Paul Rigby

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.

One of the lines of attack upon Wallace concerned his championship of Nicholas Roerich: The New Deal And The Guru https://www.americanheritage.com/new-deal-and-guru J. Samuel Walker March 1989 (V40 N2) Early in 1934 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Nicholas Roerich, a renowned painter and a self-proclaimed guardian of world peace and culture, to lead a scientific expedition to North China and Manchuria, to search for drought-resistant grasses that might revive the Dust Bowl. By the time the project ended, in 1935, the eccentric artist had compromised America’s diplomatic position in Asia, embarrassed the Roosevelt administration, humiliated Wallace, and damaged the careers of several botanists. And he had not advanced the cause of combating the drought in the United States. The episode—one of the most bizarre in the history of the New Deal—began with Henry Wallace’s infatuation with Roerich’s mystical philosophy. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1874, Roerich had studied painting, drawing, and archeology in various academies, and had become president of the Society for Encouragement of Fine Arts in Russia and a noted theater designer—he created the sets and costumes for the epochal 1913 Nijinsky premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He emigrated from Russia a short time after the Bolshevik Revolution, apparently by his own choice, and after a brief stay in England moved to the United States, arriving in New York City in 1920. At first Roerich had a hard time here, living modestly while selling paintings and designing stage sets. But then Louis L. Horch, a wealthy New York broker, and his wife, Nettie, became greatly impressed by Roerich and spent large sums settling Roerich’s debts and financing his activities. Roerich claimed he had the ability to communicate with the spiritual sphere through “automatic writings.” With his eyes covered, the artist could record thoughts and instructions from another world—on one occasion he received specific directions on how to raise funds to build a museum in New York to display Roerich’s work. In 1925 Roerich went off to India and Tibet to paint a “great panoramic series of works” and to translate “original manuscripts, folk lore, and artistic material of these countries.” At Horch’s expense he traveled widely in Asia for four years. While there, he generated so much turmoil that the British Foreign Office labeled him an “unbalanced individual.” He claimed to have discovered a manuscript in a Tibetan monastery proving that Christ had lived and preached in India as a young man. He also made a mysterious trip to the Soviet Union, where he apparently conferred with government officials. Subsequently he wrote books praising the Soviet system and describing both Christ and Buddha as communists, but the United States State Department found no convincing evidence that linked him “in any way with communist movements.” At any rate, he eventually severed his ties with Russia in favor of a fantastic scheme to create an autonomous state under his leadership in Siberia. While Roerich was traveling in Asia, a writer named Frances Grant who admired him wrote adulatory articles and pamphlets. Her efforts, along with his genuine artistic ability, helped win him an enviable international reputation as a painter. Horch, meanwhile, worked at building a museum for Roerich’s work. Between 1923 and 1929 Horch erected at 103rd Street and Riverside Drive in New York a twenty-nine story apartment house whose bottom floors constituted the Roerich Museum, with exhibit space for more than a thousand of the artist’s paintings. Horch served as president of the museum and Grant as vice-president. Roerich returned to the United States to speak at the museum’s dedication but neglected to thank the architects, builders, or contributors, or even Horch, for their efforts on his behalf. He also insisted on the addition of stained-glass windows and an expensive change in the wallpaper, which Horch carried out. With his museum established and his fame growing, Roerich turned to a new project. He called for an international agreement to protect cultural monuments and artistic treasures, particularly during wartime. In 1929 he and several associates formally drafted a treaty that they hoped would gain worldwide acceptance. It became known as the Roerich Pact. They also adopted a “Banner of Peace”—a red circle surrounding three spheres on a field of white, representing the common bonds of culture, spirit, and humanity that transcended the divisions among people. Delegates from more than twenty countries attended conferences to discuss the pact in Bruges, Belgium, in 1931 and 1932, but they failed to take any action on it. The U.S. Department of State found the pact “futile, weak, and unenforceable,” but after Roosevelt took office, his endorsement of the treaty and Henry Wallace’s aggressive advocacy of it eventually prevailed over the State Department’s opposition. Wallace was himself somewhat mystically inclined. He was a brilliant plant geneticist, who had developed the first hybrid corn for commercial use, and a respected economist, whose writings on farm problems had made him a leading agricultural spokesman—Roosevelt once referred to him as “Old Man Common Sense”—but he also exhibited a prominent strain of fervent idealism. He was an intensely religious man who disdained “the wishy-washy goodygoodness and the infantile irrelevancy” of conventional Christianity. He viewed the Depression as an opportunity for a spiritual reformation; the “fundamental cure” for it, Wallace believed, entailed “changing the human heart,” a renunciation of selfishness and greed. Continued at link

