Tag: perpetual war

What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It?

As Ukraine careens toward a political and military disaster, it is time to ask why did the CIA fail to predict this. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “How do you know the CIA did not?” Fair question. I no longer have access to classified information, but I can read the public statements of DOD and State Department officials as well as remarks by various members of Congress. At no time during the past two years — since the start of the Special Military Operation — have we heard a single discouraging word from anyone with access to CIA briefings on Ukraine’s military prospects suggesting the West embarked on a fool’s errand in trying to destroy Russia.

On the eve of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the CIA should have provided answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the capability and condition of the Russian armed forces?
  2. What is Russia’s capability to withstand Western economic sanctions?
  3. What are the conditions that must exist that will force President Putin from office?

Here is what we know for certain. Despite repeated entreaties from Vladimir Putin to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to provide assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO, the West told Putin to screw off and continued building up Ukraine’s military. The U.S. and its NATO allies believed that Russia’s military was weak and ineffective. Western leaders also believed that Russia’s economy was vulnerable to Western economic sanctions and that an economic collapse in Russia would catapult Putin from power.

The Western plan was simple, audacious and delusional — i.e., using Ukraine as a military proxy, defeat Russia and humiliate Vladimir Putin; apply Western economic sanctions that would devastate the Russian economy and further erode support for Putin; break up the Russia Republic into 41 new countries. Sounds crazy, but take a look at what Angel Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine in April 2023:

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

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US Deploys Anti-Drone Laser Systems in the Middle East to Field Test Prototypes

The Department of Defense has deployed four laser systems designed to intercept drones and rockets in the Middle East. The Pentagon has been developing a laser-style interceptor to reduce the cost of shooting down UAVs and rockets. 

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus announced the new deployment of Directed Energy Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) prototypes to the Middle East. The Army developed the weapons system in coordination with RTX, formerly Raytheon. The former employer of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, RTX, has received over $100 million to develop the platform. 

DE M-SHORAD, according to RTX, is a 50-kilowatt vehicle-mounted laser designed to intercept drones, missiles, and rockets at short range. RTX and the Pentagon believe laser systems will be a cheaper alternative for downing cheap drones and rockets. 

The four interceptors deployed to the Middle East are mounted on Stryker armored vehicles. The 2024 Pentagon funding bill authorized nearly $700 million in spending on the development and procurement of DE M-SHORAD systems. 

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The Stories You’re Not Hearing About the Russo-Ukrainian War…

Several, seemingly small events in the Russo-Ukrainian War went largely unnoticed in western media recently. But each of them, in their own way, may be significant.

The Fall of Avdiivka

On February 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia invaded his country two years ago. It was the first time he had released a number of dead. He wouldn’t provide the number of wounded.

On February 4, he said, “About 26% of the national territory is still under occupation,” before adding that “the Russian army cannot make much progress. We have stopped them.”

Both statements are absurd. As The New York Times remarks on Zelensky’s battlefield accounting, “It differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials, who, this past summer, put the losses much higher, saying that close to 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 had been wounded.”

The 31,000 number may be closer to the number of dead and wounded in the past several disastrous weeks than in the past two years. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently said that over 383,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded since the war began. Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, says that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. A number of 400,000-500,000 is consistent with internal Ukrainian communications and reports from the battlefield that 20,000 soldiers a month would be necessary to replace the dead and wounded. That number also accords with the 450,000-500,000 number Zelensky has requested in a new mobilization.

Being absurd was appropriate when Zelensky was a comedian; it may have made Ukrainians laugh. But being absurd when Zelensky is president is not appropriate; it may make more Ukrainians die.

The second statement, that Russia is incapable of further significant advances because the Ukrainian Armed Forces has stopped them is no less absurd. Less than two weeks after making the statement, on February 17, after exhausting every capability it had, the Ukrainian Armed Forces retreated in disarray from the heavily fortified town of Avdiivka as it fell to the Russians. That was a very significant advance. Taking Avdiivka is not just a symbolic victory, as reported in the West, but a strategic victory that could open the door to the Donbas for Russian forces, allowing Russia to solidify the borders of its newly annexed territories.

