Tag: perpetual war

Al Qaida Is Winning – The New Caliphate In Syria

Biden began his term in office by abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban and allowing the creation of a new terrorist super state. He is finishing his time in the Oval Office by watching helplessly as a new Caliphate is formed in the rubble of what was once Syria. Divorced from reality as always, his hapless State Department now calls the jihadi ruler of Damascus Al-Jolani a “pragmatist” and talks mindlessly about accommodation and cooperation with mass murderers and rapists.

Meanwhile, inside Syria, the new Islamic rulers are losing no time in consolidating their rule and making clear their intentions. On 26 December, Al-Jolani appointed former Al-Qaeda commander and Nusra Front co-founder Anas Hassan Khattab as the head of the country’s general intelligence agency. Khattab was designated a “terrorist” by the United Nations a decade ago. According to the UN, he was involved “in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of” and “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” the Nusra Front. This Al-Qaeda offshoot was rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.

Those are the guys who now run Syria.

As the head of intelligence Khattab’s job will not be to prepare detailed analyses of foreign developments. He will be in charge of domestic security. His job will be to crush any dissent and guarantee Al-Jolani stays in power. He has already been performing that function in the areas that HTS has controlled for years, where torture and murder are common tactics used to stifle dissent.

Last week, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, a founding member of Al-Qaeda in Syria, was appointed foreign minister for the new terrorist state being created in Syria.

Meanwhile, more information is becoming available on the composition of the jihadist forces that drove Assad from power. Contrary to press reports that want to characterize the ousting of Assad as some sort of liberal, democratic, populist movement, the reality appears to be that substantial numbers of fighters from outside of Syria are present on the ground. Just before Christmas, a video surfaced of a Christmas tree in a town in Syria being burned by Islamists. It now appears the terrorists who carried out this action were Uzbek fighters fighting with Al-Jolani’s forces.

In fact, substantial numbers of Central Asians are in Syria and serving the new Caliphate. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI),

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Meet the new generation of tax resisters refusing to pay for war

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, the IRS has taken the unusual step of extending the tax season to July 15 — a move that gives people more time to consider using the old, but often overlooked tactic of war tax resistance from the safety of their homes.

For most people tax season is a hassle — involving organizing paperwork, gathering receipts, slogging through indecipherable forms — but it’s hardly an ethical or moral quandary. However, war tax resisters see taxes through a moral lens. For them it is a time ripe with opportunities for civil disobedience, charitable giving, and sophisticated accounting in the pursuit of peace — and now public health — by refusing to pay some or all of their income tax (and even their employment taxes in some cases).

The tactic is most associated with historic peace churches, including Quakers and Mennonites, and Vietnam-era anti-war activists. As a result, the demographic associated with the tactic tends to be older, but in an age of never-ending wars, climate change and an escalating pandemic, it is now being explored by millenials and younger people.

The War Resisters League, or WRL, a secular pacifist organization founded in 1923, estimates that in fiscal year 2021, some 47 percent of the federal budget will be allocated to military spending. The budget (nearly $3.5 trillion dollars in 2021) is funded by income taxes, hence war tax resisters primary focus on refusing to pay income taxes.

There are a variety of ways to avoid income taxes, some of which are legal and others which are not. Resisters may choose to live under the taxable level ($12,400 for an individual in 2020), which is legal, while others choose to file their taxes and refuse to pay any amount owed, which is illegal. Some even choose to send the money that they would have paid in taxes to a charity or non-profit, which could be an attractive option for those wanting to redirect their money to support those risking their lives to respond to the coronavirus. A host of options between those two poles are outlined by WRL and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, or NWTRCC, a coalition of groups and individuals founded in 1982 to support war tax resistance.

“It encourages you to question how you’re relating to other people and society,” said Rev. Jerry Maynard, a 26-year-old Independent Catholic Priest, founding pastor of The People’s Church, and NWTRCC board member, who has been practicing war tax resistance since 2013. “It makes you aware that you aren’t just a fleeting reality in this giant, expansive world, but you’re really a cog in the machine. [At the same time] you’re conscious, so you can decide whether you want to turn this way or that way or if you don’t want to turn at all.”