Two great podcasts from Burt Cohen's Keeping Democracy Alive series: Henry Wallace: One of our greatest Americans. Who? February 12, 2013 The Cold War and Red Baiting of the 50s. America’s war in Vietnam. Civil rights and women’s equality. All would have been far different had the Democratic machine not replaced FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace with their own choice Harry Truman at the 1944 party convention. Wallace opposed imperialism and sought good relations with revolutionary movements throughout the world. Though practically unknown today, according to Petrer Dreier, author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, Wallace was was truly one of our greats. If only… https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/henry-a-wallace-one-of-our-greatest-americans-who/ An actual coup in America: Democrats in 1944 August 3, 2017 In the long held American tradition of opposition to colonialism and a government serving the common good, FDR’s vice president Henry A Wallace was an outstanding visionary. Then a corrupt political machine performed a bloodless coup at the 1944 Democratic convention. Just as his name was to be placed in nomination (he easily had the votes to win) the gavel was brought down and the convention instantly adjourned despite a huge outcry from the floor. Had Wallace remained as VP, he would have become president instead of Truman. American University History Professor Peter Kuznick explains the incredibly significance of this act to the next seventy years of American history. There would have been no atomic bombs dropped and no Vietnam War, had Wallace’s name simply been placed in nomination. The difference was about nine seconds. Listen in and learn. https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/actual-coup-america-democrats-1944/

Bill, Penn Jones, Jr, in his Continuing Inquiry, responded to the 1977 publication of Rather’s The Camera Never Blinks with a four page review that can be found here: https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/dan-rather-blinked-by-penn-jones-vol.-1-no.-12/675620?item=675621 There is much on Rather, including important interventions from Ken Rheberg, the owner of Dan Rather’s personal log book, in this thread, in which I argue, inter alia, that Rather was telling the truth about a number of key points in the first version of the Zapruder film: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/12216-was-muchmore%E2%80%99s-film-shown-on-wnew-tv-new-york-on-november-26-1963/ In this Deep Politics Forum thread, I provided numbered line-by-line transcripts of Rather’s three known descriptions of the Z film on CBS-TV in the course of November 25, 1963: https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/thread-12359.html Robert Prudhomme’s thread on this forum concerning Rather & Zapruder is well-worth a look, too: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/21612-dan-rathers-description-of-zapruder-film-corroborated-by-witness/ Happy hunting. Paul

Gil, Read the Krock piece again - it's an extended defence of the CIA, and an attack on both Richard Starnes, from whose "Arrogant CIA" dispatch Krock quotes so extensively, and JFK, for permitting public criticism of the Agency. I lost a deal of work on Krock, and much else besides, following a computer crash, so what follows is merely a surviving rough draft outlining his career-long service to the Allen Dulles wing of the US elite. NYT’s Arthur Krock as CIA mouthpiece The NYT’s Arthur Krock, the Princeton-educated doyen - by virtue of his stint as the NYT's Washington bureau chief (1931-1953) (1), then resident senior commentator (1953-1966) (2) – of capitol correspondents is often depicted as a Kennedy family intimate in general, and a loyal friend of President Kennedy in particular. The later is a half-truth designed to hide an inconvenient fact. For while Krock did contribute a foreword to JFK’s Why England Slept, and was the book’s dedicatee, there were profound disagreements between the journalist and the politician, disagreements that widened as the Kennedy presidency unfolded. At their root lay politics. Krock was a hard-line economic and racial conservative. As late as 1968, he continued to insist, quite surreally, that union power ruled “supreme over the economy”(3); and that the Department of Justice under Kennedy and Johnson had “spinelessly established the fact of being a Negro as a grant of immunity”(4). He was also American journalism’s most devoted servant of the CIA and both its