Paul Rigby
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Posts posted by Paul Rigby
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4 hours ago, Matt Allison said:
Fox is done.
We are watching the slow circling of the toilet bowl.
It's a process that I wish would be immediate, but alas, I'll take what we're getting, as it is crucial for America.
Good lord, what an extraordinary post.
The forum’s leading member of the Bidenescu plunge* protection team has added a fifth plank to the Deep State Dems’ Neo-McCarthyite platform. Not content with war, lies, censorship and hypocrisy, the poor American voter is to be further enticed by, according to the poster’s own logic, nothing less than…a pan of steaming ordure.
“I’ll take what we’re getting…”
On past evidence, I’m sure you will.
*Plunger would appear to be more appropriate
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1 hour ago, John Cotter said:
Don't be spreading disinformation, Paul.
Don't you know there's no such place as Syria?
John,
A timely reprimand, for which many thanks. I have engaged, upon reflection, in wanton whataboutery, almost certainly due to the fact that I am a Trumpo-Sino-Putinoid disinformationist, likely with Barf Party sympathies. I promise never again to give time of day to Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel lecture & to infiltrate myself cognitively at the first available opportunity, perhaps while standing in the local supermarket queue for the lesser-spotted egg, vegetable and/or fruit, the rich harvest of sanctions against Russia. Upon return, I shall repair to my unheated study to acquaint myself with the thoughts of Chairman Bidenescu – The Tao of Asufutimaehaehfutbw – cheered by the knowledge that the compassionate adults are back in the saddle, even if the horse is dead and the fields barren.
Paul
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President George H W Bush bequeathed the world not only bile-based diplomacy – who among us does not know precisely where we were when he unleashed a chunder tsunami into the lap of a grateful Japanese Prime Minister? – but a rich legacy of wisdom, most memorably encapsulated in his dictum “America’s freedom is the example to which the world expires.”
Given that the whole world - and California, one trusts - dotes upon the American lead, my modest proposal is that the Bidenescu regime sets an example to Russia by, for example, ending its illegal occupation of a mere one-third of Syria, and then offering lavish recompense to the peoples of that country for the death and destruction caused by the CIA’s vast Operation Timber Sycamore; and the subsequent wholesale theft of the nation’s oil reserves which, entirely coincidentally, rest in that occupied territory. Washington might even consider lifting sanctions, too, on this earth-quake devastated county.
Think of the lectures you could give to the world from such a position of moral leadership born of concrete example! No longer would a sceptical world laugh at American hypocrisy on the issue of respect for nations’ territorial integrity, though it might still, I confess, at this:
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The Psychedelic Spy - Spy Thriller set in 1968 - BBC Radio - A Radio Play by Andrew Rissik - 5 episodes of approx 45 minutes each. This five-part thriller has the plot of a Bond movie and the ambience of a Chandler novel and, after just one episode, the stamp of a classic.
Notable for the ruminations of the British scientist, beautifully played by Charles Gray, on the assassination of JFK and its import for the future. The soundtrack's not bad, either.
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18 hours ago, John Cotter said:
Chris,
That Chinese article is a devastating critique of US global hegemony.
Needless to say, the two other great powers, Russia and China itself, are no angels, but as the saying goes, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Accordingly, the unrivalled power the US has wielded since at least as far back as 1945, has corrupted the US to a degree unrivalled by any other country.
Insofar as the article is merely a factual description of this state of affairs, its contents cannot be gainsaid. What’s truly pernicious is the degree to which the majority of people living in the shadow of this US hegemony are oblivious or resigned to their servitude.
The latter – those who are resigned to the servitude – are typically self-styled highly “educated” high status well-paid liberals who rationalise their obsequious mentality by such arguments as “It would be worse if we had to kowtow to the Chinese or the Russians rather than the Americans”.
This means that for these “liberals”, servitude, or more precisely “kissing up and kicking down”, is the only mode of existence they envisage for themselves. They have traded their freedom for their high salaries.
In other words, they have sold their souls – the ultimate corruption.
Seconded & thanks, Chris, for posting - saved me the trouble of looking it up!
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16 hours ago, Matthew Koch said:
Now that this idiot got Russia to do what he said wouldn't happen in the clip and due to that the world is now starting to trade off the dollar. This fool is going to go down in history next to Woodrow Wilson as one of the worst Presidents America and the West has ever had..
