Tag: perpetual war

Washington Approves $360 Million Arms Sale to Taiwan

The State Department said on Tuesday that it has green-lit a $360 million arms sale to Taipei, including hundreds of armed drones, missile equipment, and other support material. China views Taiwan as part of its territory, and while it prefers to reclaim the de facto independent island peacefully, it has not ruled out using force if its “red lines” are crossed.

The latest sale comprises 291 Altius-600M systems, which are drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), armed with warheads. The State Department release notes 720 Switchblade drones, described as “extended-range loitering munitions,” are also included with the package.

The statement went on to claim that the sale “serves U.S. national, economic, and security interests by supporting the recipient’s continuing efforts to modernize its armed forces and to maintain a credible defensive capability.” Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te thanked Washington for the new hardware, insisting they will increase regional stability. “In the future, we will continue to strengthen Taiwan’s national defense strength, whether through … military purchases or our own efforts,” he said.

Wednesday’s announcement follows reports this week that Chinese President Xi Jinping told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last year that he believes the hawkish US posture in the region and its increased military support for the island constitute an attempt to provoke an invasion by Beijing.

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Biden Deploys Record Number of Troops to Jordan in Quiet Buildup

As the war in Gaza rages, the Biden administration has deployed a record number of U.S. troops to Jordan, a new report to Congress reveals. The troop buildup has not been previously reported.

There are now a record 3,813 American troops in Jordan, according to the White House’s war powers report to Congress released on June 7. That’s a 625 troop increase over December, with the number of soldiers and airmen exceeding the number at any time since the second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, a review of past war powers reports reveals.

The Biden administration has sought to keep quiet its close military ties to Jordan, with the White House national security council instructing State Department communications officials to avoid mentioning its military coordination with the country in particular, according to internal memos I’ve reviewed. When Iran fired missiles and drones at Israel in April, Jordan was a key partner in shooting them down, and Jordan even allowed Israeli planes to operate in Jordanian airspace. Jordan as a partner of Israel is a particularly sensitive issue, hence the desire on the part of Washington to keep talk of Jordan to a minimum.

The President’s war powers report to Congress is intended to keep the American public informed about situations in which U.S. military forces might find themselves in combat.  In the case of Jordan, this isn’t a hypothetical: in January, an Iran-backed militia group killed three American Army soldiers stationed at a secret U.S. military base in Jordan, called Tower-22. Since October 7, Iran-backed groups have launched over 170 attacks on U.S. military assets in Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to downplay these attacks, insisting that the Israel-Hamas war has not spread to the rest of the region. The war powers report makes no mention of Iran-backed groups, saying only that U.S. troops are there to “support Defeat-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”

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New US-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement: A Path to Escalation and Burden on American Taxpayers

By signing the new Bilateral Security Agreement between the United States and Ukraine, Joe Biden has added Ukraine to the long list of countries whose defense the US is obligated to support.

While the agreement is technically bilateral, the specific benefits to the US remain unclear. Unlike NATO’s Article 5, this agreement does not include mutual defense commitments. However, the act of signing it has significantly increased the likelihood of conflict with Russia.

Additionally, the agreement will impose costs on US taxpayers in the short, medium, and long term, and could potentially cost American lives in the not-so-distant future.

The United States and Ukraine signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement on June 13, 2024, during the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Italy. This agreement aims to solidify long-term defense and security cooperation between the two nations.

According to U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, the agreement sends a clear message of resolve to Russia, indicating that the coalition supporting Ukraine remains strong. The pact includes provisions to enhance Ukraine’s defense capabilities and ensure continued U.S. assistance, funded by U.S. taxpayers, in addressing Ukraine’s security needs well into the future.

While the agreement focuses on various aspects such as training Ukraine’s armed forces, enhancing intelligence sharing, and developing military capabilities, it does not include specific monetary pledges.

However, in conjunction with this agreement, the G7 leaders have backed a $50 billion loan package to support Ukraine’s broader economic and defense needs. This financial support is separate from the $60 billion in aid that the US has already approved for Ukraine.

The agreement is not a step toward NATO membership and does not commit US or NATO forces to direct military involvement in the ongoing war with Russia. Consequently, the White House can claim that it does not increase the risk of escalation.

