Tag: war mongers

NATO Leader Mark Rutte Urges Europe to Prepare For ‘Widespread Suffering’ and WW3 With Russia Within Five Years

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is urging member states to prepare for World War III with Russia and its dictator, Vladimir Putin.

During a speech in Berlin on Thursday, the former Dutch prime minister said that “dark forces of oppression are on the march again” and that Europe is facing a “scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.”

He declared:

We must all accept that we must act to defend our way of life, now. Because this year, Russia has become even more brazen, reckless, and ruthless, towards NATO and towards Ukraine.

Russia’s economy is now geared to wage war, not to make its people prosperous.

Russia is spending nearly 40 per cent of its budget on aggression, and around 70 per cent of all machine tools in Russia are used in military production.

Taxes are going up, inflation has skyrocketed, and petrol is rationed.

How is Putin able to maintain his war against Ukraine? The answer is China. China is Russia’s lifeline. China wants to prevent its ally from losing in Ukraine. Without China’s support, Russia could not continue to wage this war.

For instance around 80 per cent of critical electronic components in Russian drones and other systems are made in China.

So when civilians are made in Kyiv or Kharkiv, Chinese technology is often inside the weapons that kill them.

NATO’s own defences can hold for now but with its economy dedicated to war, Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.

How deterrence is achieved, through retaliation, through pre-emptive strike, this is something we have to analyse deeply because there could be in the future even more pressure on this”

Keep reading

The Ukraine War Hawks Sabotaging America First

As the White House moves to negotiate an end to the yearslong Ukraine proxy war, establishment members of Congress, elements of the deep state, and their corporate media allies work overtime to sabotage the president’s efforts.

The aggressive establishment campaign seeks to derail a draft settlement, negotiated largely in Washington, that would bar Ukraine from NATO in exchange for U.S. security guarantees, grant Russia de facto control of Crimea and the Donbas, and limit the size of the Ukrainian armed forces, among other measures.

By pursuing a negotiated resolution to the Ukraine war, the Trump administration is doing exactly what it was democratically elected to do. Voters who wanted to continue the proxy war against Russia were told to—and overwhelmingly did—vote for the defeated candidate, Kamala Harris. 

But even though President Donald Trump and voters may prefer restraint and diplomacy with nuclear powers like Russia, the Washington political establishment that drives U.S. foreign policy has long made clear that it does not—and that it will take aggressive measures to subvert democratically decided policies in favor of its own. With a peace deal possibly within reach, this remarkably bipartisan campaign has become increasingly overt.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers last week floated the rumor that the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan was secretly a Russian-authored “wish list.” The claim has since fallen apart—and never made sense in the first place—because, as Steve Bannon has pointed out, the terms of the deal are, if anything, overly favorable to Kiev, not Moscow. Under the proposal, the Ukrainian military would be permitted to build a fighting force of up to 600,000 troops. “That’s unacceptable to the Russians,” says political scientist John Mearsheimer. And while the draft would formally rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, it nonetheless commits the United States to extending security guarantees, a provision that leaves the door open for future rounds of confrontation between Ukraine and Russia.

Nonetheless, bipartisan factions continue to argue that Trump’s proposal favors Moscow, branding the pursuit of peace as Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement. Joining them to do it has been former Trump official Mike Pompeo, who argued against the 28-point plan on X, saying that “any so-called peace deal that limits Ukraine’s ability to defend itself would look more like a surrender.”

The former CIA director has in recent weeks emerged as a regular guest on Fox News to sabotage Trump’s peace plan, while simultaneously serving on the advisory board of the Ukrainian defense company FirePoint. The Murdoch-owned news network, which previously partly fired Tucker Carlson over his opposition to the Ukraine war, does not disclose that the former CIA director stands to profit directly from the war he goes on air to promote.

The most brazen and revealing effort to derail the Trump administration’s diplomacy comes from anonymous leakers, likely from the U.S. security state, which, through their servants in corporate media, repeatedly leak classified information in what has so far been a failed attempt to embarrass and undermine the president’s lead negotiator, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.

