Tag: perpetual war

Failing Washington Post attempts to get Grayzone editor jailed with error-filled smear piece

Though The Washington Post was forced to retract the first sentence and central premise of its nothingburger ‘expose’ targeting The Grayzone, pro-Israel operatives are using the malicious hit piece to demand a federal investigation.

The secret is out. Starting in 2020, for a period of less than a year, and well before ever joining the staff of The Grayzone, journalist Wyatt Reed appeared multiple times on PressTV, an Iranian state-backed international news service. You may have noticed it from Wyatt’s regular postings at the time highlighting these videos, or the “correspondent @PressTV” description that featured in his Twitter bio at the time.

For the Washington Post’s so-called “disinformation threat” researcher, Joseph Menn, this became a vitally important fact to highlight on a full page of a legacy newspaper whose banner motto boldly declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.” 

After sending Wyatt a series of aggressively worded emails implicitly threatening to have him criminally prosecuted, and demanding to speak with his lawyer, the Washington Post employee relied on a series of hacked documents to “expose” what Wyatt never attempted to conceal: while beginning his journalistic career, he appeared on the Iranian news outlet Press TV several dozen times.

Incidentally, during this time, Wyatt received payment from such nefarious foreign outlets as CBS Weekend News and CBS This Morning, which correctly credited him as a journalist when airing the footage he gathered reporting from the frontlines of BLM protests. 

Since joining The Grayzone in June 2023, Wyatt has not accepted a penny from any government-backed outlet. In fact, The Grayzone imposes far stricter rules on its employees than The Washington Post, which appears to have no such prohibitions on its employees moonlighting for government backed think tanks.

However, the case remains: for a brief period of time, four years ago, he openly appeared in reports for an Iranian outlet which employs Americans to this day.

So why, four years after Wyatt’s last appearance on Press TV, is the Washington Post targeting him, and only him, and even suggesting he should be jailed, despite the fact that dozens of Americans have reported for this same network?

The motive behind this malicious attack is abundantly clear: Wyatt now works for The Grayzone, and The Grayzone’s factual reporting has infuriated boosters of the Ukraine proxy war and members of Israel’s international propaganda network. 

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Look Who’s Spreading Disinformation On Ukraine

‘Black kettle’ Tony Blinken’ accused Russia of spreading propaganda to mislead the Americans and Europeans, while hiding US decision to escalate the confrontation in Ukraine

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during a set of whirlwind meetings in several European NATO countries, warned against Russian propaganda programs he accused of spreading “misinformation and disinformation” about US intentions to escalate the conflict by allowing Ukraine’s military to use longer-range US missiles to strike targets as much as 200 miles inside of Russia — something that the Biden administration had since the start of that war had not allowed, correctly fearing that it could lead to a larger and possibly nuclear war.

Blinken’s lie, though, was that at the time he was accusing Russia of dishonesty, he himself knew that the decision had already been made by President Biden to do exactly that: authorize Ukraine to strike Soviet air bases, missile launch sites, troop concentrations and staging areas well inside the Russia’s borders using missiles supplied by the US.

This inconvenient truth was exposed by Politico, which ran a story on May 30th disclosing the secret Biden decision, which followed intense lobbying of the president by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Sec. Blinken himself, as well as by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and various Ukrainian military leaders.

From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over two years ago, Biden had made it clear that no US troops would be sent to fight for Ukraine, and no US weapons would be used against Russian territory. Nothing would be done that could risk turning the conflict into a head-to-head battle between US and Russian forces, because it was felt (correctly!) that such a situation could quickly lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

What changed to make Biden suddenly stop worrying about taking the first steps up what Pentagon strategists have, since the early days of the nuclear era in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, referred to as the “nuclear ladder” of tit-for-tat nuclear escalation?

Clearly it was the fact that Ukraine has begun losing the war. It’s out of ammunition, out of anti-aircraft missiles, short of troops, is facing a mass flight of draft-age men from the country’s recently expanded conscription efforts, and it is loosing ground around Kharkiv , Ukraine’s second-largest city of 1.5. million located near the Russian border in eastern Ukraine.

Additionally, it has become evident that the supposedly marvelous US weapons (as well as some widely banned ones like anti-personnel shells, rockets and bombs, and depleted uranium shells) have not turned the tide against Russian forces as optimistically predicted.

The reality is that this idea of attacking Russian targets — for the moment only in Russian territory relatively close to Kharkiv, but perhaps later much more deeply inside Russia — is nothing short of terrifying.