However, Russia has predictably reacted negatively, condemning the signing of the agreement and viewing it as a direct threat and a provocative act that challenges its strategic interests in the region.

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MSM Very Belatedly Reports On Ukraine’s Brutal Military Recruitment Methods

A mere year ago, there was already ample evidence that Ukrainian recruitment officers were using brutal and desperate tactics to ensure a steady supply of young soldiers for the front lines in the fight against Russia. This is a trend which has only grown, as the tragic situation of masses of casualties persists, and also amid the Zelensky government’s refusal to even attempt to negotiate a peaceful end to the war.

But earlier in the conflict, any Western outlet or pundit who highlighted and condemned scenes of young men being beaten and harshly seized off Ukraine’a streets by military recruiters would have been dismissed as a ‘pro-Russian propagandist’. Yet now this trend has long been impossible to deny, and only very belatedly mainstream media sources are covering it. For example, on Sunday The Washington Post highlighted that Ukraine has resorted to releasing nearly 3,000 hardened criminals and convicts from prisons to serve in the military. The plan has immediately been met with pushback and controversy. “No one has trust in this, but we need it,” one military official involved in the policy told WaPo. However, the official admitted while describing the likelihood that this will cause disorder on the frontlines: “They’re all going to run like Forrest Gump.”

The report detailed that many of the newly released convicts were “jailed for dealing drugs, stealing phones and committing armed assaults and murders, among other serious crimes.“ However, Ukrainian Justice Minister Denis Malyuska was cited in the report as claiming “the motivation of our inmates is stronger than our ordinary soldiers,” and insisted that ultimately they “want to protect their country and they want to turn the page.” Washington Post isn’t the only outlet which has begrudgingly shifted from its fawning and overly idealist coverage of Ukraine’s armed forces and the dire battlefield situation, but BBC too has this week issued some devastating footage portraying the severe manpower crisis (and here’s a similar one from CNN days ago).

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Mossad and its network of little helpers, the Sayanim

As I am hoping to organise a conversation with colleague David Miller in the very near future to discuss his research into the Zionist movement tentacles that have embedded themselves deep inside the UK governmental and public sectors including education – I am publishing his recent article for Al Mayadeen English:

The Mossad have been exposed as targeting the International Criminal Court, including directly threatening its personnel and their families. What else does the Mossad get up to?

Zionist intelligence agencies launched a war on the International Criminal Court in January 2015. This was when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly.

“Israel’s” intelligence agencies routinely surveilled the ICC’s current chief prosecutor Karim Khan, his predecessor Fatou Bensouda, and dozens of other ICC and UN officials. Israeli intelligence also monitored materials that the Palestinian Authority submitted to the prosecutor’s office, and surveilled employees at four Palestinian human rights organizations whose submissions are central to the probe.

Multiple agencies including the Mossad, Shin Bet, and “National Security Council” were involved, in addition to the occupation military. “Israel’s” Ministry of Strategic Affairs, under Gilad Erdan, was involved in the surveilling of Palestinian human rights organizations that were submitting reports to the ICC.

It is reported that “a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.”

Mossad, the foreign intelligence agency of the Zionist colony was involved in attempting to recruit senior ICC officials.

The former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, allegedly threatened the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation.

Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the period leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.

Cohen, is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband. Regime officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor.

Cohen met with Bensouda on a number of occasions, including “ambushing” her during a meeting with Joseph Kabila, the then president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It appears he was a Mossad agent of influence.

Mossad also targeted Bensouda’s successor, the current chief prosecutor Karim Khan. The ICC confirmed there had been “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have taken a keen interest in the operation, even sending intelligence teams “instructions” and “areas of interest” regarding their monitoring of ICC officials. One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.

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Biden’s Gaza pier is bringing in chicken aid at $20,730 a pound

You’ve heard of $2,000 toilet seats? The Pentagon is famous for its cost overruns, and that was during the Reagan era.

But now we present the $20,730 per pound chicken.

With all of the U.S. aid from that pier reportedly falling into the hands of HAMAS terrorists, who take the aid and either eat it themselves or sell it at inflated prices to the displaced, that’s some mighty fine chicken, maybe the most gourmet chicken out there, except that it probably isn’t.

It’s just monstrous cost overruns, inflated prices tied to the swamp and its greedy military contractors whose interest in perpetuating wars is a matter of company profits. And we shouldn’t leave the potential for corruption going on, too.

