Tag: perpetual war

Western press fetishizes Ukrainian amputees as limb loss epidemic grows

With Ukrainian forces reportedly suffering a level of amputations reminiscent of WWI, a New York Times proxy war propagandist is spinning amputees as sex symbols and painting their gruesome injuries as “magical.”

After 18 months of devastating proxy warfare, the scale of the depletion of the Ukrainian military is so extensive that even mainstream sources have been forced to concede the cruel reality. On August 1, The Wall Street Journal reported that “between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians” have “lost one or more limbs since the start of the war.” What’s more, the outlet notes, “the actual figure could be higher” because “it takes time to register patients after they undergo the procedure.”

By comparison, around 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons underwent amputations during the entire four-year span of the First World War. The publication quotes the head of a group of former military surgeons who train Ukrainian military medics who maintained that “Western military surgeons haven’t seen injuries on this scale since World War II.”

While the implications of the Journal’s report have largely been studiously ignored by Western media, at least one mainstream journalist has displayed a keen interest in Kiev’s amputees. The New York Times’ columnist and ardent liberal interventionist Nicholas Kristof practically fetishized the mass disfigurement of Ukrainian combat veterans in the name of Washington’s war du jour. 

In a July 8 op-ed titled “They’re Ready to Fight Again, on Artificial Legs,” Kristof insisted that rather than resenting being used as cannon fodder, Ukraine’s newly-disabled veterans “carry their stumps with pride.”

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American Neo-Nazi Training Forces in Maine to Fight for Ukraine

Christopher Pohlhaus, a former Marine and prominent Neo-Nazi – has purchased land in Maine to train soldiers to fight for Ukraine. He sees the war against Russia as a unique chance to fight alongside the Azov Battalion and defend a nearly “all-white nation.”

Last year, Pohlhaus bought at least ten acres of land in Springfield, Maine. Although he claims he owns over 100 acres. Pohlhaus has discussed his ambitious plans for his Maine training grounds on social media. In a Telegram channel, he posted, “There will likely not be another chance in my lifetime to fight alongside other [National Socialist] men against a multi-ethnic invading empire to defend an almost all white nation.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Pohlhaus confirmed he hoped his Blood Tribe would join the Azov Battalion and C14 – prominent Ukrainian Neo-Nazi militias – in the fight against Russia. Scott Horton, Director of the Libertarian Insititute, Tweeted an article about the land in Maine and asked, “They going to fight with the Azov Battalion and C14 on the eastern front?” Pohlhaus – nicknamed “The Hammer” – responded directly to Horton, saying, “Yes, actually.” 

It is unclear how far the Blood Tribe fighters have progressed in their training. One reporter visited the site and said no group members were present. Local officials report Pohlhaus has not begun applying for permits to build structures on his property. Pohlhaus said he has purchased a sawmill and plans to build cabins for his soldiers. 

Since civil war broke out in Ukraine after a coup in 2014, Neo-Nazis have flocked to the country to fight for Kiev. Ukrainian Neo-Nazis have held important positions in government, and national socialist militias have been a crucial part of Kiev’s war machine. 

Early in the war, thousands of Neo-Nazis arrived in Ukraine to fight for a “shared vision for an ultranationalist ethno-state.” While Washington has attempted to dismiss the role of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine as Russian propaganda, the New York Times admitted that Western journalists were asking Ukrainian troops to remove Neo-Nazi symbols before taking photos of them. 

Additionally, the Russian Volunteer Corps – a militia aligned with Kiev – used American weapons to carry out attacks inside Russia. The fighters in the group openly wear Nazi symbols, such as the Black Sun. 

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America’s top 5 weapons contractors made $196B in 2022

American weapons makers continue to dominate the global arms industry, with four U.S.-based companies in the world’s top five military contractors, according to a new Defense News ranking of the top 100 defense firms.

