Tag: perpetual war

Trump’s “Super Duper” Delusion

“We have the super-fast missiles — tremendous number of the super-fast. We call them ‘super-fast,’ where they’re four, five, six, and even seven times faster than an ordinary missile. We need that because, again, Russia has some.” Donald Trump, February 2020

“We have a — I call it the ‘super-duper missile.’ And I heard the other night, 17 times faster than what they have right now….and you take the fastest missile we have right now — you’ve heard Russia has five times, and China is working on five or six times. We have one 17 times.” Donald Trump, May 2020

“We are building…rockets, and missiles; even a hypersonic missile that goes 17 times faster than the fastest missile currently available in the world and can hit a target 1,000 miles away within 14 inches from center point.” Donald Trump, July 2020

For years now, Donald Trump has been hyping the existence of a “super-fast” missile—something he calls the “super-duper missile” capable of flying “17 times faster” than the nearest competition.

Some believe that Trump is referring to the AGM-183A missile that is being developed under the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) program. The US Air Force awarded a contract worth more than $480m to Lockheed Martin for designing the ARRW in August 2018. An initial test of the missile was done in 2019. Lockheed Martin received a $988.8 million contract modification for the ARRW critical design review, test and production readiness support, in December 2019. A second ARRW missile was tested in 2020. The US Air Force requested $382m in funding for the ARRW program development 2021 and another $581 million for 2022. The goal was to produce a total of 33 ARRW missiles for testing by December 2022.

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Declassified: MI6 Support For Nazi ‘Forest Brothers’

September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s ‘occupation’ of their state. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these violent factions – popularly known as the Forest Brothers – waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated in the region and beyond today as courageous freedom fighters, immortalised by commemorative monuments, street names and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalised throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical coverup. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroising the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

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Israeli Defense Minister Says IDF Will Destroy Gaza Tunnels Once Hamas Releases Israeli Captives

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday that the Israeli military would destroy tunnels in Gaza after the remaining Israeli captives are released by Hamas, which is expected to happen on Monday.

“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States,” Katz wrote on X.

“This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons. I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission,” he added.

According to the outline of the Gaza ceasefire proposal released by the White House, all “military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt,” and there will be a “process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors.” But the details of how those steps will be taken, including who will be doing it, are unclear.

So far, Israel and Hamas have just entered the first phase of the ceasefire deal, which involves the release of the Israeli hostages in exchange for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, the IDF pulling back to an agreed-upon line, and Israel allowing more aid to enter Gaza. Details on implementing the rest of the agreement still need to be worked out in negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

Katz’s comments come as many are concerned Israel will restart its genocidal war once Hamas releases the Israeli captives. Also on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military “campaign is not over,” though he could be referring to other areas where Israel is at war or potential escalations elsewhere in the region.

“And I want to say: Everywhere we fought – we won. But in the same breath, I must tell you: The campaign is not over. There are still very great security challenges ahead of us,” Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office. “Some of our enemies are trying to rebuild themselves to attack us again. And as we say – ‘We’re on it.’”

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US Has Been Supporting Long-Range Ukrainian Drone Attacks Inside Russia for Months

The Trump administration has been providing Ukraine with intelligence to carry out long-range drone attacks against Russian energy infrastructure, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing multiple US and Ukrainian officials.

The report said that the US intelligence helps Ukraine “shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defenses.”

A US official told the paper that Ukraine selects the target for the strike, then the US provides information on its vulnerabilities. However, other officials said the US has actually been setting out target priorities for the Ukrainian military, meaning the US is choosing what to strike.

One of the FT’s sources described Ukraine’s drone force as the “instrument” the US is using to achieve the goal of undermining the Russian economy and pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin toward a settlement to end the war. The US has spent billions helping build up Ukraine’s drone program, an effort backed by the CIA.

The report said that the US began supplying Ukraine with the intelligence following a July phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump reportedly asked if Ukraine could hit Moscow if the US provided longer-range weapons. In August and September, Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure significantly escalated.

US-backed attacks on Russian territory always risk a major escalation between Russia and NATO, and the FT report noted that the Biden administration refrained from supporting such strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. President Biden did support Ukrainian strikes on Russian border regions using ATACMS, US-provided missiles that have a range of about 190 miles.