The campaign against Witkoff began when Reuters reported that unnamed “U.S. officials” were “increasingly concerned” by Witkoff’s discussions with Russian diplomats to end the war. Soon after, Bloomberg published a selective leak of a classified call transcript, claiming Witkoff had “advised Russia on how to pitch Ukraine plans to Trump,” framing his diplomacy as improper. 

Keep reading

How To Topple Elliott Abrams’ Delusion

Elliott Abrams has resurfaced with familiar instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet feels entitled to rearrange like a piece of furniture in Washington’s living room. His new proposal is drenched in the same Cold War fever and colonial mindset that shaped his work in the 1980s, when U.S. foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.

My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world rarely sees: stories of displacement, of death squads, of villages erased from maps, of governments toppled for daring to act outside Washington’s orbit. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think-tank biographies, but from the grief woven into Central America’s landscape.

Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived inside the countries his policies have destabilized. His newest argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority, by virtue of power alone, to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the hemisphere is still an extension of U.S. strategic space rather than a region with its own political will.

In this telling, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who bothers to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. The money laundering happens in New York and London, not in Caracas. The guns that sustain the drug corridors of the continent used to threaten, to extort, to kill, come overwhelmingly from American producers. And the history of the drug war itself, from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary enforcement wings, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.

Even U.S. government data contradicts Abrams’ narrative. DEA and UNODC reports have long shown that the vast majority of cocaine destined for U.S. consumers travels from Colombia through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a “Venezuelan narco-route” is politically useful: it turns a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case file and prepares the public for escalation.

What’s striking is that Abrams never turns to the real front line of the drug trade: U.S. cities, U.S. banks, U.S. gun shows, U.S. demand. The crisis he describes is born in his own country, yet he looks for the solution in foreign intervention. The United States has long armed, financed, and politically protected its own “narco-allies” when it suited larger strategic goals. The Contras in Nicaragua, paramilitary blocs in Colombia, and death squads in Honduras. These were policy tools, and many of them operated with Abrams’ direct diplomatic support.

I grew up with the stories of what that machinery did to our neighbors. You don’t need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you only need to listen. In Guatemala, Maya communities still grieve a genocide that U.S. officials refused to acknowledge, even as villages were erased and survivors fled into the mountains. In El Salvador, families continue lighting candles for the hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds left by the Contras, a paramilitary force armed, financed, and politically blessed by Washington, remain visible in the stories of burned cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word disappeared is not historically remote; it is widely remembered, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of U.S. anti-communism.

So when Abrams warns about “criminal regimes,” I don’t think of Venezuela. I think of the mass graves, the scorched villages, the secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he championed. And those graves are not metaphors. They are the cartography of an entire era of U.S. intervention, the era Abrams insists on resurrecting.

Abrams now adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” anxieties about “Iranian operatives,” alarms over “Chinese influence.” These issues are stripped of context, inflated, or selectively highlighted to manufacture a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development paths that do not answer to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats—not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken U.S. dominance within it.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney’s Legacy Is One of Brutal Carnage

On March 15, 2006, the United States was nearly three years into its second Iraq war. After over a decade of brutal sanctions and continuous bombing, in spring 2003, the US had launched a full-scale invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. The invasion was a flagrant violation of international law. After toppling Iraq’s Ba’athist government, a former on-again, off-again ally of Washington, the United States and its allies began a protracted military occupation of Iraq. The neocolonial affair was particularly brutal. Such is the nature of seeking to impose your presence by military force on a people who do not wish it and are willing to use force to oppose it.

That day, March 15, soldiers approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, an Iraqi farmer . Allegedly they were looking for an individual believed to be responsible for the deaths of two US soldiers and a facilitator for al-Qaeda recruitment in Iraq. In the version told by US troops, someone from the house fired on the approaching soldiers, prompting a twenty-five-minute confrontation. Eventually the soldiers entered the house, killing all of the residents.

This included not just Al-Majma’ee, but his wife; his three children, Hawra’a, Aisha, and Husam, who were between the ages of five months and five years old; his seventy-four-year-old mother, Turkiya Majeed Ali; and two nieces, Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf, who were five and three years old. An autopsy performed on the deceased “revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” After slaughtering the family execution style, US soldiers called in an air strike, destroying the house. The presumed reason for the bombardment was to cover up evidence of the extrajudicial killings.