Not for the first time, Matthew, you have it right.
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Manichaeism and ‘An Ideology of Liberal Empire’ – Biden’s Forever Cosmic War Against Russian ‘Evil’
Alastair Crooke
27 February 2023
When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’.
“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: “No.” “No.” “No.” (Applause.). “No, you will not take my country.” “No, you will not take my freedom.” “No, you will not take my future … A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease [erase] the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine — Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never”. (Applause.)
“Stand with us. We will stand with you. Let us move forward … with an abiding commitment to be allies not of darkness, but of light. Not of oppression, but of liberation. Not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”.
Biden’s speech at Warsaw, complete with the lighting effects and dramatic backdrop reminiscent of his Liberty Hall speech in which he sought to portray his own domestic MAGA opposition as a grave security threat to America, again resorts to radical Manicheanism to depict (this time) Russia, (the external counterpoint to the related U.S. MAGA threat), as the foundation for the epic battle between light and the forces of darkness. The eternal struggle that persists – that must be fought endlessly and won crushingly.
Again, as with his Liberty Hall speech, Biden offered no concrete plan. Here in Warsaw, with the sands of time running out on his Ukraine ‘project’, and with U.S. ‘Realists’ and China ‘hawks’ gaining more traction at home, Biden elevated the struggle from the literal to the metaphysical plane.
By so doing, he is trying to cement America’s deep-seated missionary ethos to a ‘forever’ cosmic war against Russian ‘evil’. He hopes to tie the American ruling class to the metaphysical struggle for the ‘light’. Should Biden continue in office, he hopes by this means, both to ‘define’ himself, and to set this overarching global struggle as something binding Americans, for the period ahead.
Simply put, his metaphysical framing is intended to trump those Realists calling for policy change.
Manichaeism is nothing new – it is an ancient cult with deep roots in Latin Christianity (and likely, Biden at least partially subscribes to seeing Putin as the Demiurge, the ‘dark’ anti-God).
So will this work? Well, this is the struggle now playing out in U.S. politics. At the upper level, the elites are more concerned with power and money than metaphysics – so, Biden’s attempt to transcend the latter and assemble an army “not of darkness but of light; not of oppression, but of liberation; not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”, more likely will be regarded as a reflection of Biden’s derangement syndrome – his detachment from reality; his kookiness, in other words.
If many of the overlap establishments (the ‘Uniparty’) want this war, it will not be for virtuousness, but for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex. If the latter élites are veering away, it is because they think the MIC needs time to refurbish –and to restock – so as to take on China.
“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever … That’s what Americans are and that’s what Americans do”, Biden said.
But the political landscape is no longer a Team Biden monopoly. Trump responded: “World War III has never been closer”; and he laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex”. The former president singled out Victoria Nuland in particular who, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO”.
Florida Governor DeSantis too, insists that the Biden administration has “effectively [given Kiev] a blank check with no clear strategic objective identified”. “I don’t think that it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war … over things like the [Ukrainian] borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said.
Republican Senator Hawley a week ago gave an reflective address to the Heritage Foundation:
“It’s hard to challenge the ‘Uniparty’: They’ve gotten very good at telling their favourite story. That’s why anyone who questions them gets called “anti-American” or “Vladimir Putin’s puppet” from a hundred different quarters”.
“But today, I want to tell you something else. I want to tell the truth. And the truth is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods. Our current foreign policy isn’t working”. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the ‘Uniparty’ doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries”. Simply said: “we’re over-committed, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire”.
Is this enough to ‘turn the worm’? Or, to bring a senior Deep State grandee to Biden’s office to whisper: ‘Remember what happened to Nixon?’ ‘Time for you to let go of Zelensky; (such a pity should Hunter end in jail…!)’.
There is however, another aspect to Biden’s resort to metaphysical Manichaeism that brings real, palpable consequence. Again, not new. Rather, a case of old demons re-surfacing. Here was the Estonian PM, Kaja Kallas, at the Munich Security Conference, saying that ‘NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens’: “The entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of imperialistic dreams’ – claiming that absent a mandated rehabilitation, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.