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Russia accuses US of planning coup in Venezuela

Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia has accused the US of plotting a coup in Venezuela under the guise of an anti-drug campaign.

Washington has deployed marines and warships off of Venezuela’s coast and has carried out airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels. At least four boats have been sunk, killing more than 21 people. Caracas condemned the move as a violation of its sovereignty and requested an emergency UN Security Council session, warning the operation sought to topple President Nicolas Maduro and threatened regional peace.

At the session on Friday, Nebenzia said Russia “strongly condemned” the US campaign, calling it “a flagrant violation of international law and human rights.”

“We are witnessing a brazen campaign of political, military, and psychological pressure on the government of an independent state with the sole purpose of changing a regime unfavorable to the US,” he stated, noting that the coup plot is being carried out “using the classic tools of color revolutions and hybrid wars” by “artificially fueling an atmosphere of confrontation.”

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Israeli airstrikes devastate south Lebanon’s power grid, destroy reconstruction equipment

Israeli warplanes carried out a series of intense airstrikes along Musaylih Road in southern Lebanon overnight on 11 October, cutting off the main route and plunging large parts of the south into darkness after severing key power lines.

At least 10 strikes hit six excavation and bulldozer depots, destroying more than 300 engineering vehicles and heavy machines, and leaving one person dead and seven wounded.

Electricité du Liban (EDL), Lebanon’s main electricity provider, said the strikes caused severe damage to the national grid. A 66 kV tower was completely destroyed, cutting the Zahrani-Musaylih line and disrupting power to the main 66 kV substations in Sidon and Siblin. 

The unprovoked attack also severed the primary 220 kV Zahrani–Tyre transmission line, forcing the shutdown of several substations across southern Lebanon, including Tyre and Wadi Jilou.

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The Israeli media is reporting on a ‘secret clause’ in the Gaza ceasefire deal that no one is talking about

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas could collapse due to an alleged “secret clause” in the agreement that would allow Israel to resume the war, according to reports in the Arab and Hebrew-language Israeli media. That so-called clause would reportedly be “activated” in the event that Hamas is unable to locate all the Israeli captives within the 72-hour window allotted to the Palestinian resistance group during the first part of the deal’s implementation.

On Friday, Al Jazeera’s Palestine Bureau Chief Walid al-Omary pointed out on the network’s live broadcast that the second article of the deal concerning the release of Israeli captives included a phrase in the Hebrew version about an undisclosed annex. According to al-Omary, if Hamas fails to release all Israeli captives, dead and alive, a “secret clause in appendix B” would be “activated.”

Israel’s Kan TV was the first to report on the clause, which was subsequently covered by other Israeli media outlets. According to Kan, an unnamed source who had been exposed to the content of the secret clause said that it was “jumbles of words.” Israel’s Channel 13 also reported that an Israeli court dismissed a petition to disclose the “secret contents” of the deal, citing security considerations.

Although the alleged clause implies punitive consequences on Hamas in the event of failing to meet the 72-hour deadline, Hamas official Osama Hamdan said in an interview hours after the deal was first announced that the time needed to find, gather, and release Israeli captives would depend on “field conditions.” Hamdan added that locating the captives might take longer. U.S. President Donald Trump also admitted that finding the dead bodies of Israeli captives might take longer than anticipated.

Hamas has officially denied the existence of such a clause. A Hamas official told Al Jazeera that “the reported rumors concerning the presence of ‘secret clauses’ in the agreement to end the war on Gaza are completely untrue.”

The potential existence of such a secret clause has reinforced already-existing Palestinian concerns that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would seek to find a way to sabotage the deal. Already in March, Israel broke the first ceasefire after the release of all civilian Israeli captives in the first phase of the deal. Last July, Hamas accepted a proposed deal following talks through Egyptian and Qatari mediators, while Netanyahu completely ignored it as mediators waited for Israel’s response.

Moreover, the lack of any additional terms within the deal for the end of the war, known as Trump’s “20-Point Plan,” has contributed to the spread of such reports in Arab media outlets. Issues relating to disarmament, Gaza’s postwar administration, and Israel’s withdrawal have all been relegated until after the prisoner exchange.

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Is Trump Preparing for the Next Civil War, or Already Fighting It?