Keep reading

History Will Not Be Kind to Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney died this week. He leaves behind a wretched legacy.

Cheney reached the pinnacle of his influence as George W. Bush’s vice president, a position from which he orchestrated the Iraq War and helped bring about one of the most intrusive pieces of legislation ever to have been leveled against the American people.

Democrats reflexively abhorred Cheney as veep, but as GOP voters became more averse to foreign intervention, he became a symbol of everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. As Jack Kenny said in 2011, “[Cheney’s] impact on and, to a large extent, direction of foreign policy during the Bush presidency suggests that if he was and is a conservative, his is the kind of conservatism George Will described as believing that ‘government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.’”

Iraq Intervention: Why?

As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be “made anew.” “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s — “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.

“Agency of the President”

Cheney once said, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” This is related to the common perception that he was more powerful than the president. “At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history,” renowned left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote. Kenny pointed out that one of the nicknames Cheney acquired as veep was “’Management,’ as in ‘Better check with management first.’” He wrote:

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) described the free hand Cheney appeared to have in his dealings with Congress. “Dick could make a deal,” Gramm told [Barton Gellman], author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. “He didn’t have to check with the president, not as far as I could tell. I’m sure at the end of the day, he would fill the president in on what happened. But Dick had the agency of the president.”

CFR Ties

While Cheney is rightly recognized, even by mainstream standards, as a negative influence on American policies, one important element that’s been widely overlooked in his ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a subversive foreign-policy think tank that we like to refer to as the “Deep State nervous system.” Cheney was a CFR life member. He served on its board of directors from 1987 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1995, and was also its director at one point. Interestingly, he mentioned none of this in his 500-plus-page memoir, In My Time. In 2011, the former Wyoming lawmaker admitted during a visit to CFR headquarters that he had intentionally kept his ties to the organization a secret:

It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve been a member for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming, but it stood me in good stead.

After his death, the CFR posted a warm tribute to him:

A steadfast steward of the Council, Cheney brought to our community the same seriousness of purpose, strategic insight, and commitment to public service that defined his distinguished career in government and the private sector. Cheney’s decades of leadership — as vice president of the United States, secretary of defense, member of Congress, and senior White House official — reflected a lifetime devoted to strengthening the United States’ national security and its role in the world. The Council is grateful to have counted Cheney as a member, director, and friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Many would disagree with the CFR’s characterization. It’s difficult to see how sacrificing thousands of American lives and racking up debt to pay for overseas wars and fueling legislation that allows the government to spy on Americans have made the country stronger. Cheney was a key architect of the post-9/11 response. And as such, he helped finagle congressional approval for the PATRIOT Act, a wholly un-American piece of legislation that has greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil Americans. He coordinated amendments with administration officials and reconciled the House and Senate versions. His chief of staff,  Scooter Libby, was also involved in high-level meetings about the act.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney (1941–2025): The Dark Legacy of a War Criminal

Former U.S. vice president Richard “Dick” Cheney died on 3 November 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a “war on terror” that unleashed torture, preventive war and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to the post‑9/11 wars he championed. Cheney’s legacy is one of unprecedented destruction and the erosion of civil liberties.

From prudence to preemption

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell resisted calls to topple Saddam Hussein. Cheney argued that invading Baghdad would force the U.S. to occupy Iraq alone, risk its territorial integrity, and require unacceptable casualties: “It’s a quagmire if you go that far,” he told PBS’s Frontline in 1994, asking how many additional dead Americans Saddam was worth. Those words reflect a prudence that vanished after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Within days, the vice president laid out a radical new doctrine. On NBC’s Meet the Press he said America must operate on the “dark side,” spend time in the shadows, and use “any means at our disposal” to achieve its objectives.

Cheney’s longtime counsel, David Addington, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee drafted memos arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees captured in the war on terror. The State Department’s legal advisor warned that claiming the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions was legally flawed and would reverse over a century of U.S. policy. Cheney pressed ahead, telling the Washington Times that he “signed off” on the CIA’s secret detention and rendition program and, as a principal participant in National Security Council meetings, he authorized the agency’s interrogation program, including waterboarding. In 2006 he called waterboarding a “no‑brainer,” and in 2009 he acknowledged knowing about the practice “as a general policy that we had approved.”