German FM, Annalena Baerbock, similarly warned the 90% of the world who have not taken the U.S./EU side:
“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor … take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself”.
Yes, alongside this European Manichaeism, the edging towards a new racism can be espied: an ancient rhizome that has one tendril long burrowed into radical Ukrainian nationalism and with other tendrils coiling through mainstream EU structures, as the Euro-Élites patiently debate whether Russia was insufficiently ‘pacified’ after WW2, or whether more radical ‘rehab’ is required.
The rise of this class who regard themselves as credentialled to decide whether Russian culture must be cancelled – and ‘re-wired’ – is a particularly pernicious dynamic in global politics. It has been getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, as its culture-war leaches out into geo-politics. This sense of superiority and impunity, in itself, provokes increased tensions and the risk of war.
Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, was asked for the meaning of Chancellor Scholtz’s ‘German Zeitenwende’ (turning point). He responded:
“The Zeitenwende speech was a response to intensified pressure … for Germany to fall in line with the foreign policy of the U.S. – and, in particular, with that of the Biden administration. What is clear is that Scholz’s Zeitenwende entails a promise, above all to the United States, that Germany will from now on, unlike in the past, act in line with a view of the world as divided between the West – and an evil empire, or better: several evil empires, from Russia to China to Iran…”.
(Nota Bene: This is pure Leo Strauss, channelling Carl Schmitt’s earlier explicit German Manichaeism.)
Streeck continues:
“Between [Germany and the U.S.] – and the various evil empires: Peace is possible, only temporarily and intermittently, and only as long as we enjoy military superiority. In principle, we and they are always at each other’s throats. Real peace will require regime change making an evil empire part of our virtuous one – as a result of its conversion to ‘our values’. It is legitimate to use all its political, economic, and military means to bring such conversion about.
“After the Zeitenwende, wars will always be around the corner and we must be prepared for them. What should help is that a virtuous empire’s “value-driven” or “feminist foreign policy” (Baerbock) fights only just wars – as wars against evil cannot be unjust. The underlying world view here is not social-Darwinist, history being a battle for the “survival of the fittest“, but Manichaean, in which history is a relentless struggle between good and bad, in which the forces of virtue must do their utmost to prevail over those of evil. Before they have won, there can be no real peace, only cease-fires for tactical reasons. For real peace we, the forces of virtue, must prepare for war.
“There is a strong and a weak version of Zeitenwende rhetoric. The strong version implies that the world was always like this: ontologically Manichaean. Those who in the past had a different view were either feeble-minded fools, cowards who all-too-willingly let themselves be deceived by enemy propaganda, or traitors. This essentially coincides with the world view of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the United States.
“The weak version, the one Scholtz obviously prefers, is that the world has recently changed: while in the past it allowed for peaceful coexistence between regimes and countries with different interests or ‘identities’ – so that life in peace could be preferred over victory in war – now the enemy has become so evil that there is no moral alternative to defeating him, cost it what it may.
“Today, American messianism seems to have migrated to Europe. At the same time, Bob Dylan is right. And times continue to be a’changing. How long the German government can remain as subservient to the United States as it has now promised to be is an open question – considering the risks that come with Germany’s territorial closeness to the Ukrainian battlefield – a risk not shared by the U.S.. There is also pressure from France for Germany to become more European and less transatlantic in outlook, and this may, with time, have an impact. Furthermore, it is likely that the U.S. at some point, will try to “Europeanise” the war and bow out, as they tried to “Vietnamise” the Vietnam war in the 1970s – hoping that post-Zeitenwende Germany can take the burden of sponsoring their proxy war from them.
“As for Europe, the United States may not object to Germany, Poland, and others continuing to help the Ukrainian government pursue its dream of a final victory over Russia, at their own cost and risk. With Germany and the EU having turned their political judgment over to Zelenskiy and Biden, and all serious discussion of the aims of the war – the terms of a settlement – being de facto precluded, this is quite a frightening prospect”.
If Streeck’s analysis is correct, the Bidenesque ideology now gripping the upper reaches of Europe suggests that the EU’s conversion to Zeitenwende makes any future relationship with Russia nigh impossible. The conviction this class has of itself as the global future, and of being on the ‘right side of history’, whereas ‘others’ (Russia and the ‘autocrats’) represent only that dark side to history, effective forecloses on mediation. Mediation with ‘evil’ is a tautology.