forerunners, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Central Intelligence Group (CIG). Krock’s career of lying in the service of power and wealth began in earnest in the pages of the New York World. Taking his cue from the paper’s star reporter, Edward Bayard Swope, Krock used his op. ed. contributions to burnish the reputation of Bernard Baruch, the financier and serial political eminence grise, in return for lucrative stock market tips. He simultaneously supplemented his income by serving as what he himself termed a “private counsel” on “public relations” to the banking firm of Dillon, Reid. It was for leaking details of “an editorial likely to effect the price” of certain Dillon, Reid stocks that the paper’s editor, Walter Lippmann, in one of his career-defining fits of selective indignation, barred Krock from further contributions to the editorial pages. As a token of its enduring commitment to the highest levels of journalistic integrity, the New York Times responded by hiring, then swiftly promoting, the offending Krock (5). By the 1930s, Krock was a zealous isolationist with a hands-off approach to European fascism. In 1935, according to Krock, FDR wrote to the NYT’s publisher urging Krock’s dismissal (6). Krock’s memoir makes this action appear capricious and unwarranted. FDR was prescient. A Krock column of May 1937 sought to pressure the President into removing William Dodds, the determinedly anti-Hitler US Ambassador to Berlin, with a figure more congenial to both Hitler and his backers within the US elite (7). A year later, a Krock column sought to scupper the attempt to repeal the US embargo on aid to the democratically elected Spanish Republican government (8). In August 1940, he tried “to turn Wilkie from co-operation with Roosevelt on the question of releasing destroyers to Britain,” citing “Roosevelt’s failure to co-operate with Hoover in the critical months between Roosevelt’s election and inauguration” (9). Krock’s gift for the apposite and timely analogy, be it historical, constitutional, or merely moral, was a recurring characteristic of his journalism. Krock did not come under sustained attack from the massive covert propaganda effort undertaken by British intelligence against US isolationism in the years 1940-41 for the very good reason that the journalist, like the faction within the US elite for whom he was such a dutiful mouthpiece, was too powerful to offend. That faction was, in any case, ready to move. By late September 1941, Krock was noting, with well-concealed dismay, the collapse of solidarity among the Congressional advocates of continued isolationism, a change effected in part by a British intelligence-concocted opinion poll which appeared to show a dramatic shift in attitudes among delegates to the American Legion convention of earlier that same month(10). Krock’s championship of the modern “external” US intelligence community began with an October 1941 puff piece in support of William Donovan’s disinterested call for a presidential war room. The latter was to function as the focal point of, and clearing house for, intelligence supplied by men like…William Donovan, the Wall Street lawyer who became the OSS’s first and only head (11). With the war’s end, FDR ordered the winding up of the OSS (12). He was not alone in his fears. A prescient Republican Senator, Edward V. Robertson (Wyoming), argued - when opposing the National Security bill – that the resultant bureaucracy would become “an American Gestapo,” and create “a vast military empire” (13). Truman initially endorsed his predecessor’s verdict (14), but was soon to discover that the presidential writ runs only where real power permits. In the summer and autumn of 1945, the OSS fought tooth and nail the decision to fold of successive US Presidents. As Donovan’s assistant, Robert H. Alcorn, later revealed, his boss had no intention of seeing his creation abolished (15). In the classic manner of the spook bureaucracy, this campaign was waged by simultaneous suppression and propaganda. As a CIA propagandist observed: “Propaganda thrives best if there are no competing expressions of opinion to disturb the audience” (16). Thus Drew Pearson’s critical swipe at the class composition of the OSS, and the effect its ruling Wall Street claque had in determining policy toward occupied Germany, contained in a despatch filed from San Francisco on 27 April 1945, gained a public airing not thanks to the Bell Syndicate, his customary distributors, but Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who read it into the Congressional Record (17). At the same time as it suppressed criticism, the OSS selectively declassified its own files, and spoon-fed them to tame hacks (18). Among the group charged with either spicing up the sanitised boys own adventure stories fed them, or else drawing the correct conclusions from same, was, inevitably, Krock. In July, he lamented the ingratitude shown the OSS for its war-time heroics (19). In August, he argued that America’s newly-won global dominance merited nothing less than “an active intelligence looking to the outside world,” not least to prevent the repetition of “pre-war mistakes” (20). Two months later, he