Torture and the repudiation of law

The vice president’s embrace of waterboarding ignored that the technique has long been treated as torture under U.S. and international law. Amnesty International notes that Japanese officials were convicted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials for subjecting U.S. pilots to waterboarding, and U.S. courts have sentenced sheriffs to prison for using the technique. Amnesty stresses that its status as torture is “not a matter of opinion.” The Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that approving aggressive interrogation techniques sent a message that physical pressure and degradation were acceptable treatment for detainees. Amnesty calls Cheney “one of the principal architects of a policy that amounted to torture.”

Cheney’s legal defense of the program was rife with distortions. He misrepresented Justice Department opinions, falsely suggested Japanese waterboarders were never prosecuted, overstated detainee recidivism, insisted detainees had no rights under the Geneva Conventions, and repeated unproven claims of ties between Saddam Hussein and al‑Qaeda.

The road to Baghdad and the case for war

He cautioned against occupying Iraq in 1994 but became the administration’s leading voice for war nine years later. On March 16, 2003 he declared that Saddam had “reconstituted nuclear weapons” and that Americans would be greeted as liberators. These claims proved false. He insisted there was “no doubt” Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al‑Qaeda, yet evidence was lacking. Retired colonel Lawrence Wilkerson later alleged the administration manipulated intelligence to justify invasion and suggested that Cheney’s push to ignore the Geneva Conventions may constitute a war crime.

Cheney’s radicalism was not limited to Iraq. He championed a “unitary executive” theory contending that the president alone decides matters within the executive branch. Legal scholar Martin Lederman observed that he sidelined dissenting views in the military and intelligence agencies. Chip Gibbons, writing in Jacobin, describes him as an enemy of democracy whose agenda included war, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and torture.

Human cost: war, death, and permanent surveillance

The human toll of Cheney’s policies is staggering. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people have been killed by direct post‑9/11 violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, including over 432,000 civilians. Indirect deaths raise the toll into the millions. In Iraq alone, about 29,199 bombs were dropped, causing heavy civilian casualties, and a 2006 survey estimated over 600,000 civilian deaths. Current Affairs compares Cheney’s record to that of serial killer Samuel Little, concluding that “Little was strictly an amateur.”

The costs extended beyond foreign battlefields. Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute writes that in a more reasonable world, people like Cheney would be forgotten, shamed, and disgraced. The post‑9/11 wars did nothing to enhance freedom, yet thousands of American families paid with their blood and millions continue to pay through taxes and inflation. McMaken lists domestic infringements such as the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, TSA groping, and FISA abuses, and none of the architects have been held accountable.

Colonel Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff, told ABC News that Cheney “was president for all practical purposes” during Bush’s first term and feared being tried as a war criminal. The Washington Post dubbed him the “vice-president for torture,” and Wilkerson said his push to disregard the Geneva Conventions amounted to an international crime. Chip Gibbons asserts that he “reduced nations to rubble, shredded the Bill of Rights, and enacted programs of surveillance, abduction, detention, and torture.”

The culture of impunity Cheney helped foster has not faded. Politicians continued to accept his endorsements despite his record, while he insisted the CIA’s interrogation techniques did not violate international agreements and his allies still argued for expansive presidential war powers.

An opinion essay by law professor Ziyad Motala in Al Jazeera argues that Cheney is the architect of some of the most disastrous foreign and domestic policies of the early twenty‑first century. Motala contends that Cheney’s policies left “a trail of death and destabilization” and that the havoc unleashed by the Iraq War and the broader “war on terror” continues to reverberate, causing “suffering and instability far surpassing anything Trump has wrought.” He notes that estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from hundreds of thousands to well over a million and that the war destabilized an entire region, paving the way for extremist groups like ISIL and ongoing cycles of violence and displacement. The war drained trillions from the U.S. economy and left thousands of U.S. troops dead and many more with life‑altering physical and psychological wounds.