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The World Order Is Dangerously In Flux

“A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above.”

– Matt Taibbi, Racket News

I would guess that you’re feeling as if anything might happen now. It’s hard to rule out even the possibility that we could all be vaporized before moving onto the next mundane chore of the day. The world order is dangerously in flux. America’s Woke-Jacobin “Joe Biden” regime was defeated in the 2024 election, but they were apparently just a front for the sinister entity we call the “blob” or the Deep State, which in recent years has consistently and garishly acted against our country’s interests. So, the blob abides, and it probably weaves schemes in the deep background of daily life even as a new government awaits. But if the Woke-Jacobin Biden-istas were tied-in with the so-called “globalist” enterprise centered around the EU bureaucracy, with assistance from the World Economic Forum’s network of zillionaires and bankers. . . well, that coalition looks rather broken now. It’s doing a hurt-dance. It’s on the run, a little bit.

What is not broken for the moment — a tenuous moment — is the new Trump regime’s determination to correct the disorders of Western Civ, starting with the affairs of the USA, according to age-old reality-based norms of behavior and good-faith relations between the people and their government. Trust was broken and must be restored. The President-elect has assembled an extraordinary team of reformers, if they can get to their posts without subversion. And, of course, Mr. Trump himself has to evade further attempts to rub him out, to knock him off the game-board before he can take office, and then he must survive the months beyond his inauguration. So, you are correct to be nervous.

Paradoxically, Mr. Trump has to initially manage the US government as if it deserves a sense of reassuring continuity, which, in many respects it does not deserve. So many institutions and relationships between them have been perverted and damaged. How do we pretend that the upper layers of management in any federal agency — the strata who really run things below the top “political” appointees — can continue in-place as if all that perversion never happened? The Department of Justice and the FBI are filled with lawyers and agents who abused their power egregiously and went to war against the American people. The agency’s work will just have to stop for a while. The nation can probably endure if investigations and prosecutions are suspended for sixty days while the personnel issues get sorted out — who goes and who stays.

But what about the Defense Department and the CIA? The country must be able to defend itself. These departments are the lairs of the more dangerously entrenched blob actors. Both DOD and the CIA have come to be organized as racketeering operations. Both are involved in domestic money-laundering activities at the giant scale, and in rackets abroad — such as the many grifts around Ukraine, in which giant financial entities like BlackRock are partnered-in. (You know, for instance, don’t you, that BlackRock was poised to acquire control of Ukraine’s natural resource base, until Mr. Putin’s resolve ended that fantasy.) And the CIA is suspected of being deeply involved in the Mexican crime cartel operations, both around drugs and human trafficking. The imputations are sickening. The DOD and the CIA will fight desperately to preserve their perqs and projects, and to stay out of jail. But until now they have not really been challenged.

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Is Peace Possible Today?

As we approach Christmas, with its connotations of peace and goodwill to all people, and the New Year, when one traditionally comes up with ‘resolutions’ for the year ahead, with the intention of compensating for mistakes made during the past year, and of initiating creative projects for the future, one has to ask: is all of this just Heideggerian ‘idle talk,’ or is peace a realistic possibility? 

This seems to be an easy question to answer. Despite President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated assurance that he would bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, it is by no means certain that he would be able to do that, not only because his enemies, both in the US and abroad, are heavily invested in keeping the war going at all costs, but also in light of the improbability that President Vladimir Putin of Russia would be a pushover when it comes to conditions for a peace agreement.  

Such an arrangement would suit Ukraine and NATO very well, insofar as it would provide them with the opportunity to rearm and recruit more soldiers for the likely recommencement of hostilities in the future – something that was done before (after the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements), as Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande have admitted. Besides, that this is not a novel tactic, and a disingenuous one to boot, should be evident, as Immanuel Kant knew in the 18th century already, when he wrote his famous essay on the conditions for ‘perpetual peace,’ on which I have elaborated before. I am thinking of a specific condition stated in this essay, in the very first of the ‘preliminary articles,’ which reads: ‘No treaty of peace shall be regarded as valid, if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.’ 