memorialised OSS Colonel Peter Dewey, “the first American to die in Vietnam” (albeit only until the early 1960s, when the next first American to die on active service in Vietnam did so). The paragon Dewey, NYT readers learned, was “shot from ambush” by ungrateful natives who had mistaken him for a French officer, and thus unwittingly deprived themselves of an anti-colonialist liberator (21). Vast numbers of the great unwashed, not only in Vietnam, were of course to persist in this absurd error for many decades to come. The victory of those campaigning for a vast “external” intelligence bureaucracy saw the formation of, first, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), then the CIA. With Truman’s change of heart came approval. In July 1946, Krock praised Truman as the best-briefed President ever, one who would not repeat the mistakes of Roosevelt in making too many concessions to the Russians because, thanks to the existence of the CIG, he would be much better informed (22). The CIA’s overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala in 1954 saw Krock welcoming the defeat of “the world Bolshevik conspiracy to take over the country” and the advent of a military junta, albeit only “until there can be free and democratic elections again.” Precisely how and when that happy state was to be achieved were subjects that did not obsess Krock. He denied any US involvement, and thought America, the serial invader of Central American countries, had been slow to respond to burgeoning Moscow-directed intervention in the region (23). Aware of the U-2 flights over the USSR “long before they became public knowledge” (24), Krock whitewashed the CIA’s role in arming and financing Fidel Castro (25), and later censored the key phrase of Eisenhower’s ominous farewell address to the nation as President (from the actual “military-industrial complex” to the more ideologically acceptable “industry-government spending combination” (26)). The less public face of Krock’s role as elite insider saw repeated service as messenger and intermediary. As early as January 1933, Krock conveyed a message from Herbert Hoover to his successor, FDR, on the subject of independence for the Philippines (27). That role endured, as was strikingly illustrated by his involvement in the startling revelation of Eisenhower’s last head of the Atomic Energy Commission - and that revelation’s part in the cover-up of the supply by the Pentagon and the Agency of atomic weaponry to Israel. In December 1960, an Arabic-language broadcast from Moscow insisted that Israel had recently taken receipt of a ready-made atomic bomb, courtesy of the United States. The claim drew the tacit endorsement of The Times, which noted in its comment on the broadcast that a cover-story was already in motion: “Surprised indignation about the idea of a Franco-Israel bomb seemed a more effective response than a mere denial” (28). In fact, de Gaulle had severed all such co-operation upon his return to power in 1958 (29). The cover-story took wing in the NYT of 19 December 1960, courtesy of reporter John Finney, who had been steered in the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission head by Arthur Krock (30). Within days of the interview’s emergence, the AEC chief, the cover story launched, announced his resignation on NBC’s Meet The Press. John A. McCone was to replace Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence only after a fierce and neglected power struggle, one that saw the unexplained displacement of Kennedy’s first choice, Fowler Hamilton, who had spent months at Langley preparing for the role (31). Krock’s opposition to Kennedy’s policies – from the Congo to Alabama – led to some of the most hypocritical attacks launched by an American journalist on a President. In February 1963, he joined in the attack on the Kennedy administration’s news manipulation: “A news management policy not only exists but in the form of direct and deliberate actions has been enforced more cynically and more boldly than by any other previous Administration…One principal form that it takes is social flattery of Washington reporters and commentators – many more than ever got this treatment in the past – by the President and his high-level supporters” (32). As a right-wing English journalist noted, “Arthur Krock had a grouch, no doubt, since he was not among those who were being flattered.” (33). Krock’s hypocrisy was complete and unabashed. This was the same journalist, of course, who had participated in the OSS campaign against Truman in 1946, and who worked for the newspaper that denounced and censored Bertrand Russell’s claims that the US was using napalm and defoliants in Vietnam in 1963 (34). (1) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 92. (2) Ibid., p. 78. (3) Ibid. p. 278. (4) Ibid., p.277. (5) Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century (NY: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 200-201. In his Memoirs (p. 63), Krock dates his joining the NYT to 1 May 1927. (6) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 182. (7) Arnold A. Offner. American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1976), p. 205. NYT, 5 May 1938. (8) Ibid., p. 159. NYT, 14 May 1937. (9) Mark Lincoln Chadwin. The Warhawks: American Interventionists before Pearl Harbor (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1970), pp. 94-95. NYT, 1 August 1940. (10) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. 