The economic burden of these wars is also staggering. Nearly twenty years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, the global war on terror had cost about $8 trillion. That figure includes not only Department of Defense spending but also State Department expenditures, care for veterans, Department of Homeland Security funds, and interest payments on war borrowing. Brown’s Cost of War Project Co‑director Catherine Lutz said the Pentagon now absorbs the majority of federal discretionary spending, yet most people do not realize the scale of this funding. She warned that these costs will continue for decades as the country pays for veterans’ care and the environmental damage wrought by the wars.

Cheney championed the Patriot Act as a key pillar of the “war on terror” and campaigned aggressively to renew its provisions. In January 2006 he and President Bush launched a “double‑barrelled assault” on critics of domestic surveillance and opponents of the law; Cheney told the Heritage Foundation that Americans could not afford “one day” without the Patriot Act. Civil liberties groups argue that the Patriot Act dramatically expanded government surveillance powers at the expense of constitutional freedoms. Under the law, investigators can monitor online communications on an extremely low legal standard, and secret court orders can compel companies to hand over lists of what people read or which websites they visit. The American Civil Liberties Union notes that the law is enforced in secret, weakens judicial review, and allows agents to seize business and communications records without probable cause. By 2004 the ACLU had filed lawsuits challenging these provisions and denounced the administration’s claim that there were no abuses as a “red herring.” The Patriot Act turned ordinary Americans into subjects of a vast dragnet, chilling free speech and giving the executive branch powers reminiscent of past crises.

Keep reading

Dick Cheney, War Criminal and Torturer, Dead at 84

Former U.S. Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney died on November 3, 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a Global War on Terror that unleashed torture, preemptive war, and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to the post‑9/11 wars he championed. Dick Cheney’s legacy is one of unprecedented destruction and the erosion of civil liberties.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell resisted calls to topple Saddam Hussein. Cheney argued that invading Baghdad would force the United States to occupy Iraq alone, risk its territorial integrity, and require unacceptable casualties. “It’s a quagmire if you go that far,” he told PBS’s Frontline in 1994, asking how many additional dead Americans Saddam was worth. Those words reflect a prudence that vanished after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Within days, the vice president laid out a radical new doctrine. On NBC’s Meet the Press he said America must operate on the “dark side,” spend time in the shadows, and use “any means at our disposal” to achieve its objectives.

Cheney’s longtime counsel, David Addington, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee drafted memos arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees captured in the Global War on Terror. The State Department’s legal advisor warned that claiming the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions was legally flawed and would reverse over a century of U.S. policy. Cheney pressed ahead, telling The Washington Times that he “signed off” on the CIA’s secret detention and rendition program and, as a principal participant in National Security Council meetings, he authorized the agency’s interrogation program, including waterboarding. In 2006 he called waterboarding a “no‑brainer,” and in 2009 he acknowledged knowing about the practice “as a general policy that we had approved.”

The vice president’s embrace of waterboarding ignored that the technique has long been treated as torture under U.S. and international law. Amnesty International notes that Japanese officials were convicted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials for subjecting American pilots to waterboarding, and U.S. courts have sentenced sheriffs to prison for using the technique. Amnesty stresses that its status as torture is “not a matter of opinion.” The Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that approving aggressive interrogation techniques sent a message that physical pressure and degradation were acceptable treatment for detainees. Amnesty calls Cheney “one of the principal architects of a policy that amounted to torture.”

Cheney’s legal defense of the program was rife with distortions. He misrepresented Justice Department opinions, falsely suggested Japanese waterboarders were never prosecuted, overstated detainee recidivism, insisted detainees had no rights under the Geneva Conventions, and repeated unproven claims of ties between Saddam Hussein and al‑Qaeda.

Keep reading

Ex-UK defense minister calls for Crimea to be made ‘uninhabitable’

Kiev’s Western backers must help make Crimea “not inhabitable,” former UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said.

Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on Tuesday, Wallace argued that Russia views the Black Sea peninsula as a “Holy Mount,” and that Ukraine should strike where it can inflict the greatest damage.

“We have to help Ukraine have the long-range capabilities to make Crimea unviable. We need to choke the life out of Crimea,” Wallace said.

“If it is not inhabitable or not possible for it to function… I think, if we do that, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will suddenly realize he’s got something to lose.” 