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Russian Warships Steam For Caribbean As Ukraine Tensions Go Global

In a show of force perhaps prompted by President Biden’s authorization of Ukrainian strikes inside Russia using US weapons, a group of Russian warships is en route to the Caribbean, a senior US official has told McClatchy and the Miami Herald. White House officials alerted members of Congress to the Russian move on Wednesday. 

The deployment signals Russia’s capacity to operate globally while still fully engaged its third year of war in Ukraine. “This is about Russia showing they are still capable of some level of naval power projection,” the official said. “We should expect more of this activity going forward.” In March, Ukraine claimed it had either sunk or disabled a full third of Russia’s ships in the Black Sea.

CBS News reports that long-range Russian bombers will rendezvous with the ships for combined naval and air maneuvers. Such exercises are not without precedent: Russia conducted similar combined-arms Caribbean maneuvers in 2019, and had a streak of sending ships into the Western Hemisphere at least annually from 2013 to 2020. Following the summer exercises, Russia is expected to engage in a worldwide naval exercise this fall, sources tell CBS. 

The Pentagon is tracking a “handful” of ships and support craft that are expected to reach Caribbean waters in the upcoming weeks. US analysts speculate that the flotilla will make port calls in both Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba’s likely relishes the opportunity to host the Russian warships: Last year’s docking of a US nuclear submarine at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base ruffled feathers in Havana, with the Cuban government calling it a “provocative escalation.”

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Pentagon’s AI office awards Palantir a contract to create a data-sharing ecosystem

The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, leveraged its marketplace for fast-tracking the acquisition of innovative technologies to award Silicon Valley-based Palantir a contract to develop a data-sharing ecosystem — a tool that will help the Pentagon with its connect-everything initiative.

CDAO announced last Thursday that the ecosystem — known as Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories, or Open DAGIR — will enable the Department of Defense to scale its use of data, analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities through greater collaboration with private sector partners. 

Palantir said it received a $33 million prototype Other Transaction award from CDAO “to rapidly and securely onboard third-party vendor and government capabilities into the government-owned, Palantir-operated data environment to meet priority combatant command digital needs.”

The contract was awarded through CDAO’s Tradewinds Solution Marketplace, which allows private firms of all sizes to pitch DOD their AI, machine learning and data capabilities through five minute infomercial-style videos. Once companies are accepted into the marketplace, Pentagon components can search the platform to view videos of solutions from industry partners. Companies, in turn, are able to access post-competition, readily awardable contracts. 

Bonnie Evangelista, CDAO’s acting deputy for acquisition directorate, told Nextgov/FCW earlier this year that the platform can significantly shorten the time it takes for companies to receive DOD contracts.

During a NetApp conference on Tuesday, CDAO Director of Procurement Quentin McCoy said Palantir’s use of the Tradewinds marketplace allowed it to receive the award for Open DAGIR in 30 days. 

“It’s a sort of healthy prototype,” McCoy said about the Open DAGIR solution Palantir will provide, noting that “it’s going to allow industry and government to ingest data together and share and bring in third-party vendors to do this action.”

DOD said it will initially use Open DAGIR to support its Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control — or CJADC2 — initiative that is designed to promote interoperability across disparate military environments. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced in February that CDAO had achieved “the minimum viable capability” of the information-sharing network.

CDAO is also planning to use its ongoing Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, to determine whether any additional capabilities should be added to the Open DAGIR ecosystem. GIDE is designed, in part, to help inform the Pentagon’s use of emerging technologies to support its CJADC2 initiative. 

The GIDE series — created by U.S. Northern Command and relaunched by CDAO last year — tests out AI and data analytics tools to determine how they can be used for military decisionmaking. The department finished its GIDE 9 iteration in March. 

McCoy said CDAO is planning to hold several industry days in the next few months, including one scheduled for mid-July, in preparation for the office’s next GIDE iteration. 

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The Coming Novus Ordo Seclorum – Change We Must; There Is No Choice!

On a visit to Oxford a few weeks ago, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative, (Walter Münchau writes), made an interesting remark: “Diplomacy is the art of managing double standards”. Münchau illustrated its inherent hypocrisy by contrasting the enthusiasm with which EU leaders supported the ICC’s decision to seek an arrest warrant against Putin last year, and “yet not to accept it – when it hits a member of your team” (i.e. Netanyahu).