96. Krock’s NYT column of 21 September 1941. (11) John Ranelagh. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London: Sceptre, 1988), p. 60. See the NYT, 8 October 1941. (12) (13) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 29. (14) “[F]ollowing the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945, Truman ordered the disbanding of the OSS as of 1 October of that year.” (Athan G. Theoharis & John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (London: Harrap Books, 1989), p. 190.) (15) Richard J. Barnet. Roots of War: The Men and the Institutions behind US Foreign Policy (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 32. (16) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. ? (17) George Seldes. The People Don’t Know: The American Press and the Cold War (NY: Gaer Associates, 1949), pp.324-325: “The OSS…has, strangely [sic], distributed some of the most powerful bankers representatives in the United States at key points where they can influence U.S. policy in occupied Germany. The roster of OSS men who have been or are operating in Europe reads like a bluestocking list of the first 60 families…” (18) William R. Corson. The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Community (NY: The Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977), p. 244. The other named journalistic servants of the OSS were: Joseph Loftus (“Secret Thai Role in War Detailed,” NYT, 9 September 1945, p.20), Bess Furman, and Tillman Durdin (“US ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Exploits and Secret Blows in China Bared,” New York Times, 14 September 1945, p.1). (19) R. Harris Smith. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1972), p. 424, citing Krock’s “OSS Gets It Coming And Going,” New York Times, 31 July 1945. (20) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 23. See also the same author’s The CIA and American Democracy (Yale UP, 1989), p. 37. The Krock column in question appeared in the NYT on 16 July, 1946. (21) Noam Chomsky. Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 164. Krock in the NYT, 29 June 1954. (22) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 181. (23) Ibid., pp. 275-6. Krock pointed the finger at the State Department. The later was unquestionably used for cover by the Agency, but was most definitely not the driving force behind the policy. To hide the CIA’s role, Krock cites the penultimate US Ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, but not the last, Earl T. Smith, who attested to the CIA’s backing for Castro before a Senate Sub-committee in late August 1960. (24) Ibid., p. 276. The effect is eerily echoed in the shifting variants employed by President Bush on the subject of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” Orwellian right-speak, no less. (25) Ibid., p. 128-129. (26) “Israel Fails to Allay U.S. Anxiety,” The Times, 21 December 1960, p. 6. Time, for example, the ever-faithful mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex, was eagerly running the cover-story. See “The Atom,” 26 December 1960, p. 11. (27) Bernard Ledwidge. De Gaulle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 304. (28) Seymour Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p.71. (29) (30) (31) Helen Fuller. Year of Trial: Kennedy’s Crucial Decisions (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 271: “A New York lawyer, Fowler Hamilton, with considerable experience behind him, had been brought to Washington and installed at the CIA with the general expectation that he would succeed Allen Dulles…” AP, "Retirement of CIA Chief Announced," Washington Post, 1 August 1961, p.A2: Salinger yesterday announced retirement of Allen Dulles, claiming retirement in November 1961 had been Dulles' intention when accepted JFK's offer to stay on. Salinger declined to answer questions concerning Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton, according to forthcoming issue of Newsweek (August 7), due to succeed Dulles in October "after several months of working with Dulles". CIA propagandist Victor Lasky sought to mask Hamilton’s displacement with a red herring candidate: “The Liberals had hoped that CIA would be given to one of their own…there had been pressure on Kennedy to appoint someone like New York attorney Telford Taylor…,” JFK: The Man and the Myth (NY: Dell, 1977), p. 672. Of Kennedy’s inner circle, Sorensen comes closest to the truth about the appointment of Dulles’s successor. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, with characteristic dishonesty, merely that Hamilton “had been under consideration,” A Thousand Days, p. 518. (32) Henry Fairlie, “Camelot Revisited: The bright promises that led to bloodshed and despair,” Harper’s, January 1973, p. 73. (33) Wayne H. Nielsen, “The Second Indo-China War and the American Press,” The Minority of One, October 1964, p. 11.