The reality is that the EU is gripped by the attempt to impose a ‘cultural revolution’ – in the sense that broad citizen conformity to its cultural norms and ‘emergencies’ is not enough. But rather, it is its’ thought-processes that have to be fully reflected in modes of thinking such that every citizen’s acts and thoughts reflect EU ‘right thinking’.
We see this with the war party’s poster girl, Annalena Baerbock’s, lecturing non-aligned countries that there is no space for neutrality when it comes to Ukraine: ‘You are ‘either with us or against us’; and if the former, then GIVE U.S. AMMO!’.
Well, the cultural revolution already is reversing. Today, the Civilisational States (Russia, China, Iran, etc. and link) see the future as theirs and view the woke globalists – and their financialised economic structures – as passé. This reversal increasingly is evident in the popular war in the U.S., but not in Europe.
But can the EU change? – since all the bridges by which it might reconnect to the future have long since been burned down. In essence, the EU is a steam-roller ‘offensive’ ever incrementally moving towards ‘more Europe’.
Change ultimately will come to the EU as a result of a clash of interests, factiousness, and possibly a big political implosion or two – but above all by events on the ground in Ukraine as the Russian offensive proceeds.
Reality has been so far exorcised from the Credentialled Class ‘bubble’. It is not clear how the latter will react to having their ‘Balloon’ popped. Already, we see signs of incipient hysteria.
But the bottom line is this: When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’. The latter will soon find that for all its florid language of fighting on behalf of the ‘light’, the number of Europeans willing to die so that Sevastopol can become Ukrainian will be few indeed. Baerbock will find herself alone, as the rest of world already has shifted across to Russia (see here), ignoring her taunts.
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February 18, 2023
How the Wolfowitz Doctrine Shaped Putin’s OutlookA 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
QuoteOne year has passed since Russia crossed the border into Ukraine, and the Cold War, confined to the literature of the twentieth century, returned once again with the West bleeding Russia through a buffer state. The war has not been about preventing the cannibalization of Ukraine into Russia. Rather, the war is about maintaining U.S. dominance in the United States European Command (EUCOM).
The Wolfowitz Doctrine, named after then U.S. under-secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, was leaked to The New York Times in 1992. The crux of the policy underscored American supremacy at all costs in a post-Soviet world and “stamping out rivals wherever they may emerge.” In addition, U.S. leadership would place defense agreements as the cornerstone of its policy and inadvertently monopolize the global arms trade through treaties. Furthermore, it would prevent allies from developing their defense systems and increase reliance on American-manufactured hardware. Finally, interoperability formed the basis for amalgamating competing factions within NATO.
If this all sounds familiar, as it should, then it is essential to understand when this doctrine formed, how it came about, and why it still shapes many individuals’ views of the West—including Russian president Vladimir Putin’s.
The Fall of the USSR and the Broken Promise
The United States’ victory against the Soviets laid the foundations for the Wolfowitz Doctrine. First, the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, due to Pakistan’s tactical use of guerrilla warfare, helped drained the Soviet economy and the USSR to its collapse in 1991. Secondly, the United States’ own victory over Saddam Hussein through a “tune-up” war in the same year, allowed Washington to showcase its supreme military might, regain some lost pride after the defeat in Vietnam, and rebuild the confidence of its allies.
In conjunction with this, the Wolfowitz Doctrine stipulated that the United States could silence and integrate two former major powers, Germany and Japan, “into a U.S-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic zone of peace.” Russia, on the other hand, was dealt with differently—the country fell off the radar. It became insignificant as a geopolitical competitor in the eyes of the West, as its gestures of peaceful offerings were rebuffed and guarantees given to it regarding NATO’s expansion forfeited.
A record of the minutes, declassified and released by the National Security Archives, recounts the meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Secretary of State James A. Baker III in Moscow. Baker promised NATO would not expand under any circumstance. He further went on, and stated that “NATO is the mechanism for securing U.S. presence in Europe…We understand that only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries…. it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread; in an eastern direction… Germany's unification will not lead to NATO's military spreading to the East.”
