Tag: russia

Snowden Didn’t “Flee to Russia”: Obama Trapped Him There

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”

The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

What many people don’t realize — and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore — is that Snowden wasn’t traveling to Russia, but merely through it.

When he left Hong Kong after meeting with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and turning over hundreds of thousands of stolen files, Snowden’s ultimate destination was Quito, Ecuador.

It’s important to note that Snowden says that, before leaving, he destroyed his cryptographic keys that provided him access to the files, and didn’t bring any copies of the files with him.

At the time, the Ecuadoran government was providing political asylum to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange at the country’s London consulate, and Snowden hoped Ecuador would provide him asylum as well.

Snowden’s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn’t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.

However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.

He’d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. “Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,” Snowden wrote in his memoir, Permanent Record, “with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory — a feat that was impossible.”

Seemingly tired of the spectacle, Putin granted Snowden asylum, and he’s been in Russia ever since. The essential point, however, is that Snowden is in Russia because the Obama administration deliberately trapped him there.

In 2013 and ever since, rabid Snowden detractors have failed to acknowledge how that move by the Obama White House belied its own assertions that Snowden was a traitor who traveled to Moscow with highly valuable intelligence information and was at high risk of turning it over to the Russian government.

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Nordstream Sabotage – Deeper Dive

In the most recent edition of New World Next Week, James Corbett cites my recent article on the Nordstream sabotage, but politely disagrees about the irrelevance of attribution.

He argues that this kind of event will have definite geopolitical ramifications, and as such the identity of the culprit becomes important information.

I respect James’ work immensely and in the alternate media world there’s probably no one I am more likely to agree with as a general rule, but here I must return that polite disagreement in kind.

Now, I do not doubt there will be “geopolitical ramifications”, but in a post-Covid world we need to ask what that means in real terms.

Yes, this will likely mean “tougher sanctions”, or Russia being declared a “terrorist state”. Maybe the war will “intensify”. Maybe Russia’s allies in China or India or Iran will face sanctions too.

But have we not already established that the sanctions are not really designed to hurt Russia, but the West’s own economies?

That the war is being used to excuse and exacerbate the economic downturn already deliberately created by the “pandemic”?

And does that not, in turn, mean that any geopolitical ramifications will be translated ultimately into further excuses to wear down the economic foundations of our society?

I would argue any such reaction could be more accurately described as a shadowplay of conflict, a puppet show for our consumption.

This is not a nihilistic or sweeping dismissal, borne of childish contrarianism.

I’m not saying “both sides of the conflict are the same so what does it matter who wins or which crimes are committed by which side”.

I’m saying, aside from whatever personal or petty gripes, ambitions, power plays may run through the hierarchy, and no matter how much blood is spilled, ultimately there is no conflict between them, and through cooperative complicity, both “sides” are equally responsible for every act within the Great Reset narrative.

To paraphrase Iain Davis in a recent comment, global governance has a management structure akin to any major corporation, and though individual managers or vice-presidents may seek personal advancement or pursue private rivalries, they are all ultimately answerable to the owner of the company, and all working toward the same overarching goal.

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First Openly Trans US Army Officer and Wife Arrested in Plot to Give Medical Records to Russia

U.S. Army Major Dr. Jamie Lee Henry, who came out as the first openly trans officer on 2015, is accused of betraying the military and country he serves by working with his wife Dr. Anna Gabrielian, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, to give medical records to Russia on patients at Fort Bragg and Hopkins, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday by the Department of Justice. The couple was dealing with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian embassy staffer after Gabrielien had allegedly reached out to the Russian embassy. Gabrielian reportedly calimed she was motivated by patriotism for Russia. Gabrielian’s profile at Hopkins says she speaks Russian and English.

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After U.S. Soldiers Were Told to Go On Food Stamps, Congress Finds Another $12 Billion for Ukraine

Congressional lawmakers agreed to a deal that would provide another $12 billion in aid to Ukraine, which would bring the total military and economic resources provided to over $66 billion.

The news follows the Senate passing a $40 billion aid package in May, along with a $14 billion package in March.

President Biden earlier this month asked Congress for an additional $11.7 billion in aid for Ukraine, with Congress, in turn, seems to be jumping at his behest.

As a reminder, also earlier this month the Army told active-duty American soldiers to go on food stamps if they were unable to afford food thanks to inflation. 

Food stamps for American soldiers, endless billions for Ukraine. This is your country now.

Reuters reports that the funding agreement for Ukraine would address a variety of financial needs for Ukraine, including the hope that it would “reduce future energy costs.”

Meanwhile, the White House which had been touting lower gas prices despite them being well over the national average when Biden took office, has suddenly gone quiet. Why? Because they’re going back up again.

Biden and Congress won’t do anything to address American energy woes, but as long as Ukraine keeps showing a little leg, the political strip club patrons on the left and right will continue to shell out dollar bills.

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Ukrainian Army War Crimes Include Shelling of Ambulences, Firetrucks, and Rescue Workers in the Donbass Republics—Similar to Israelis and U.S. Backed Terrorists in Syria

In the more than eight years of bombing the civilians of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Ukraine has committed untold numbers of war crimes. These include bombing residential areas, markets, hospitals, schools, parks—including with prohibited heavy weapons and banned cluster munitions—and, since late July, raining banned “Petal” mines down on populated civilian areas, including the very center of Donetsk, including as recently as September 7.