The US – that powerful nation standing for peace, self-determination and liberty – as Charles Hugh Smith discusses, is a spectacle, an artifice, a lie.  Smith refers to Guy Debord’s 1967 book, and Debord’s subsequent Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.

Debord seems to have completely anticipated my life as a child of the Cold War and adult participant in the rise of the executive warfare state. What’s more, he explained it:

The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

The constructs in which we operate provide for endless intellectual challenges, often taking us down deep rabbit holes.  But rabbit hole or not, all of us are living and producing within a simulated liberty, accompanied by – to paraphrase Debord and Smith – hyper-complex technological systems, unitary and ahistorical governments, and all-encompassing state and techno-narratives created to replace the humane and silence humanity.

We are fascinated by what we see on our screens – in Gaza, in Ukraine and now Venezuela, even in the Pacific.  Yet, we must have been getting a snack when the plot twisted and the peace and America First campaign morphed into Tomahawks to Kiev, brutal US-assisted genocide in Gaza, the US Navy blowing up fishermen and other civilians in international waters at will, without consequence.

The media summary of the latest Gaza flotilla was pure Hunger Games-style pablum: “It was the first time since Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza’s waters in 2009 that an unauthorised humanitarian mission has reached closer than 70 nautical miles from the territory.”  What is an ‘unauthorized’ humanitarian mission?” Apparently they’re quite common, as we saw with Bush 43 and Katrina, feeding the homeless, and even Peanut the Squirrel.

The current idiotic fiascos – NATO’s Ukraine and Israel’s expansionist murder spree – have been curiously unwinnable, and even more curiously, unstoppable.  Trump complained he didn’t understand how difficult it would be to end these wars. The vast majority of countries represented in the United Nations probably agree with Trump on this point – why can’t the stupidity and inhumanity just be stopped (ideally by the US government simply ceasing to fund them)?

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Breaking Free From State Rule

Wars are mass-murder, massive theft, and unrelenting propaganda. In this country they’re lucrative overseas entanglements, as government diverts loot from taxpayers to the war industry. They’re also perpetual, as war embellishes the sanctity of the state as well as providing grounds for increased plunder of its population. Wars are government as Houdini—drawing attention to the bloody far-away while relieving attention on the corrupt close-at-hand. For the victor, the propaganda is inked as truth in the history books. War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne concluded, but not for the people under it:

In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

Government-controlled monetary policy is cover for counterfeiting, an insidious form of taxation that creates gross economic distortions and inequalities. Presidential elections are extravagant contests between straw men owned by those behind the throne. Formal education is indoctrination into dominant narratives. The US Constitution is a feel-good distraction from the larceny and depravity of the political class.

Blogger J.D. Breen has published a brief history of the 21st century in two parts (here and here). “As last century was launched when the Maine sank in Havana harbor, this one turned when the Twin Towers were toppled. . . . The remnants of the U.S. Constitution went in the shredder.” Shocking, but not surprising, he said, given the destruction wrought by US intervention in Muslim countries over the decades.

But government, as we’ve learned, is never accountable for wrong-doing. If it was, it would imply the state is fallible, a blasphemous idea.

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Putin Says Russia ‘Very Actively’ Developing New Nuclear Weapons

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Oct. 10 that Russia is “very actively” developing and testing new nuclear weapons and that Moscow may soon make a formal announcement about the progress of its latest strategic systems.

Speaking to reporters after a summit in Tajikistan, Putin said the development of new weapons was proceeding successfully and that Russia’s nuclear deterrent capabilities are now more advanced than those of any other nuclear power.

“I believe that we will have an opportunity to report about the new weapons that we announced a while ago,” Putin said, according to Russian state media Tass.

“These weapons are being developed and undergoing tests. The tests are proceeding successfully.

“The novelty of our nuclear deterrence capabilities is higher than in any other nuclear-weapon state—and we are actively developing it all. We are developing what I mentioned earlier, in previous years—we are working to finalize it.”

The remarks follow Moscow’s recent offer to voluntarily maintain the warhead limits set by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) if the United States does the same. The treaty, signed in 2010 and extended by five years in 2021, is the last remaining major arms-control accord between Washington and Moscow. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed long-range missiles and bombers.

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