Tag: perpetual war

The Biden-Schumer Plan To Kill More Ukrainians

President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and US taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.

The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.

$61 billion is not nothing. This worse-than-useless outlay would exceed the combined budgets of the U.S. Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program.

Almost exactly 10 years ago this month, Biden did much to put Ukraine on the path to disaster. This is well known to those who have looked carefully at the facts but is kept hidden from view by the White House, the Senate Democrats, and the mainstream media that back Biden. I have previously provided a detailed chronology, with hyperlinks, here.

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush, Sr. and his German counterpart Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. When the Soviet Union disbanded in December 1991, with Russia as the successor state, American leaders decided to renege.

President Bill Clinton began NATO expansion over the vociferous opposition of top diplomats like George Kennan and the opposition of his own Secretary of Defense, William Perry. In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski upped the ante, with a plan for NATO to expand all the way to Ukraine. He famously wrote that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power.

Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear that NATO expansion to Ukraine is understandably the reddest of Russian redlines. In 2007, President Vladmir Putin stated that NATO enlargement to that date was a cheat on the 1990 promise, and that it must go no further. Despite these clear warnings, including by his own diplomats, George W. Bush Jr. committed in 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea.

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How the CIA destabilises the world

There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.

As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.

It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.

When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.

In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilisation, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”

The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy.

That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.

In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.

In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.

If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.

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Think the US exit from Afghanistan was bad? Look what’s brewing in the Pacific

You think America’s tail-between-its-legs departure from Afghanistan was bad? Something even worse is coming in the Pacific, albeit more quietly.

U.S. defenses in the Asia-Pacific center on a defense line running from Japan to Philippines to Taiwan and on to Borneo. The so-called First Island Chain.

Try defending against China along the first island chain without a secure “rear area” in the Central Pacific. And suppose it’s the Chinese in the rear.

American control of the Central Pacific depends on three treaties – known as Compacts of Free Association (COFA) – with three nations: Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and Republic of Marshall Islands. These nations and their huge maritime territory comprise most of an “east-west corridor” from Hawaii to the western edge of the Pacific that is essential for U.S. control and military operations in the region.

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Israel killing Gaza civilians in strikes with no military objective: report

Israeli strikes that killed dozens of civilians in Gaza had no legitimate military objectives, an investigation by Amnesty International has found.

Amnesty’s report details how 95 civilians, including 42 children, were killed across four separate strikes — three in December and one in January — in Rafah. Israel had previously designated the southern border city as a safe zone, causing around 1.5 million Palestinians to seek shelter there.

As part of the investigation, Amnesty went to the sites of the strikes, received witness testimony, and analysed satellite imagery in order to determine whether the strikes lawful.

It also analysed the Israel’s war diary published by the military, finding no reference to the strikes.

Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns Erika Guevara-Rosas said the strikes killed whole families who sought refuge from Israel’s military campaign.

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Ukraine Using Thousands Of Networked Microphones To Track Russian Drones

Ukraine is using a network made up of thousands of acoustic sensors across the country to help detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defenses in advance, and also dispatch ad hoc drone hunting teams to shoot them down. This is according to the U.S. Air Force’s top officer in Europe who also said the U.S. military is now looking to test this capability to see if it might help meet its own demands for additional ways to persistently monitor for, and engag,e drone threats.

Gen. James Hecker, head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), as well as Air Forces Africa (AFAFRICA) and NATO’s Allied Air Command, provided the details about Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network and related air and missile defense issues at a press roundtable that The War Zone and other outlets attended earlier today. This gathering took place on the sidelines of this year’s Air & Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium, which opened today.

“At the unclassified level, Ukraine’s done some pretty sophisticated things to get after [a] persistent ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]” picture of “low altitude objects,” Hecker explained. This now includes an acoustic sensor system that makes use of microphones designed to pick up and amplify ambient noise, he added.

“Think if you have a series of sensors, think of your cell phone, okay, with power to it, so it doesn’t die, right? And then you put a microphone to kind of make the acoustics louder of one-way UAVs that are going overhead,” Hecker explained. “And you have … 6,000 of these things all over the country. They’ve been successful in being able to pick up the one-way UAVs like Shahed 136s and those kinds of things.”

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Israel deploys new military AI in Gaza war

The army has hinted at what the new tech is being used for, with spokesman Daniel Hagari saying last month that Israel’s forces were operating “above and underground simultaneously”.

A senior defence official told AFP the tech was destroying enemy drones and mapping Hamas’s vast tunnel network in Gaza.

New defence technologies including artificial intelligence-powered gunsights and robotic drones form a bright spot in an otherwise dire period for Israel’s tech industry.