In 2022, America’s top five weapons contractors made $196 billion in military-related revenue, according to Defense News. Lockheed Martin dominated all other defense-focused companies, with total military revenue of roughly $63 billion last year. RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, was a distant second, earning roughly $40 billion in revenue in 2022.

The same five American “prime” contractors have long dominated lists of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics have remained in the top seven of the Defense News ranking since it began in 2000.

Notably, several Chinese firms have expanded their military operations in recent years as tensions have risen between the U.S. and China. Four Chinese companies are now in the top 20, including one — the Aviation Industry Corporation of China — that became the world’s fourth largest military contractor last year. 

The top 5 for 2022 are as follows: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Aviation Industry Corporation, and Boeing.

The U.S., for its part, had 10 companies in the top 20. Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom each had at least one of the world’s 20 biggest military firms last year.

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SECRET PAKISTAN CABLE DOCUMENTS U.S. PRESSURE TO REMOVE IMRAN KHAN

THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept.

The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan’s party. The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination.

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A US soldier may have falsely reported a US raid in Afghanistan while attempting to secure the adoption of a baby he found in the rubble

The Afghan villager was afraid the American soldiers might come. And one cool night in fall, as his children lay asleep, helicopters roared overhead.

At the first sound of gunshots, he yelled for his wife and 10 children to take cover. His young daughter grabbed her sleeping infant sister off the bed. Their mud compound exploded, and a blast sent a huge shock through the home.

“My small sister fell away from my arms,” the girl, now a teenager, whispered, so quietly she could barely be heard above the breeze. “The wind blew her out of my hands.”

Today, what exactly happened that night is at the center of a bitter international custody dispute over an orphaned baby found amid the rubble. The high-profile legal battle pits an Afghan family against an American one, and has drawn responses from the White House and the Taliban.

The Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross determined that the baby belonged to this Afghan villager. Friends and family say he was a farmer, not a militant. The Red Cross found surviving relatives and united her with them.

However, a US Marine attorney, Maj. Joshua Mast, believed he should get the girl instead. He insists that the child is the stateless orphan of foreign fighters who were living in an Al Qaeda compound, and convinced a rural Virginia judge to grant him an adoption from 7,000 miles away.

Were it not for this little girl, now 4 years old, the events that began on the night of September 5, 2019, in this remote, impoverished region might have remained locked away among clandestine stories of the thousands of raids the American and Afghan militaries carried out during the long war.

But once-secret documents, now filed in court records, reveal details that thrust this raid into an ongoing controversy over who the military killed when they blew down walls in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, if those people were fighters or civilians, and whether the military ever tried to find out.

The Mast family has submitted a summary of the raid in a federal court case, an account Mast helped create after he said he “personally read every page of the 150+ classified documents” on the operation. The summary describes how as many as six enemy fighters were killed and possibly one civilian. The only child the document mentions is the injured baby.

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Obama’s real legacy makes him one of the worst US presidents of all time.

You have to give credit to Obama, he comes across as a genuinely honest guy who’s a great speaker and who has tons of charisma, almost enough to convince you that his 8 years in office were a success and not huge failure. Mainstream media is doing all it can to hype and brainwash people about Obama’s legacy, even years after he left office, while completely whitewashing all of his massive failures both domestic and abroad.

The biggest foreign international crime Barack Obama, nobel peace prize laureate, was responsible for was of course Libya. The US administration headed by Clinton and Obama, backed by NATO , the UK, France and the Gulf states, destroyed Libya and toppled its regime. This was mainly because Obama had no plans as to what to do after Gaddafi was removed from office. He and his then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, thought that just by bombing Libya and destroying the Gaddafi regime, they will make the world a better place. They were wrong, and now Libyans the middle east and countries in south of Europe are having to deal with the consequences. As a result of Obama’s actions, Libya is now a failed state, home to terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, where African slaves ares sold in the streets while an ongoing civil war has ruined the country and claimed the lives of tens of thousnads of Libyans.