Kant’s elaboration on this article shows that he was not sufficiently shortsighted to confuse peace with ‘a mere truce, a mere suspension of hostilities’ – possibly to gain valuable time for strengthening one’s military to recover after relinquishing some of their capabilities in battle. The article is therefore clearly aimed at preventing any ‘mental reservation’ of demands to be used as casus belli to be revitalised on a more auspicious occasion in the future. This is essentially what was done before, as acknowledged by Merkel and Hollande in the RT article linked above, which reported that ‘…former German chancellor Angela Merkel [who] described the Minsk accords in December [2014/2015] as ‘an attempt to give Ukraine time’ to build up its armed forces.’ 

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GEN (RET) LLOYD AUSTIN’S TROUBLING LEGACY OF DEI, COVID, LOSING WARS, AND WAR PROFITEERING

GEN (Retired) Lloyd Austin will be replaced as SECDEF once the new administration’s pick is confirmed. He will finish nearly 50 years of service to our country. He achieved many firsts – first Black theater commander during war and the first Black SECDEF among other firsts. He does however, leave a troubling legacy as both an Army general and SECDEF.

DEI

Austin accelerated the spread of DEI within the US military as SECDEF. As a Black SECDEF warning about extremism and lack of opportunity for minorities, he is to be both commended for his path from West Point and chided as a supreme hypocrite.

The Army is like most other branches of the military where officers typically need to branch into a combat specialty and move up the ranks commanding combat units to reach general officer and high commands. Austin graduated from West Point in 1975 and chose the correct branch – infantry. He commanded at all levels from company grade to field grade to general officer. Examining nothing else in his career, it would seem that he chose the correct path to be a general…and he indeed attained the rank of four-star general.

In the DEI debate, proponents point out the lack of equity in race of general officers. The percentage of Black generals is lower than the percent of Blacks in West Point’s classes. The data for each class is difficult to obtain, but the author is familiar with the demographics of his own 1996 West Point year group. A mere 3 Black males in the West Point Class joined the 180 or so cadets that branched Infantry. Two left before 10 years’ service and the last left as a LTC. Minorities have to be willing to branch the correct branches AND remain in the military if they wish to compete for general officer rank later on in their career. So, in this sense, Austin chose the harder combat arms branch and was later rewarded for it.

In his last speech as SECDEF at West Point in December 2024 he talked about the difficulties facing minorities in today’s military.

“So look, if I get a little fired up about this, it’s just because this isn’t 1950. It isn’t 1948. It is 2024. And we need each and every qualified citizen who steps up to wear the cloth of our nation. And any military that turns away tough, talented patriots—women or men—is just making itself weaker and smaller. So enough already.”1

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China Rapidly Builds Up Weapons And Psychological Warfare Operations

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is undertaking an unprecedented military buildup aimed at challenging America and its allies, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. And, like Nazi Germany’s buildup in the 1930s, the militarization program ordered by the Chinese Communist Party isn’t simply a great power buildup — it’s a weapon in service of a deadly ideology.

The 2024 Department of Defense China Military Power Report and recent analysis by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times reveal this buildup as part of a broader strategy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to position itself as a global superpower. Meanwhile, the U.S., having spent $5.4 trillion on the global war on terror and attendant, futile nation-building, has left itself strategically vulnerable by diverting critical resources while underestimating the threat from China.

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Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a covert plan proposed in 1962 by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The operation was intended to create a series of false-flag events to justify military intervention in Cuba. It was conceived during a period of heightened tension between the United States and Cuba, following the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s rise to power. The primary goal of Operation Northwoods was to fabricate acts of terrorism and aggression that could be attributed to the Cuban government, thereby providing the U.S. government with a pretext for invading the island and ousting Castro.

The plan included various possible scenarios, such as staging attacks on American military installations in Guantanamo Bay, sinking boats carrying Cuban refugees, and orchestrating fake hijackings of civilian airliners. These incidents were to be designed in such a way that they would appear to be carried out by Cuban operatives. The hope was that these provocations would lead the American public and international community to support military action against Cuba. The operation’s proposals went as far as considering the possible loss of American lives, which would have been falsely blamed on the Cuban government to rally support for intervention.

