Tag: perpetual war

Ukrainian politician suspected of collaborating with Russia found murdered in home

A Ukrainian politician who was working with the Russian occupation government was found murdered in his home over the weekend.

Oleksiy Kovalev, a former member of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political party, was found dead in his home near Kherson Sunday with a gunshot wound to the head, the Kyiv Post reported Monday.

His wife was also reportedly stabbed in the neck, and initial reports indicated she succumbed to her wounds.

Kovalev was found beside a shotgun registered in his name.

Kovalev had served in the Russian occupation government in Kherson as the deputy head of the occupation government since July.

Keep reading

US Hints At Preparing Military Option Against Iran To Israeli Officials

An Israeli official said that the US hinted it was preparing a military option against Iran during a meeting between Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Friday, The Times of Israel reported.

The Israeli official said that Gantz told Sullivan that Israel “needs” the US to have a credible military option against Iran. The meeting came as Washington and Tehran are engaged in negotiations to revive the nuclear deal.

The official said that Gantz received “good hints” that the US was preparing a military option. The official didn’t offer details but said the idea of the military option that Israel wants would be to get Iran to make more concessions in negotiations. If not, the US could potentially take military action against the Islamic Republic alongside Israel.

Gantz expressed his opposition to the nuclear deal in the meeting with Sullivan, and the Israelis are stepping up pressure on the Biden administration to abandon the talks. As part of the pressure campaign, the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, David Barnea, is heading to Washington next week.

Keep reading

Thirty Six Percent of Mass Shooters Were Trained by the U.S. Military, But Few Americans Know This Because the Media Never Report It

In the wake of a barrage of mass shootings, the media have offered a variety of explanations centering predominantly on the social isolation and mental illness of shooters and their easy access to military-style weaponry due to lax gun regulations.

These factors are significant but almost all media pundits avoid the gorilla sitting in the psyche of the American mind—that of the huge military budget and culture of military veneration, which is reminiscent of fascist cultures.

In a July 8 column entitled “Why Shooters Do the Evil They Do,” New York Times columnist David Brooks characteristically cites mental illness, loneliness and the need for recognition and power as lying at the root of recent mass shootings.

What is missing is any discussion of American-style militarism, something Brooks has whitewashed throughout his writing career.

According to David Swanson, Director of World Beyond War, 36% of mass shooters have been trained by the U.S. military—when only one percent of Americans serve in the military.

Keep reading

Roger Waters Added to Ukrainian Hit List

Ihave written about the Ukrainian hit list known as Mirotvorets, or “Peacekeeper,” twice before. The first time was in an article about internet censorship, and the second time was when a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl, Faina Savenkova, was added to the list for publicly speaking out against Kyiv’s bloody war on Russian-speaking civilians in the eastern part of Ukraine, a region known as the Donbas.

Myrotvorets is a database which lists thousands of journalists, activists, and anyone else who is declared an “Enemy of Ukraine.” Their personal information is published, such as the addresses of their homes, phone numbers and bank account numbers; anything that can help them be easily located. When the people on this list are murdered, like Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli was, the word ЛИКВИДИРОВАН, “LIQUIDATED,” written in Ukrainian, is stamped across their picture in big red letters.

And, as of today, Darya Dugina, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Moscow on Saturday, appears as “liquidated” on the website, adding more credibility to Russia’s assertion that she was assassinated by a Ukrainian nationalist who rented an apartment in the building where Darya lived in order to surveil her prior to her killing. It is believed that she was killed because her father, Alexander Dugin, was referred to as “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s spiritual guide” in Western media, though these claims are really just more speculation.

Keep reading

Free Speech Doesn’t Matter If Propagandists Determine What People Say

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

None are more hopelessly ignorant than those who falsely believe they’re informed.

None are more hopelessly propagandized than those who don’t know they are propagandized.

Living in a liberal western democracy means having the freedom to criticize the tyranny of your government, but instead spending your time criticizing the tyranny of foreign governments who your government doesn’t like.

Free speech in a liberal western democracy means you have the freedom to say whatever you want about the abuses of your government, and the press has the freedom to hammer you with propaganda to ensure that you never do.

In a liberal western democracy you are free to criticize your government, but instead you are propagandized into criticizing the impotent puppets who get rotated in and out of office while your government continues doing all the same evil things regardless of who gets elected.