He suggested that Kiev should prioritize attacks on the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Crimea with Russia’s Krasnodar Region. Ukrainian forces struck the bridge in October 2022 and July 2023, temporarily halting traffic.

Wallace, who served as defense secretary from 2019 to 2023, previously urged Ukraine to mobilize more of its population to fight Russia.

Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia shortly after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev. Since then, Ukraine has imposed an economic blockade, cutting electricity and water supplies to the region. Home to around 2.5 million people, the peninsula also hosts Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The Kremlin has described the UK as “one of the leaders of this pro-war camp” due to its military aid to Kiev and calls for tighter sanctions on Russia.

Keep reading

Senator Graham Calls For Disarming Hezbollah By Military Force

Hawkish Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said “it’s time for Hezbollah to go” – and he’s willing to use military force to do it.

“They are trained by Iran, they are loyal to Iran, and we’re looking for military power in Lebanon to be loyal to the Lebanese people and a good partner to the region,” Graham, who is the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said at a press conference in Tel Aviv. 

He made the comments soon after meeting with both Lebanese and Israeli officials. The Trump administration has been heavily pressuring the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, even after it was greatly weakened after Israel took out its top leadership, including the slain longtime Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, last year.

Graham declared: “If we cannot reach a peaceful disarmament solution for Hezbollah, then we need to look at Plan B. Plan B is disarming Hezbollah by military force.”

“Also, there is a decision made to eliminate UNIFIL as a U.N. peace keeping organization in the next 15 months. Now that presents an opportunity for the Lebanese Armed Forces to replace a very ineffective UNIFIL and prove to not only the Lebanese people, but Israel and others, that Lebanon has a capability it did not possess before,” the US senator went on to say.

He didn’t specify whether he envisions that American troops could be involved in such a military intervention – and he likely has foremost in his mind the Israelis and Lebanese taking action – but he’s one who has never shied away from using American soldiers in overseas conflicts.

US envoy to the region Tom Barrack had led the American delegation that visited Beirut this week, and there was plenty of controversy unleashed by the visit, and specifically when he chastised the Lebanese over being ‘civilized’ and not ‘animalistic’…

Keep reading

Another Narrative Busted: Bolton Investigation Began Under Biden

For several days the media has been saying the Trump administration FBI targeted John Bolton, hence the FBI raid on his home and office.  However, the New York Times now outlines how the investigation into John Bolton began during the Biden administration and picked up speed after they received access to his email information from an “adversarial country’s spy service.”

Apparently, John Bolton used an unclassified email system to send information to his friends and allies.  The emails were intercepted.  Bolton was discussing information that appears to have been the outcome of his access to classified information as National Security Advisor.

CTH has previously outlined how John Bolton’s business model was essentially selling information and influence.  This common DC business model seems to have formed the baseline for him to share sensitive, possibly classified information, of greater value.  This does not come as a surprise.

Selling information is the currency of affluence in Washington DC.  That’s why the removal of security clearances is looked upon as devastating within the beltway.  New York Times story below:

NEW YORK TIMES – The investigation into President Trump’s former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence officials collected information that appeared to show that he had mishandled classified information, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The United States gathered data from an adversarial country’s spy service, including emails with sensitive information that Mr. Bolton, while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case that remains open.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

In a sign of the stakes for Mr. Bolton, he is in talks to retain the high-profile criminal defense lawyer Abbe Lowell. Mr. Lowell, who has represented Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, is defending two other prominent perceived enemies of Mr. Trump who are now under scrutiny: the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board. (read more)

At the time of the raid, we noted the activity of Bolton mirrors that of former Senator John McCain (now dead). “An FBI investigation under the auspices of potential violations of the Espionage Act, where Bolton would have leveraged current or prior classified intelligence information as part of his influence business.

Almost identically to former Senator John McCain, John Bolton was well known to intersect with the nation of Qatar as part of his operation.  Qatar has deep pockets and a long-identified influence operation throughout the Middle East, sometimes playing both sides. Qatar is also the playground for the CIA.

While it is yet unknown which nation and which activity Bolton was likely engaged in, the highest probability centers around the deepest pockets, which would also put Bolton on the CIA radar.

Keep reading