Following the retreat from Avdiivka, Ukrainian statements about stopping Russia retreated one more step, now claiming that Russia won’t be able to advance. General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military-intelligence chief, acknowledged that the loss of Avdiivka was tough, but insisted that Russia has its problems too, and that “they don’t have the strength” to advance significantly and capture all of the Donbas.

American officials echoed Budanov’s assessment, saying that “Russian gains in eastern Ukraine will not necessarily lead to any collapse of Ukrainian lines and that Moscow is unlikely to be able to follow up with another major offensive.”

Kiev said that their armed forces had withdrawn from Avdiivka and established new defensive lines around Lastochkyne and other nearby villages. But on February 26, Lastochkyne fell, and Ukrainian troops retreated to villages further west.

Western officials now say that Russia is “attacking in strength along four parallel axes in the northeast” and that they are “driving forward around Lyman and Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region.” Newsweek says there are reports that Russian troops have now “advanced west of the village of Lastochkyne.” And military spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy now says that Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from Stepove and Severne, two villages near Avdiivka and north of Lastochkyne.

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UN Report Finds Palestinians Sexually Abused and Beaten in Israeli Detention

A document compiled by the UN Palestinian agency (UNRWA) found rampant abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention facilities. The detainees report frequent beatings, sexual abuse, and even the deaths of prisoners. Thousands of Palestinians have been rounded by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza over the past four months. 

The New York Times viewed a UNRWA report that documents pervasive abuse in Israeli detention camps. “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month,” the outlet wrote. “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”

One prisoner reported he was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine,” adding that “guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.” 

The draft document describes “a range of ill-treatment that Gazans of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds have reported facing in makeshift detention facilities in Israel.” Such treatment, the report concluded, “was used to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish.”

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So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

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On Hypocrisy and Genocide – How Gaza Has Exposed the West Like Never Before

The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West.

As soon as the Israeli war began, following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its western allies supposedly held dear was suddenly dropped. Western leaders rushed to Israel, one after the other, offering military, political and intelligence support – along with a blank check to rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals to torment the Palestinians.

The likes of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, went as far as joining Israel’s first war council meeting, so that he could take part in the discussion which directly resulted in the Gaza genocide.

“I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew,” he said on October 12. The interpretation of these words is disturbing, no matter how it is spun, but it also ultimately means that Blinken has lost all credibility as an American, as a politician or even as a fair-minded human being.

His boss, President Joe Biden, as if in an infinite loop, has been, for years, repeating that “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist”. Indeed, he has lived up to his maxim, declaring, time and again, “I am a Zionist”. Indeed, he is.

Like many other US and western officials and politicians, the US President abandoned international and humanitarian laws altogether, even the law of his own country. The Leahy Law “prohibits the US Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity.” Instead, he, like Blinken, subscribed to tribal affiliation and ideological notions, which simply added fuel to the fire.

Though “protected persons” under international law, Palestinians seem dispensable, in fact, irrelevant to the point that their collective death appears critical for Israel to regain its ‘deterrence’, and to protect itself, in the words of Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, against the “human animals” of Gaza.

If there is a stronger word than hypocrisy, one would have used it. But, for now, it would have to suffice.

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Patriot Games: The Ideologies of American Warmongers

Just how stupid do they think we are?

The balance of evidence provided by the public statements of senior Biden administration officials would suggest, very.

Take the following vignette from US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland’s speech on February 22nd in Washington:

…I visited a center in Kyiv, that the U.S. supports, which helps Ukrainian children that have been displaced by the war. There I met a young boy from Kharkiv, with bright eyes and a sweet smile, who had just lost his home to Putin’s barbarity.

As part of a therapy session, he and a handful of other kids his age were making little knit dolls out of yellow and blue yarn.

Before leaving I asked him if I could keep one.

“Da,” he said.

I then asked what the doll’s name was.

“Patriot,” he answered.

It was quiet [sic] a moment – a child making a doll, who just lost his home, thinking about patriotism.

That’s what war brings. To Ukraine and around the world.

I now keep Patriot on my desk as a reminder that the support that the United States provides is not abstract. It’s often the difference between life and death for Ukrainians on the front lines of this fight for Ukraine, and for the future of the free world.”