In liberal western democracies you are free to call the president “Drumpf” or “Brandon”, but you are not free to know who’s actually calling the shots in your country underneath the official government.

In liberal western democracies people say, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a country like Russia or China where people are forbidden to criticize their government. I live in the west, where I’m free to criticize Russia and China all I want.”

It doesn’t matter if you have freedom of speech if those in power can control what you will say. And in liberal western democracies, this is exactly what happens.

Keep reading

Justin Trudeau invited China’s People’s Liberation Army to train troops in Canada, according to top secret documents published by Canadian conservative news site which claims ‘they were sending spies not just soldiers to train’

‘Top secret’ government documents have revealed that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invited China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to send its troops to Ontario for cold weather training and was unhappy when it was canceled, according to two Canadian media outlets. 

The Canadian government’s bombshell secret 34-page file was obtained by Rebel News and The Globe and Mail. 

The two outlets published excerpts from the files Wednesday, revealing that members of the PLA were scheduled to attend a military exercise at a base in Ontario in 2019.  

According to the memos, the training was then canceled by Chief of Defense Staff Jonathan Vance due to concerns that China could use the trip to obtain information from Canada. 

But Trudeau was displeased about the cancelation, because he thought it would look like retaliation over China’s detention of two Canadian nationals, and insisted Chinese officials be let down gently, the memos show. 

Ezra Levant, founder of conservative news site Rebel News, claimed Thursday the PLA was sending spies not just soldiers to Canada through the partnership. 

The plans for the joint military exercise came as tensions were boiling between the two nations, months after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzou and China hit back arresting Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.

The release of the files comes on the two-year anniversary of Spavor and Kovrig’s arrests as the two remain behind bars in Beijing.  

Keep reading

The US Has Conducted 3 Consecutive Days Of Airstrikes In Syria

The US launched more airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, marking the third day of violence since President Biden ordered the bombing of facilities in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, on Tuesday night. A US official told CNN that Thursday’s strikes were launched from an AC-130 gunship and killed a number of “enemy combatants” in Deir ez-Zor. The official said the strike was in response to rocket attacks that hit US bases in eastern Syria on Wednesday, which injured three US troops.

But Washington had already launched helicopter strikes in response to the earlier rocket attacks. US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a press release Thursday that over the past 24 hours, CENTCOM forces had struck “Iran-affiliated” fighters with “AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships, and M777 artillery.”

CENTCOM said that the strikes resulted “in four enemy fighters killed and seven enemy rocket launchers destroyed.”

CENTCOM announced the initial airstrikes that started the escalation on Tuesday night and said they targeted “infrastructure facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” but Iran denied having links to the groups.

According to the UK-based Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the facilities targeted in Tuesday’s strikes were used by Fatimiyoun, an Afghan Shia militia. The SOHR said six militants were killed, while Deir ez-Zor 24, another monitoring group, said 10 people were killed.

While Iran has denied links to the groups the US targeted, the Pentagon said that these strikes are a message to Tehran. The bombings come as the US and Iran appear close to reviving the nuclear deal. Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said that the escalation shows that US attacks on such groups “are not linked to wherever we end up on the nuclear deal.”

Keep reading

US Invades Syria, Kills People, Claims Self-Defense

Numerous Syrian and foreign militants have reportedly been killed and several US troops injured in an escalating exchange of attacks between the American invaders and the people in the country whose territory they are illegally occupying.

On Tuesday night US Central Command announced that it had “conducted precision airstrikes in Deir ez-Zor Syria” in order to “defend and protect U.S. forces from attacks like the ones on August 15 against U.S. personnel by Iran-backed groups.”

“The President gave the direction for these strikes pursuant to his Article II authority to protect and defend U.S. personnel by disrupting or deterring attacks by Iran-backed groups,” CENTCOM said.

Iran has denied any link to the troops targeted in the airstrikes, up to ten of whom were reportedly killed.

The US attack was followed by rocket attacks on US military positions in eastern Syria, injuring an unknown number of US troops, to which the US responded with an Apache helicopter assault on Syrian vehicles from which it claims the rockets were launched. Central Command claims “two or three suspected Iran-backed militants” were killed in the helicopter attack.

