The Peace Press — Saturday, July 10, 2021 edition
American Propaganda — — — — -served up from notable flagship newspapers like the New York Times — — — — -a paper that now actively engages in disinformation and misinformation operations directly for the CIA. Most other media channels and papers then repeat what they see in the New York Times or the Washington Post thus amplifying the propaganda on a national scale.
RUSSIA IS NOT OUR ENEMY. CHINA IS NOT OUR ENEMY.
Planet Earth depends on diplomacy and international cooperation with Russia and China to mitigate the effects of climate change, to mitigate nuclear proliferation, to mitigate the threat of religious violent extremism, to mitigate international law violation by powerful states and to work together cooperatively on various common issues of global concern. Our species depends upon international cooperation whereas great power competition only threatens our species with extinction and many other species too. It is critically important that we set our differences aside and work together cooperatively with Russia and China for the sake of the future of humanity.
Instead, the NYT and other newspapers want you to hate Russia to justify wasting trillions on a military establishment that does more harm than good to the nation in purports to serve.
“Sanger was first off the blocks in parroting former CIA Director John Brennan’s concoction, in the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 6, 2017, that Putin personally directed the “hacking of the DNC emails”. Those who rely on the NY Times do not know this yet, but testimony taken under oath by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 5, 2017 revealed that no one — not the Russians, no one — hacked those emails.”
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/07/06/new-york-times-pushing-the-envelope-on-russia/
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“Buffeted on all sides, from the unceremonious (literally) departure from Afghanistan to various cyber crimes blamed on Russia, President Biden is being challenged by the likes of the New York Times’s David Sanger to show he has cojones (free translation from Spanish — manliness). ( See: Biden Weighs a Response to Ransomware Attacks.
Will Biden let himself be shamed into taking “some kind of visible action” against Russia; something much stronger than just another “verbal warning”? What could possibly go wrong?
The answer? A whole lot can go wrong.”
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/07/08/a-cyber-culprit-other-than-russia/
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Just because our military claims something does not make it true. Remember, there is such a thing as a conflict of interest at play.
It is not the Russia who is the aggressor nation. It is the United States, Britain and NATO who are the aggressor nations. Russia is merely playing defense.
“The US and NATO have made a point to increase their military footprint in the Black Sea since the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine that led to Crimea joining the Russian Federation and sparked the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Holding such massive drills in the Black Sea is a provocation despite the US and NATO framing them as routine operations.”
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/07/07/us-navy-says-black-sea-drills-are-essential-despite-russia-tensions/
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You think you’re free? Think again. You are being watched by an oppressor military government. Perpetual war helps destroy the Republic, it does not protect it.
“In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked documents proving that XKeyscore was the surveillance state’s incarnation of paranoia. What did it take for the NSA to justify vacuuming up Americans’ emails and internet data? Merely detecting “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”
The peril of that farcical standard was compounded because, as Snowden explained, NSA surveillance tools enabled him to “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.” Thanks to its all-encompassing standard of “suspicious,” NSA has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion [email and phone] transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens,” according to former NSA senior analyst William Binney.
Six months after Snowden’s disclosures began, federal judge Richard Leon issued a ruling denouncing the NSA surveillance regime as “almost Orwellian”:”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/09/sham-surveillance-safeguards-vs-tucker-carlson/
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“The late professor launched the first incarnation in 1974. A year after his death, his wife and colleagues are pressing forward under new name.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/07/07/stephen-cohens-legacy-lives-on-in-group-fostering-u-s-russia-relations/
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“John Quincy Adams delivered his address celebrating American independence two hundred years ago this week, and in that speech he famously told his fellow Americans that their country does not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” This was just one part of his paean to American independence, which was then not yet half a century old, but it is the part that is most often cited because it sets out a clear rule for how America should conduct itself in the world. It is also the part that later generations of American leaders have chosen to disregard entirely to our detriment and that of the rest of the world.