In the same meeting, Gorbachev proposed to Baker that as the Soviet Union had dissolved, the need for NATO was no more, and a newly created Russia be allowed to join NATO. Baker dismissed this as a “dream.” However, when Boris Yeltsin came to power, he also proposed joining NATO, and took a step further by labeling membership to NATO as a “political aim for Russia.” In 1994, Russia signed the NATO Partnership for Peace program, which aimed to bridge the divide between the two entities and lead to a pathway to NATO membership.
As the United States realized its privileged position as an uncontested power, it went back on Baker’s word. After all, these “guarantees” were given to the Soviet Union—not to Russia. Taking advantage of this technicality, the United States pushed for former Warsaw Pact countries—such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—to join NATO at the Washington Summit in 1999. Russia opposed the inclusion, but besides a symbolic murmur, Moscow could do nothing to prevent such an endeavor. The successor state of the mighty Soviet Union was not its equal, and thus not considered important enough to be involved in global decisionmaking. Yet, despite its reduced size and sphere of influence, Russia persisted in being considered a key player in international affairs.
Putin’s Ascent and the End of Patience
In 2000, three weeks before his ascension to the presidency, a young and bold Vladimir Putin was interviewed by the BBC’s David Frost. He clarified his intention: “Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe. Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy.”
When the 9/11 attacks occurred, it provided Putin with an opportunity to prove that Russia was willing to engage with the West in its fight against terrorism, as it saw similar security-related issues in Chechnya. Russian intelligence cooperated with the initial U.S. phase of the invasion of Afghanistan by providing crucial logistical, topographical, and urban data entry points into Afghanistan, especially the areas in and around Kabul. Putin also influenced former Central Asian states to open supply routes into Afghanistan for George W. Bush’s War on Terror. There was never any reciprocation or appreciation for this gesture by the United States, as it overreached and established bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. America had established itself in Russia's backyard, and did so as a “favor” to help its security problems and prevent any form of galvanization of groups venturing out of Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, despite these amicable efforts and out-of-the-box thinking by Putin, NATO and the United States could not lose their Cold War mentality—the alliance pushed even more aggressively with its expansion. In 2004, seven countries—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—were granted NATO membership. The alliance had not only moved more than an “inch” from Germany, against what was promised by Baker, but was now standing firmly on Russia’s doorstep. George Kennan, the former American ambassador to the Soviet Union and the architect of containment, himself rejected the idea of expanding NATO and warned of its potential consequences. He professed that this “fatal error” could “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”
The tipping point came in 2007, when Putin had lost patience with the arrogance shown by his Western counterparts. At the Munich Security Conference, Putin declared that he thought “it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Consequences
America’s position of not granting Russia a dignified parity status only further inflamed Putin. He, along with much of Russia’s political elite, could only come to the conclusion that the United States had no intention of working with Russia in a responsible and respectful manner. Washington was doing nothing more, the Kremlin realized, than carrying out a plan determined in 1992 to impose its will upon the world and “stamping out rivals wherever they may emerge.”
This would be further confirmed in Putin’s mind by American actions in Ukraine, meddling in the country’s political affairs and chalking out a path for the country towards eventually joining NATO and the European Union. The back and forth between both sides led to the Euromaidan Revolution, essentially setting up an everlasting division in Ukrainian politics that only deepened by the year.
From Putin’s perspective, invading Ukraine in 2022 was the only option to signal to the Transatlantic alliance that Russia is now in an economic and geostrategic position to counter any further expansion–that Moscow remembers how the broken promises Baker made to Gorbachev, that the line has been drawn in the sand, and the Wolfowitz Doctrine shall advance no further.
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.
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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.
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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”
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
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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.
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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
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18 hours ago, John Cotter said:
Paul,
Amen to that. The political leaders in our western so-called democracies are controlled from the shadows rather than by the people.
This is illustrated by how the Northern Ireland peace process has been used to subvert democracy in Ireland. The Irish police force, the Gárdai, and its overseeing body, the Policing Authority, have been effectively taken over by personnel from Northern Ireland with MI5 connections.
The most obvious such individual is Drew Harris, who was appointed as Gárda Commissioner, the most senior position in the Gárdai, in 2018.
https://eirigi.org/latestnews/2020/2/28/drew-harris-cannot-continue-as-garda-commissioner
The men who sacrificed their lives for Irish freedom a hundred years ago must be spinning in their graves.