And that’s just the chicken.

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UN probe finds Israel GUILTY of crimes against humanity in Gaza

Israel is guilty of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in the Gaza Strip, a United Nations (UN) committee has concluded.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) made this conclusion on June 12, deeming Tel Aviv guilty of the atrocities committed during its eight-month-long campaign of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The COI said Israeli authorities are accountable for “the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or willful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention, and outrages upon personal dignity.”

The COI also discovered that “the crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, murder, [and] forcible transfer” were also committed. According to the commission’s findings, the the enormous number of civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza is “the inevitable result of a strategy undertaken with the intent to cause maximum damage, disregarding the principles of distinction, proportionality, and adequate precautions.”

Moreover, the investigation resolved that the inflammatory remarks by Israeli officials “amounted to incitement and may constitute other serious international crimes,” adding that direct and public provocation to genocide is a crime under international law whenever committed.

The COI also criticized Israel’s continued assaults on civilian evacuation routes and “safe areas” and stated leading Israeli authorities have “weaponized the siege and used the provision of life-sustaining necessities, including by severing water, food, electricity, fuel, and humanitarian assistance, for strategic and political gains.”

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Campaigners Decry ‘Dangerous Escalation’ as NATO Chief Floats Nuclear Deployment

Nuclear disarmament campaigners on Monday implored NATO and Russia to step back from the brink after the head of the Western military alliance said its members are considering deploying additional atomic weapons to counter Moscow and Beijing.

“This is the dangerous escalation inherent to the deterrence doctrine,” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) wrote on social media, referring to the notion that the threat of catastrophic nuclear retaliation prevents nations from using atomic weaponry.

The U.S., which spent more on its atomic weapons arsenal than every other nuclear-armed nation combined last year, currently has nukes deployed in five NATO countries—Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Russia, meanwhile, recently deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus, which said earlier this month that it would join Moscow’s nuclear exercises.

ICAN said Monday that “it’s time for both to reverse course.”

“NATO countries hosting U.S. nuclear weapons should admit to their citizens they have weapons of mass destruction on their soil with no public say,” ICAN added. “But neither Belarus nor NATO allies should flaunt being prepared to indiscriminately kill millions of people.”

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We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis… and Lost

Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.

To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis announced their policy in response to civilian deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza, but when the US and UK military became involved they announced they would target US and UK shipping as well.

The operation was supposed to be quick and easy. After all, the rag-tag Houthi militia was no match for the mighty US and UK navies. But it didn’t work out that way at all. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”

Meanwhile, the article informed us that a continued US effort to fight the Houthis over Red Sea shipping was “not sustainable.” Perhaps the most revealing part of the article comes from a Washington military expert, Emily Harding of CSIS: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long.”

It is reminiscent of a recollection by Col. Harry G. Summers of a discussion he had with North Vietnamese Col. Tu: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said Summers. Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

Similarly, the US military spent a quarter of a billion dollars building a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to the starving Palestinians even though a land route already existed and would have been far cheaper to use. The project was doomed from the beginning, as days after opening stormy weather broke up the pier and washed part of it up on Israel’s shore. The US military managed to gather the pieces together again, but in total only a few aid trucks managed to use it before, over the weekend, the pier was again disassembled for fear of another weather-related break-up.

The only thing the pier was good for, it seems, was assisting the Israeli military in a Gaza raid on June 8th that killed 270 Palestinian civilians.

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Former Israeli MK Quotes Hitler While Discussing Gaza War

Former Israeli MK Moshe Feiglin quoted Adolf Hitler while commenting on the war in Gaza saying: “We can’t live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza,” while speaking to Channel 12 news.

Feiglin continued, saying that Jews “are not guests in our own land, it is entirely ours,” adding that he wants to “turn Gaza Hebrew.”

Feiglin’s Zehut party platform in 2019 claimed that once Israelis “adopt their true identity and stop seeing themselves as an occupying force in their own country, the rest of the world will leave the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict behind and accept our legal sovereignty.”

The document further stated the party would “cancel” the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians and offer three options to the “non-Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” the first would be to leave. Israel, the platform stated, would “enable interested residents to sell their property, and will help them immigrate to the destination of their choice.”

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