The most egregious example of such double ‘thinking’ concerns its correlate – the western ‘management’ of created realities. A double standard – a ‘narrative’ of us ‘winning’ – is crafted, and then set against a narrative of ‘them failing’.

A resort to the manufacture of narratives of winning (instead of actually doing the winning) may seem rather clever, but the uncertainty it causes can have unforeseen potentially disastrous consequences. For instance, President Macron’s deliberately obfuscated threats to send NATO forces to serve in Ukraine – which only contributed to Russia preparing for a wider war against all NATO, accelerating its offensive operations.

Instead of deterring – as likely intended by Macron – it brought about a more determined adversary, with Putin warning that Russia would kill any NATO ‘invaders’. It was not so clever, after all…

Take as a more substantive example President Putin’s response to a press query during his visit to Uzbekistan: ‘These representatives of NATO countries, especially in Europe, … firstly provoked us in the Donbas; led us by the nose for eight years, deliberately deceived us into supposing they [the West] wanted going to resolve things peacefully – notwithstanding their seemingly contrarian attempt to force the situation ‘towards peace’ – through armed means.

‘Then they deceived us during the negotiation process’, Putin continued, ‘having, a priori decided in secret to defeat Russia on the battlefield – and thereby to inflict a strategic defeat on it. This constant escalation can lead to serious consequences (Putin probably refers to a ratchetting missile exchange ending – even – with nuclear weapons). If these serious consequences occur in Europe, how will the United States behave in view of our strategic arms parity? Do they want a global conflict? It’s hard to say… Let’s see what happens next’, he concluded. (This is a paraphrase of what was a long and extensive question and answer session by President Putin).

Naturally, some in the West will say that this is just a Russian ‘story’ – and that the West has acted reasonably throughout, in response to Moscow’s actions.

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False Flag On The Horizon? The Strange Case of the Destroyed Russian Nuclear Radar

If we accept the fundamental truth that Ukraine is nothing more than a proxy battleground between Russia and the west, then you might say WWIII has already begun. The powers-that-be have been content to keep the situation contained primarily to Ukraine so far, but a recent event suggests things are about to change. There’s something very strange happening on the nuclear front between NATO and Russia and I believe it might be time to consider the possibility that a false flag threat is in the works.

In the past two weeks Ukraine has taken credit for at least two separate strikes on peculiar targets – Russian “over the horizon” radar stations using drones with an impressive flight range of at least 1200 miles. Until this point, long range attacks into Russian territory have been exceedingly rare. So, why these specifics radar stations?

The Voronezh-DM stations were positioned outside the city of Orsk and the region of Krasnodar (Armavir); far away from the front lines in Ukraine. The strikes are being hailed as the furthest Ukraine has attacked into the heart of Russia, but the corporate media has ignored the wider implications of the situation.

It is likely that the drones used were of US or European origin. NATO has (until the past couple of days) enforced tight restrictions on how their weapons can be used by Ukraine. Long range drones and cruise missiles hitting targets deep in Russia invites major blowback, including the threat of a nuclear response.

That said, it’s not so much the weapons used that concerns me, it’s the specific targets that Ukraine supposedly chose.

Russia’s over-the-horizon radar systems have a detection range of at least 6000 miles (the real range is classified) and scan specifically for high altitude ballistic missiles. They are not designed to detect lower flying medium range cruise missiles (ATACMS) and drones. Meaning, the two stations destroyed by Ukrainian weapons are meant to act as an early warning system for nuclear attack.

The Ukrainians supposedly defied NATO restrictions, not once, but twice, to target radar systems that have nothing to do with them. In fact, the arrays sit in permanently fixed positions and neither array was actually aimed at Ukraine, they were aimed to the North and Southwest of Russia. The Armavir radar was constructed in 2009 to close a gap created by the loss of radars in Ukraine, and was also meant to replace an older Daryal radar in Gabala. Interestingly, Armavir and Orsk “search fans” watches the skies primarily above the Middle East, including Israel, and a large chunk of Europe including Switzerland.

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Are They TRYING to Start a Nuclear War?

The steady path toward World War III continues. U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in the war with Russia has been one long failure, but that hasn’t stopped them from escalating the war with new weapons and tactics.

Russia has met the escalation with its own escalation every step of the way. At what point do rational leaders in the West (if there are any left) pause, consider that the war is lost in Ukraine, deescalate and seek a treaty to end the war?