The most extraordinary aspect of this situation is that Sinn Féin, the erstwhile political wing of the IRA and now the single biggest political party in both northern and southern Ireland, has said or done nothing about this. One can only conclude that Sinn Féin/IRA were bought off in the peace process and have stayed bought.
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.
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2 hours ago, John Cotter said:
Thank you for those, Paul. I had repeatedly cited Preparata’s work here. There’s an abridged version of his book Incubating Hitler available free on the internet, but I can’t find it now.
The Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash illustrates how murderously Machiavellian western securocrats can be when they so choose. In their delusional Manichean world view, @W. Niederhut and others here seem to believe that such ruthlessness is the sole preserve of the Russians.
In this regard, I would add that in view of political developments in Ireland in recent years, I have come to the conclusion that the Northern Ireland peace process was primarily a Five Eyes/Nato north Atlantic security operation. But that’s perhaps a topic for another day.
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
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On 2/15/2023 at 12:14 AM, John Cotter said:
Professor Guido Preparata and others have also gone further back in describing how US and British ruling elites supported the rise of the Nasties in a typical imperialistic divide-and-conquer stratagem to keep Germany and Russia at each others throats. There's an abridged PDF version of Preparata's book, The Incubation of Naz**m, available free on the internet.
Thanks for sharing that article on narcissism. According to the article, only a small minority of the general population are narcissists, but in my experience there is a far bigger percentage of them in the higner echelons of all the institutions, public and private, in our authoritarian shamocracies.
Meanwhile, has Chris been banned for all this time? If he has it is a travesty, in view of the constant transgressions committed with impunity by his opponents.
A seminal work, here reviewed by David McGregor:
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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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What does the Nord Stream pipeline gas leak mean for the environment?
DW News
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On 2/12/2023 at 3:07 AM, Benjamin Cole said:
Paul-
I think a face-saving armistice, leaving battle lines where there with nobody recognizing them as permanent, might be in the cards and the most humane result as of now.
Trump was right: NATO is a weak sister, giving less to the Ukrainians than the US, and prolonged dithering over tanks and fighter jets. And this horrible military invasion is on their doorstep. They should be doing more, not less.
I am skeptical of US "experts" on the progress of the war. They first predicted a rapid Russian victory. They also predicted a US victory in Vietnam. They promised US victories in Afghanistan. Let's say we don't know how this war turns out.
History shows occupations are very expensive and difficult.
Will Putin change goals from occupation to annihilation?
In the end, Putin's war was volitional, thus criminal. No one was planning to invade Russia, a nation with nukes, tactical nukes and 12,000 tanks, rail lines to the front.
An interesting digression: In 2008, President Obama instigated a military surge into Afghanistan, a nation posited to harbor threats to the US, although located as far from the US as possible, when still in the Northern Hemisphere.
Obama felt his military occupation of Afghanistan was justified---but it also appears volitional.
Obama as a war criminal?
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
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9 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:
John,
I have posted several comments about the Nordstream demolition as an act of war (in which no one was killed.)
For example, on page 16 of this lengthy thread, I wrote;
My point about Nordstream is that it was a source of funding for Putin's genocidal war in Ukraine.
Putin is committing mass murder of civilians in Ukraine with missiles and drones.
Is it ethical in this situation to establish a blockade on his military resources and funding?
...
Is democracy worth defending? And at what cost?
Perhaps Biden and the U.S. military should have left that Nordstream issue up to you Europeans.
But we Americans waited too long to intervene against Hitler, and you Europeans paid a high price for our isolationism prior to 1942.
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.
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Garland Nixon in fine form:
Biden is facing political civil war
https://youtube.com/live/r06F-Auyx3U?si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
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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.
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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.
The inevitable end result of our last 56 years
in Political Discussions
Posted
A strong contender for the most ludicrous and cynical cover story of all-time. All things considered, I think the Old Grey Hooker's editorial board should stick to wrestling with transvestites (or whatever the current imbroglio is about).
Talk about the Yanks throwing the Ukie junta under the bus is quite wrong, though. It's actually the entire bloody North Sea...
Fantastic.