In the two centuries since Adams warned against enlisting in the causes of other nations, the U.S. has increasingly involved itself in “the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.” Because our government presumes to “lead” the world, it takes it as a given that it has the right to interfere anywhere and to intervene forcibly whenever it wishes. Today our government wears the “imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murkey radiance of dominion and power” just as Adams feared that it would if it ignored the principles he defended. The question for Americans today is whether we want to cast off that imperial diadem and reclaim some measure of self-government by ending our involvement in our many foreign wars and entanglements.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Daniel_Larison/2021/07/06/casting-off-the-imperial-diadem/
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I deeply respect this statement by the President and I hope it is true. Time will tell. We will continue to measure the substance of policy to see if it matches the rhetoric and then react accordingly. Kudos to President Biden if he means what he says here.
“I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” Biden said.
Biden offered little detail on what the US military footprint in Afghanistan will look like after August 31st. “I intend to maintain our diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, and we are coordinating closely with our international partners in order to continue to secure the international airport,” he said.
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/07/08/biden-military-mission-in-afghanistan-will-be-over-by-august-31/
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But isn’t it interesting how the New York Times wrote an article that did not include the group Veterans for Peace who has advocated for peace longer than any other veterans organization? Propaganda by omission is one of their favorite propaganda tools.
“A politically diverse set of veterans’ groups critical of the conflicts abroad have found ways to gain access to the White House to lobby for withdrawals.”
https://archive.is/bfWDd
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“Thirty thousand dead from suicide in 20 years among American service-members and veterans. Brown University’s Costs of War Project, utilizing data from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), calculates that four times as many men and women who have served in the US military since 9/11 have died by suicide than were killed in the post-9/11 wars. The vast majority of those killed by suicide have been veterans, meaning men and women not still in uniform. While the rate of suicide among active-duty service-members is alarmingly high, the rate among veterans is even more so, and, in particular, it appears highest among combat veterans.
Anyone who served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan may likely now know more friends killed by suicide than killed by the Taliban or by Iraqi insurgents. The same possibly for veterans who fought in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. Suicide after taking part in war, and its killing, is not a new phenomenon, and its likely cause, guilt, is understood if seldom discussed.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/09/was-it-just-america-and-her-suicidal-combat-veterans/
“This tempest in a teapot suddenly became a farce after a stack of soggy secret British naval documents was found behind a park bench in Kent. ‘Defender’s’ mission was discussed in them, Russia’s possible response, and, of all crazy things, potential new British operations in Afghanistan. All to please Uncle Sam, of course.
These embarrassing documents caused an uproar in Britain, made the government look like fools, and put the lie to Whitehall’s claims that the naval operation was only an innocent patrol. Britons are very intelligent people but tend to be sloppy and poorly organized. Britain has been a happy hunting ground for Soviet/Russian spies since the war.
Small wonder the French call Britain ‘perfide Albion.’ The Brits are masters at intrigue, double-dealing and propaganda. British propaganda drew the United States into two world wars. In our era, Britain has assumed leadership of western propaganda efforts against Russia and its allies.”
https://www.unz.com/emargolis/rule-britannia-britannia-rule-the-waves/
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:America has already attempted two adventures in Afghanistan’s imperial graveyard. Neither ended well, and both backfired. In the 1980s, Washington waged a shortsighted and indulgent proxy war against the country’s then Soviet occupiers, backing the most reactionary Islamist forces that would later form like an (era-appropriate) Taliban Voltron. Sure, the US vengefully handed the Soviet Union — per President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — its own “Vietnam,” but (karma being a bitch, and all) the CIA-fueled blowback after the Russian retreat included a worldwide jihadi diaspora and a man named Bin Laden. America’s overreaction to ole Osama’s awful but one-off 9/11 attacks then almost tragicomically handed the USits own Vietnam encore.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2021/07/08/spare-us-an-afghan-threequel-joe-dont-get-pulled-back-in/
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“Truth be told, Afghanistan was never a vital interest of the United States but has always been the most priceless possession of the Afghan people. But how the Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara of Afghanistan rule themselves, 8,000 miles away, is not our business.
There never was a vital US interest in Afghanistan worth a war of the cost in blood, treasure and time that we have just fought.”
https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2021/07/08/is-afghanistan-a-failed-mission/
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“It bears pointing out that this is not a great way for a country to handle matters of war and death, especially not the most powerful country in the world, and especially not a country that espouses the power of democracy. The U.S. government is basically allowed to conduct military operations on autopilot with only the slightest oversight and accountability.