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Profiteers of Armageddon

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project.

The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of “The Day After” about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

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20,000-50,000 Ukrainians Have Lost Limbs Since Russia Invaded

Between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have lost one or more limbs since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The figure is based on estimates made by prosthetics firms, doctors, and charities. The number could be higher as it takes time to register amputees after they undergo surgery, and fighting has intensified since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June.

The higher-end estimate of 50,000 came from the German prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock, which cited data from the government and medical partners. The estimate of 20,000 was based on data from the Kyiv-based charity Health of the Ukrainian People ICF. The charity estimates the number of serious injuries in the war is at 200,000 and says about 10% of serious injuries typically require amputations.

The number of Ukrainian amputations puts the war on the scale of World War I. According to the report, some 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the four-year war. Less than 2,000 Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century have had amputations.

Ukraine has kept its casualty rates a secret throughout the war for propaganda purposes, but the staggering number of Ukrainians who lost limbs gives an idea of the human cost of the war.

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When Our Weapons Go Missing

Fears of loose weapons in Ukraine have become reality: Once American weapons arrive, Ukrainian criminals steal them. If U.S. arms transfer policies are not changed, Washington will inevitably accidentally arm groups that actively want to harm the United States.

In June, two separate Department of Defense inspector general reports revealed poor monitoring when U.S. weapons are transferred to Ukraine. Challenges in Ukraine’s war zone have made it nearly impossible to track the weapons.

The first report found that the personnel responsible for ensuring accountability were given no “training or guidance.” It concluded that the Pentagon does “not have accountability controls sufficient enough to provide reasonable assurance that its inventory of defense items transferred to [Ukraine] via the air hub in Jasionka was accurate or complete.”

The second report discovered that the Office of Defense Cooperation–Kyiv was unable to monitor how American military equipment was put to use. Indeed, monitors could not “visit areas where equipment provided to Ukraine was being used or stored.”

Such problems are not unique to Ukraine, but the Biden administration has been open to accepting the possibility of weapons dispersion when it comes to Ukraine’s war. Yet discounting these perils comes with four long-term security risks.

First, larger weapons systems have a high value on the black arms market. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban has been able to continue funding itself through its already existing smuggling networks by selling U.S. weapons left behind in the withdrawal. These weapons are now used in attacks in Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Gaza Strip.

Even before the war, Ukraine had one of the largest illegally trafficked arms markets in Europe, according to the 2021 Global Organized Crime Index. This has only intensified since the Russian invasion. For example, in August 2022 a criminal organization in Ukraine stole and intended to sell 60 rifles and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

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Joe Biden to ask Congress to fund Taiwan arms via Ukraine budget

The White House will ask Congress to fund arms for Taiwan as part of a supplemental budget request for Ukraine, in an effort to speed up the supply of weapons to the country amid the rising threat from China. The Office of Management and Budget will include funding for Taiwan in the supplemental request as part of an effort to accelerate the provision of weapons, according to two people familiar with the plan. If passed by Congress, Taiwan would get arms through a US taxpayer-funded system known as “foreign military financing” for the first time. The White House is expected to submit the request this month. The request comes on the heels of a White House announcement that the US would supply Taiwan with $345mn in weapons from stockpiles for the first time, under a system known as “presidential drawdown authority” that has been used to send weapons to Ukraine. The decision to include Taiwan funding in the supplemental budget and use PDA to supply weapons underscores a rising urgency to help Taipei. Critics of the current Taiwan strategy have urged Washington to supply weapons more quickly as China increases military activity around the country. “This would be a monumental step that signals how far the US government is now willing to go to accelerate deterrence across the Taiwan Strait,” said Eric Sayers, managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington consultancy. “For decades we have chosen to only sell Taiwan military equipment but now . . . we are seeing both the tools of drawdown authority and foreign military financing be deployed, just as they have been so successful in Ukraine,” Sayers added.

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