Operation Northwoods was never approved, and President John F. Kennedy ultimately rejected the plan. The proposal was part of a broader effort by the U.S. government during the Cold War to contain the spread of communism, particularly in Latin America. This rejection is often viewed as a critical moment in Kennedy’s presidency, demonstrating his reluctance to escalate military conflict in Cuba, especially in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year.

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Finnish Commandos Seize Russia-Linked Ship After Undersea Cable Cut

Finland has seized the ship which is being accused of cutting of an undersea cable connecting electricity to Estonia, allegedly on behalf of Russia, given that the vessel was carrying Russian oil. Finnish authorities and Western officials have described the damage to the Estlink 2 electricity cable as the result of “aggravated criminal mischief”.

EU officials have characterized the incident as part of Russia’s hybrid warfare against NATO, with a European Commission statement describing the cable severing as “the latest in a series of suspected attacks on critical infrastructure.”

The vessel in question was observed traversing the same area where the cable damage occurred near in time to the incident. Four additional telecom cables were disrupted – one linking Finland and Germany and three between Finland and Estonia.

Finland’s coast guard boarded the suspect vessel on Thursday:

Finnish police said in a statement that the coastguard crew boarded an oil tanker in Finnish waters early on Thursday. Authorities named the vessel as the Eagle S, and said it was registered in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

When it was detained, the ship was sailing from Russia’s Saint Petersburg to Port Said in Egypt, according to online marine tracking website, MarineTraffic.

According to MarineTraffic, the ship was owned by United Arab Emirates-based vessel management company, Caravella.

The European Commission in its statement additionally accused the Eagle S ship of being part of Russia’s energy sanctions-busting ‘shadow fleet’.

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Leaked files show secret UK Syria project boosted Jolani’s HTS 

In the name of building a “moderate opposition,” London established a social service and media network in areas controlled by HTS, benefitting the group it branded as a dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate.

Leaked British intelligence files reviewed by The Grayzone raise grave questions about whether London has aided the rise of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group which was proscribed by Western governments until it seized power in Syria this December. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has stated it is “too early” to remove HTS from Britain’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations. When the group was added in 2017, its entry stated it should be considered among “alternative names” for Al Qaeda. It was therefore illegal for British government officials to meet with HTS representatives while its status endured.

However, on December 16, British diplomats including Ann Snow, London’s special representative for Syria, convened a summit with Jolani and other HTS leaders in Damascus.

That same day, The Times of London granted Jolani a sympathetic interview, during which he called for an end to Western sanctions on the country, promising Syria would not be a “launchpad for attacks on Israel” under his watch. This followed a fawning BBC profile intended to highlight Jolani’s “rebranding” of HTS. The stage now appears set for HTS’ proscription to be rescinded, and London to recognize the group as legitimate rulers of post-Assad Syria. 

The UK’s embrace of HTS represents the culmination of a long and secretive process which began when the group’s leadership was still closely aligned with Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat Al Nusra, and even the Islamic State. While British intelligence once embarked on a campaign to undermine HTS in opposition-controlled areas of Syria, while cultivating supposedly “moderate” factions, leaked files reviewed by The Grayzone reveal the clandestine efforts wound up strengthening Jolani’s organization, helping pave its path to power. More troublingly, these documents suggest that, contrary to mainstream accounts of the group’s split from Al Qaeda, the pair remain close collaborators in Syria.

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Putin Reveals Biden Offered To Postpone Ukraine’s NATO Entry As Compromise 

Russian President Vladimir Putin fielded questions from journalists Thursday at the conclusion of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council meeting held outside St. Petersburg. The Russian-led EEU economic bloc includes member states Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Among the more interesting moments was when Putin revealed what President Biden previously offered him in order to avert the Ukraine conflict, regarding the question of Kiev’s NATO membership.

The comments came in the context of a question over Trump’s reported peace plan and the idea of freezing the front lines. Putin described that such a plan is nothing new, and added the following per state media translation:

“I know that the current President Biden spoke about this, it’s no secret, back in 2021. He proposed exactly this to me – to delay Ukraine’s admission into NATO by 10-15 years, because [Kiev] is not ready yet,” Putin said, referring to the midsummer meeting he had with the US leader in Switzerland.

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