Walter Lippmann’s observation that “we must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace” applies here with full force.

Within this sickly sweet tale of Nuland and her doll are the usual hypocrisies, after all, at no point should we expect to hear from her or any other administration official about children (11,500 as of early February according to Haaretz) with “bright eyes and  sweet smiles” starved, crushed or blown to bits by American-made ordnance in Gaza.

How do figures such as Nuland and her superiors, including Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jeff Zients justify an approach to the world that privileges, above all, violence?

To get to the bottom of why things are the way they are we need to think about ideology. And the first thing that needs to be said is that the two leading foreign policy ideologies, neoconservatism and liberal internationalism, are in many respects alien to the American tradition. These ideologies serve as a cover (Hannah Arendt defined ideology as “the knowledgeable dismissal of what is visible”) and are themselves a root cause of the current madness.

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WORTHY VS. UNWORTHY VICTIMS: STUDY REVEALS MEDIA’S SELECTIVE COVERAGE OF NAVALNY AND LIRA

Anew MintPress News study of media coverage of the deaths of American journalist and commentator Gonzalo Lira and Russian political leader Alexey Navalny has found that the establishment U.S. press overwhelmingly ignored the former and focussed on the latter. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News and CNN collectively ran 731 segments on Navalny between February 16 and February 22, compared to just one on Lira since his death on January 12, perhaps because one was a Western-backed figure who died at the hands of an official enemy state, while the other was a pro-Russian voice who met their end at the hands of the Ukrainian government.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK COVERAGE VS RADIO SILENCE

MintPress conducted a quantitative analysis of the media coverage of two political figures who recently died in prison: Alexey Navalny and Gonzalo Lira. Both were controversial characters and critics of the governments that imprisoned them. Both died under suspicious circumstances (their families both maintain they were effectively murdered). And both died in the past six weeks, Navalny in February and Lira in January. A crucial difference in their stories, however, is that Navalny perished in an Arctic penal colony after being arrested in Russia (an enemy state), while Lira’s life ended in a Ukrainian prison, abandoned by the pro-Kiev government in Washington, D.C.

The study compared the coverage of Navalny and Lira’s death in five leading outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News, and CNN. These outlets were chosen for their reach and influence and, together, could be said to reasonably represent the corporate media spectrum as a whole. The data was compiled using the Dow Jones Factiva news database and searches on the websites of the news organizations. This study takes no position on the matter of Navalny, Lira, or the Russia-Ukraine war.

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Is Nato heading for nuclear war? 

On Monday, Europe crossed yet another red line in its ever-escalating, no-longer-so-proxy war against Russia. In a hastily arranged meeting of European leaders in Paris — a response to significant Russian breakthroughs on the Ukrainian frontline over the past few weeks — Emmanuel Macron shattered one of the few taboos left in Western circles by saying that sending Nato troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. “We must do everything necessary to prevent Russia from winning the war,” he declared, adding that France could even take such action without the consent of other EU members because “each country is sovereign and its armed forces are sovereign”.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with Nato allies, whom the French president hadn’t even bothered to warn beforehand. This was probably designed to maximise the statement’s impact: Macron is prone to attention-grabbing pronouncements that are never actually acted upon, often as a way of deflecting attention away from domestic problems.

This time, though, Macron overplayed his hand. His statement was so obviously unhinged that it fuelled a sizeable backlash in France, where half of the population opposes providing more aid to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen accused Macron of playing with the lives of French children, while radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it “madness”. Outside of France, meanwhile, practically all Nato members rebutted Macron’s suggestion and ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine, while Putin himself yesterday warned such a move could spark a major escalation.

But how long will Nato leaders maintain this stance? After all, Macron is right about one thing: Nato countries have crossed virtually all the red lines they had given themselves at the start of the conflict. “Many people who say ‘Never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘Never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles’ two years ago,” he said. In this sense, the whole troops-on-the-ground debate is little more than a distraction from the fact that we are, of course, already engaged in a de facto war against Russia — troops on the ground or not. Besides, it’s an open secret that Western special forces are already present in Ukraine — including British troops.

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