A lesser-known war crime is Ukraine’s routine targeting of ambulances, fire trucks, medics and rescuers, and their headquarters and stations. Many of the times Ukraine bombs such heroic rescuers, it is when they are on the way, or already on site, to help civilians often themselves just bombed by Ukraine.

On August 21, Ukrainian shelling of the DPR’s Gorlovka wounded twelve, including five firefighters.

The day prior, Ukrainian shelling targeted an ambulance station in the LPR’s Lysychansk, wounding several and damaging some of the ambulances.

On June 23, the Kievskiy District of Donetsk came under repeated shelling over the course of the two hours I was visiting the Emergency Services headquarters there. On the grounds, I saw the remnants of a “Hurricane” missile from a previous Ukrainian attack.

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US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard

After the August 20 car-bomb assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian ultranationalist political philosopher, US media outlets quickly branded the 29-year-old as an agent in Russia’s “disinformation war.” Rather than treating her as a member of the civilian press, they seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.

CNN (8/27/22) ran an article to this effect, failing to characterize her murder as an assassination, instead stating Dugina was “on the front lines” of Russia’s war effort, linking her to “Russia’s vast disinformation machine.” NPR (8/24/22) reported that  Dugina was a “Russian propagandist” whose killing signaled the war was coming to Russian elites in their own territory. Foreign Policy (8/26/22) called Dugina a “dead propagandist” whose “martyrdom” did more to achieve her goals in death than she could have hoped for in life.

It is certainly true that during her life, Dugina, who espoused the philosophy of Russian Eurasianism, an expansionist political doctrine veiled as an objective analysis of Russian interests, had very little impact on Western audiences. This is true of most Russian journalists, despite the frequent warnings in US corporate media about the threat posed by Russian media messages. For instance, RT, often considered the foremost Russian outlet in the West, accounted for only 0.04% of Britain’s total viewing audience in 2017 (New Statesman, 2/25/22), and reached about 0.6% of the UK’s online population from February 2021 to the start of 2022—and this was before Western media platforms sharply restricted access to RT and other pro-Moscow outlets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

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Ex-CIA Ray McGovern: Conditioned For War With Russia

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden — I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former national intelligence director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former national intelligence officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” 

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HOW COVERT BRITISH INFORMATION WARS TARGET RUSSIA, THREATENING CIVILIANS AND JOURNALISTS 

In late July, a shocking interview with a captured Azov Battalion fighter began circulating online.

In the clip, the prisoner-of-war claimed that Oleksiy Arestovych, once a key advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, had, prior to the war, ordered his Neo-Nazi regiment (among other military units) to carry out and film “brutal murders” of captured Russian soldiers in service of an “information campaign.”

The purpose of this effort, the Azov fighter claimed, was to transmit the grisly footage to Russia in order to stoke anti-war sentiment among the population, and thus protests and upheaval.

Incendiary confessions and allegations emanating from prisoners-of-war should always be treated with intense skepticism. The likelihood they will be made under significant duress, and/or result from extensive coaching, is invariably high. Nonetheless, there are sound reasons not to reflexively discount the nameless combatant’s testimony.

While you would barely know it from Western media reporting, countless Russian soldiers have been tortured and killed in the most savage ways imaginable post-capture, each and every horrifying incident representing a grave war crime. There are numerous reports of prisoners being burnt with blowtorches and/or having their eyes gouged out before execution, and even those kept alive are frequently shot in their kneecaps to cripple them for life. Accompanying clips are voluminous, and have traveled widely.

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The US Empire Is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict On Two Fronts

Vladimir Putin has announced that referenda will be held in four regions of the eastern part of Ukraine whose populations will now vote on whether to join the Russian Federation, much like the Crimea referendum of 2014 which resulted in Russia’s annexation of that territory. Putin announced that 300,000 additional troops will be mobilized for the war to help facilitate this action, which is a major escalation in the conflict by any measure.

Putin also issued a stern nuclear warning that’s being hysterically spun by empire managers as a shocking and unprecedentedly bellicose threat, but if you read what he actually said it’s clear that he’s really reminding the west of the same principles of Mutually Assured Destruction that have been in place for generations, and isn’t expressing any position that western nuclear powers don’t also hold:

Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.

To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I emphasize this again, with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the wind can also turn in their direction.

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Another former Putin ally dies after ‘falling down several flights of stairs’ as eight cronies are mysteriously killed

A FORMER Putin ally and top aviation expert has died in Moscow, becoming the latest of the Russian president’s associates to meet his end in a mysterious fashion since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Anatoly Gerashchenko, the former rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), died after reportedly falling down a series of flights of stairs on Tuesday.

He was 73 years old.

A Russian channel on the messaging app Telegram, quoting the MAI, said: “This morning, 73-year-old Anatoly Gerashchenko fell from a height, flying [down] several flights of stairs.”

It added: “The scientist received injuries incompatible with life. The doctors who arrived at the scene could not save the professor.”

The post went on to say that Gerashchenko had more recently served as an adviser to the current MAI rector, Mikhail Poghosyan.

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