The sector accounted for 18 percent of GDP in 2022, but the war in Gaza has wreaked havoc with an estimated eight percent of its workforce called up to fight.

“In general the war in Gaza presents threats, but also opportunities to test emerging technologies in the field,” said Avi Hasson, chief executive of Startup Nation Central, an Israeli tech incubator.

“Both on the battlefield and in the hospitals there are technologies that have been used in this war that have not been used in the past.”

But the rising civilian death toll shows that much greater oversight is needed over the use of new forms of defence tech, Mary Wareham, an arms expert at Human Rights Watch, told AFP.

“Now we’re facing the worst possible situation of death and suffering that we’re seeing today –- some of that is being brought about by the new tech,” she said.

More than 150 countries in December backed a UN resolution identifying “serious challenges and concerns” in new military tech, including “artificial intelligence and autonomy in weapons systems.”

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“They brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture”: IDF torture of Palestinian prisoners is turned into entertainment for Israeli viewers

The Israeli army introduced groups of Israeli civilians into detention centres and prisons holding Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip, permitting the civilians to witness torture crimes against the detainees, with many allowed to film them on their own phones.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor received shocking testimonies from recently released Palestinian prisoners and detainees, in which they reported that the Israeli army invited a number of Israeli civilians during their interrogation sessions to witness torture and inhumane treatment, to which they were deliberately subjected in the presence of the civilians.

Arrested during ground incursions by Israeli army forces into the Strip, the prisoners and detainees were held for varying periods of time inside two detention centres: one located in the Zikim area on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, and another affiliated with the Naqab prison in southern Israel.

The released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the 7 October attack on Israeli towns on Gaza Strip borders.

According to testimony received by Euro-Med Monitor, groups of ten to twenty Israeli civilians at a time were permitted to watch and laughingly film Palestinian prisoners and detainees in their underwear while Israeli army soldiers subjected them to physical abuse, including beating them with metal batons, electric sticks, and pouring hot water on their heads. The detainees were also verbally abused.

This is the first time that these illegal practices have come to the attention of Euro-Med Monitor. It adds a new crime to the list of those committed by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and specifically against prisoners and detainees who are subjected to cruel torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and denials of a fair trial, among other atrocities.

Palestinian Omar Abu Mudallala, 43, told the Euro-Med Monitor team: “I was arrested at the checkpoint set up near the Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from the central region, as part of the Israeli random arrest campaigns. I was subjected to all types of torture and abuse for approximately 52 days,” pointing out that Israeli soldiers “brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture.”

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Let Them Eat Dirt

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire.

Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation.

When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed. 

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza. 

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.” 

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA, after the ruling, of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated.

Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective. 

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DISGUSTING: US Senate Advances $95 Billion Aid Package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan in Rare Super Bowl Sunday Vote — Here are the 18 Republicans Who Voted with Democrats

In an unusual session held on Super Bowl Sunday, the US Senate voted to move forward a substantial $95 billion aid package that will support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, with no southern border security provisions. The vote garnered support from RINOs, with a final tally of 67-27.

The vote came in response to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.)’s steadfast refusal to expedite voting on the bill, which he vehemently criticized as “rotten” and detrimental to national interests.

Senator Paul, expressing his staunch opposition, declared he would not allow the bill to pass immediately, emphasizing his concerns over prioritizing foreign aid over domestic issues.

According to the Hill, Schumer offered Republicans the chance to vote on amendments in exchange for expediting the legislative process.

“By a vote of 67-27, The Senate invoked cloture on Murray substitute amendment 1388 to H.R.815, legislative vehicle for supplemental appropriations,” the Senate Press Gallery wrote on X.

Sixty-seven senators voted in favor of war funding, while 27 senators opposed the expenditure, all of whom were Republicans.

On Super Bowl Sunday, the following 18 Republican senators supported the Ukraine war funding:

  • Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)
  • Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
  • Susan Collins (R-ME)
  • John Cornyn (R-TX)
  • Joni Ernst (R-IA)
  • Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
  • John Kennedy (R-LA)
  • Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
  • Jerry Moran (R-KS)
  • Markwayne Mullin (R-OK)
  • Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
  • Mitt Romney (R-UT)
  • Mike Rounds (R-SD)
  • Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
  • John Thune (R-SD)
  • Thom Tillis (R-NC)
  • Roger Wicker (R-MS)
  • Todd Young (R-IN)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) acknowledged the unusual scheduling.

“I can’t remember the last time the Senate was in session on Super Bowl Sunday, but as I’ve said all week long, we’re going to keep working on this bill until the job is done,” Schumer said.

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