There’s no sign of that yet. In fact, all of the signs point to further escalation, which is a sure path to nuclear war. What good has escalation accomplished?

The West supplied Ukraine with HIMARS precision-guided artillery, but that largely failed because the Russians quickly learned how to jam the GPS guidance systems, so the missiles went off course.

That doesn’t mean the Russians shoot down or jam every HIMARS rocket Ukraine launches. Some will always get through. But overall, their effectiveness has been limited compared with expectations.

The U.S. and NATO also supplied Ukraine with Abrams, Leopard and Challenger tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that have been left burning on the battlefield. They also require intensive maintenance Ukraine can’t necessarily provide, and are often unsuited for the battlefield conditions in Ukraine. Many Ukrainian soldiers have actually expressed a preference for Russian-made equipment over NATO’s.

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Dismissing Tom Clancy’s Fanboy Generals In the USAF

In his foreword to Tom Clancy’s book Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing, updated in 2004, a retired USAF general named John M. Loh writes: “This book chronicles the creation of a command with a unique culture – the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command. It possesses the leadership, the combat power, and the highly trained, competent people to provide the world’s best combat air forces anywhere in the world, at any time, to win quickly, decisively, with overwhelming advantage and few casualties. Tom Clancy does a masterful job of telling us all about it. I am proud to have served as the first commander of Air Combat Command, and proud to commend this book to your reading pleasure.” (Location 226)

Not only does the general validate Clancy’s outrageous claims about USAF pilots being the finest in the world, as one would expect from those who have both been thoroughly indoctrinated in the myth of American aerial supremacy, it just shows that the USAF liked Clancy because he published propaganda books that served their interests.

For those who have followed my writing career as a military reformer, you know that Tom Clancy sticks in my craw, and I am always keen to rebut his arguments, which never contain footnotes, or any documentation other than the words of defense contractors.

Although Clancy is no longer with us, General Loh still is, and I would like to offer the following news to him and other Clancy fanboys and ask them to possibly reconsider their bragging. In previous articles and my book I have argued that smaller air forces, such as the Royal Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, and the Royal Canadian Air Force have outstanding reputations, with pilot selection and training standards that are higher than the USAF.

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Nagasaki Mayor Withholds Israel’s Invitation to Peace Ceremony

The mayor of Nagasaki said Monday that he is withholding Israel’s invitation to the annual peace ceremony commemorating the 1945 U.S. nuclear attack on the Japanese city and will call on the country’s far-right government to accept an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

“Given the critical humanitarian situation in Gaza and international opinion, there is a risk of unpredictable disruption occurring at the ceremony,” said Mayor Shirō Suzuki, according to The Asahi Shimbun.

“The situation is changing day by day, so we have put sending an invitation letter on hold,” Suzuki explained. “We need to carefully monitor the situation as it develops.”

The ceremony is held each year on August 9, when at 11:02 am local time in 1945 a U.S. B-29 bomber dropped a single nuclear bomb over the city, killing tens of thousands of people instantly and dooming many thousands more to slow death by radiation-induced ailments.

Suzuki said he would extend an invitation to Israel once it’s clear that doing so won’t cause any problems. Palestine’s envoy is invited to attend, although Japan is one of a global minority of nations that do not formally recognize a Palestinian state.

Once again, Russia – whose forces have been invading Ukraine since February 2022 – and Belarus, which supports the invasion, are not invited.

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US Warns Dual Citizens Will Be Stuck in Ukraine Under Mobilization Law

On Tuesday, the US Embassy in Ukraine issued a warning to US-Ukrainian dual citizens that they may no longer be able to leave Ukraine under the country’s new mobilization law.

Under martial law that was imposed in February 2022, Ukrainian males ages 18 to 60 cannot leave the country. Before the new mobilization law took effect, there were exceptions for dual US-Ukrainian nationals, but now they can be forced to stay.

“The US Embassy in Kyiv understands that, effective June 1, Ukraine has eliminated a ‘residence abroad’ exception that previously allowed certain Ukrainian males aged 18 to 60 to depart the country. After this change, US-Ukrainian dual citizens, including those who live in the United States, may no longer be able to depart the country,” the US Embassy said.

The Embassy said it was “limited in our ability to influence Ukrainian law, including the application of martial law and the mobilization law to Ukrainian citizens” and advised any dual US-Ukrainian nationals that are in the country to “shelter in place and obey all local orders.”

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