find it appalling that anyone, in 2023, would seek to minimize the scale and horror of American brutality and aggression across the globe given all that we now know. Fortunately, not all American conservatives are as blind as you to the massacres perpetrated by as policy by the US: The Korean War Atrocities No One Wants to Talk About For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-korean-war-atrocities-no-one-wants-to-talk-about/ Jim Bovard Jun 26, 2020 (12:01 AM) June 25th was the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers fought bravely in that war, and almost 37,000 were killed. But the media is ignoring perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes. During the Korean War, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements about how the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the U.S. was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that, “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops. The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purportedly proving that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees. President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In a January 2001 interview, Clinton was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible.” In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators never saw Muccio’s letter but it was in the specific research file used for its report. Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted: “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.” In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents—in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’—were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force Pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of other massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.” Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese Army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. U.S. Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” In a scoring method that foreshadowed the Vietnam war body counts, Air Force press releases touted the “square footage” of “enemy-held buildings” that it flattened. General Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea… and some in South Korea, too.” A million civilians may have been killed during the war, and a South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left truth to the historians, not the policymakers. The facts about No Gun Ri finally slipped out—ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up until after four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war). Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. military interventions has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the hijackers (15 of 19 were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and Wikileaks exposed them in 2010. There is likely reams of evidence of duplicity and intentional slaughter of civilians in U.S. government files on its endlessly confused and contradictory Syrian intervention. When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the U.S. into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. The blood of civilian victims of U.S. wars is the political version of disappearing ink. But the kinfolk and neighbors of those victims could pursue vengeance regardless of whether cover-ups con the American people. James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard. Get off your high horse: America is to democracies what Jack the Ripper was to the care of fallen women. You extirpate them wherever you find them.