After nearly a fortnight of fantastic Ukrainian successes, unrelenting Russian failure, and accurate reporting of a kind found on this thread, the armed forces of Kyiv find themselves, er, completely surrounded. Shome mishtake, shurely? Patricia Arquette, the geopolitical guru seemingly inspiring the Bidenescu regime, had it right: Kick Russia out of NATO

"Perversely enjoyed discussing his nuclear arsenal"? Oooh er Missus, this really is the Frankie Howard school of history. For the record, it was the comedian cowering in Lvov who, on February 19, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, got all hot & desirous of nuclear weapons. You can read a very informative discussion of the speech in question here: http://eu.eot.su/2022/02/21/zelenskys-statement-a-bluff-or-a-dream-of-nuclear-weapons/ As for the claim that "no one...ever demonstrated any interest in invading his inhospitable homeland" - you've obviously never been to Moscow or St Petersburg, both of which are wonderful - Wikipedia provides the following helpful list of those who did precisely that: Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' (1223–1236), a series of invasions that resulted in the Rus states becoming vassals of the Golden Horde. Russo-Crimean Wars (1571), an Ottoman invasion that penetrated Russia and destroyed Moscow. Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Poland gained Severia and Smolensk. Ingrian War (1610–1617), a Swedish invasion which captured Novgorod and Pskov. Swedish invasion of Russia (1707), an unsuccessful Swedish invasion. French invasion of Russia (1812), an unsuccessful invasion by Napoleon's French Empire and its allies. Japanese invasion of Sakhalin (1905), an invasion and annexation by the Japanese. Eastern Front (World War I) (1914–1918), Russia was forced to cede Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states to Germany as the Russian Empire collapsed. Caucasus campaign (1914-1918), a series of conflicts between the Russian Empire, its various successor states, and the Ottoman Empire. Japanese intervention in Siberia (1918-1922), an occupation of the Russian Far East by Japanese soldiers during the Russian Civil War. Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and the contemporaneous Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), the Polish occupation of Belarus and West Ukraine. Operation Barbarossa (1941), a German-led invasion that started the Eastern Front of World War II. Kantokuen (1941), an aborted plan for a major Japanese invasion of the Russian Far East during World War II. Operation Unthinkable (1945), a proposed contingency plan for an Anglo-American invasion of the Soviet Union developed by the British Chiefs of Staff during the later stages of World War II. War of Dagestan (1999), a repulsed Chechen invasion of Dagestan. The one led by the Austrian watercolourist cost the Soviet Union a mere 27 million inhabitants, the kind of minor intrusion you may have forgotten, but which the Russians most unreasonably haven't.

He is surrounded by enemies, some of them uniformed, and presides over a crumbling economy beset by gross inequality, hyperinflation, a devalued currency, a collapsing supply chain, and militarism run amok. And then there’s the small matter of an imminent, deeply humiliating, military defeat. His position is surely untenable. But enough of the Bidenescu regime. What about that other feeble Deep State puppet, Zelenskyy, eh?

Five observations: The retreat of the CIA, the real ruler of the post-coup (2014) rump Ukrainian terror-state, to Lvov appears to portend the attempted creation, within an area of central rump-Ukraine encompassing Kiev, of an arc of instability designed to sever connectivity within Eurasia The teetering Bidenescu regime is resolved for a classic “khaki election” in an effort to ward off a devastating mid-term electoral defeat The prolongation of the manufactured rump-Ukraine crisis will be accompanied by a concerted programme of domestic repression, most likely along Trudescu lines, albeit one supplemented by false flag terrorism The costs of the Bidenescu regime’s geopolitical gambits, both to the American consumer and non-military component of the domestic economy, are almost certain to prove devastating, and even worse within America’s European satrapies, most notably Germany – they’re out of gas, and fast running out of time The inevitable heightening of the economic crises within the American empire will likely lead to a kinetic attack on Russia