As of this writing it remains to be seen if this exchange of attacks will continue, but what’s crystal clear is who the aggressor is.

“US claims to be in Syria to fight ISIS, but it rarely fights ISIS,” journalist Aaron Maté tweeted of the exchange. “It’s actually there to deny Syria its own oil and wheat, and to occasionally attack Syrians and their allies who defeated US-backed sectarian death squads in the dirty war.”

What he says is completely true. The US is an occupying force who is there without the permission of the Syrian government, without having been attacked by Syria, and without any valid claim to be defending itself from anyone in Syria. The “Iran-backed” militias in Syria are operating with the full authorization of the Syrian government. The US has quite literally invaded a nation on the other side of the world, killed the people in that nation who don’t want them there, and then claimed self-defense in doing so.

If I broke into my neighbor’s house to steal his things, and then murdered him when he tried to stop me or make me leave, it would look pretty ridiculous if I tried to plead self-defense. It would look even more ridiculous if anyone believed me.

Keep reading

NATO Abandons Diplomacy, Says No Longer ‘At Peace’

At the end of its annual summit in Madrid in late June, NATO adopted a new strategic concept. The guidance document is the eighth of its kind since the founding of the alliance in 1949. It radically breaks with the three previous post-Cold War security briefs, however, which observed that “the Euro-Atlantic area is at peace” because “the threat of a conventional attack against NATO territory is low.” In the eyes of NATO, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that calculus, claiming that the military organization can no longer discount the possibility of an assault on sovereign NATO states. Continuing the same cryptic language, the new strategic concept concludes that the Euro-Atlantic area now is “not at peace,” in spite of no NATO member being in a state of war with Russia.

Behind this word play, a more dangerous policy change has been codified in the document. Since the adoption of the Harmel Report in 1967, NATO has always officially included diplomacy in one form or another (with political dialogue and strategic partnership being interchangeable labels) as one of its “core” or “fundamental” tasks. The “NATO 2030” report from November 2020, for instance, unequivocally stated that “NATO should continue the dual-track approach of deterrence and dialogue with Russia.”

In the new strategic concept, the core tasks have been purged of the need for diplomacy, except for one or two throw-away lines about “meaningful and reciprocal political dialogue” about arms control issues buried in the middle of the text. Rather, in addition to its original function of deterrence and defense, NATO now fully embraces “crisis prevention and management,” which it has spearheaded since the 1990s with its legally dubious and morally questionable interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya; and “cooperative security,” referring to NATO’s enlargement in Eastern Europe and its Partnership for Peace cooperation with countries in ever further-away regions, including the Black Sea, the Middle East, North Africa, and even the Indo-Pacific, which the British have been pushing to include in a “global NATO.”

Russia was the first country to sign up for the Partnership for Peace program back in 1994. The new NATO doctrine, however, states that Russia can no longer be considered a partner “in light of its hostile policies and actions.” The strategic concept ignores the fact that NATO’s enlargement and new core tasks, which the alliance adopted after the Cold War in an effort to justify its continued existence, have likewise long been seen as hostile in Moscow, nor does it offer any reflection on how the new policies might have contributed to the current unpeaceful “strategic environment.” Instead, it hails the “historic success” of NATO’s expansion in terms of space and substance and insists that the alliance “does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to the Russian federation.”

Keep reading

Intelligence Expert Believes CIA Behind Car Bomb Assassination of Daughter of Alexander Dugin

CIA expert Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), believes that the CIA was behind the car bomb that killed Darya Dugina, a journalist and daughter of well-known Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin.

Ms. Dugina, 29, was killed on Saturday night when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving in a suburb of Moscow. She was the intended target along with her father, whose promotion of a Eurasian Union has influenced the thinking of Vladimir Putin and members of his inner circle.

Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) blamed the Ukrainian intelligence services for the killing, specifying that the attack was carried out by a woman named Natalya Vovk (AKA Natalya Shaban), a member of the Azov Battalion along with her brother who arrived in Russia last month with her teenage daughter.[1]

Vovk allegedly rented an apartment from where she researched Ms. Dugina, attended “The Tradition” celebration where her father gave a speech and Ms. Dugina was killed, and after planting the bomb, fled to Estonia via Pskov.

Keep reading