And while Congress is finally moving to do the bare minimum to curtail the White House’s ability to conduct “private wars,” there’s no sign that the executive branch is willing to dismantle the system that made these strikes a casual affair.”
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/biden-s-defense-new-airstrikes-iraq-syria-weak-n1272573
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Coleen Rowley spotlights the ever-growing list of domestic blowback incidents.
“While the Democratic side of the country (and its mainstream media) still focus almost solely on white supremacy as the cause, and we’ve been told for years to blame Russian Facebook posts for “sowing discord,” it’s high time to also consider whether our perpetual wars abroad have finally and fully boomeranged back home.
The facts about such blowback from our decades-long cultivation of militarism speak for themselves. In a 2016 New York Times piece, an anthropology professor at George Washington University found that:
“…military veterans account for a disproportionate number of mass shooters. Veterans account for 13 percent of the adult population, but more than a third of the adult perpetrators of the 43 worst mass killings since 1984 had been in the United States military. It is clear that, in the etiology of mass killings, military service is an important risk factor.”
It may not be politically correct to also recall that Timothy McVeigh and John Muhammad both served as highly decorated Army sergeants in the first Gulf War. The former bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 men, women and children and injuring more than 680 others — the largest act of “domestic terrorism” ever committed.
The latter, better known as the “D.C. Sniper,” killed 10 random people (and wounded many others) in 2002 around the Washington, D.C., area. But many have long connected the dots.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/08/us-wars-come-home-to-roost/
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“The whistleblower acted on behalf of the public’s right to know what is being done in its name.
“Hale’s honesty, courage, and exemplary readiness to act in accord with his conscience are critically needed. Instead, the U.S. government has done its best to silence him.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/07/why-daniel-hale-deserves-gratitude-not-prison
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You call this a military withdrawal? What are you, stupid?
“Over-the-horizon” air operations, possibly directed at the Taliban, may rely very heavily on drone assassination and drone targeting for manned aircraft.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/05/biden-acknowledges-over-horizon-air-attacks-planned-against-taliban
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“Biden is continuing the same failed regime change policy as Trump, and Venezuela remains under crippling sanctions.”
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/07/06/biden-reaffirms-us-support-for-venezuelas-guaido/
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“Deadly June 10th Spill of Toxins from U.S. Military Base in Okinawa Could Sicken and Kill Thousands”
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/07/05/deadly-june-10th-spill-of-toxins-from-u-s-military-base-in-okinawa-could-sicken-and-kill-thousands/
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“We need to openly consider all the costs, benefits, and consequences of military action,” said the two Democratic lawmakers, “and that includes doing everything we can to prevent and respond to civilian harm.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/07/06/warren-and-khanna-demand-probe-undercounting-civilians-killed-us-military
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“One company is empowering Kurdish human rights abusers. Another is accused of selling Iranian fuel to the U.S. military.”
https://prospect.org/world/the-real-war-dogs-of-iraq/
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“The struggle to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen has run into another obstacle. This time it’s partisanship. But it isn’t Republican opposition blocking Joe Biden’s promise to end U.S. participation in the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. It’s the president’s own hesitancy to keep his word paired with the unwillingness of Democrats in Congress to cross a president from their own party.”
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/06/28/ending-the-war-in-yemen-means-overcoming-political-cowardice/
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“Because western media are designed to protect the powerful, most people are more aware of smears about Assange being a Russian agent or a rapist than of his victimization by a tyrannical assault on world press freedoms, writes Caity Johnstone.”
“Britain’s High Court has granted the US government limited permission to appeal its extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, meaning that the acclaimed journalist will continue to languish in prison for exposing US war crimes while the appeals process plays out. “
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/07/sweeping-it-under-the-carpet/
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“Part three of a six-part series on Julian Assange and the Espionage Act.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/08/the-espionage-act-julian-assange-3-passing-the-espionage-act/
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“With few exceptions, American newspapers voluntarily censored themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated it. In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting American battlefield losses.
On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what ‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.
After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war home to America and spurred popular anti-war protests, the military reacted by blaming the news media for its defeat. It then instituted, initially in the First Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters from private media companies, which accepted the arrangement, much as World War II newspapers censored themselves.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/09/the-espionage-act-julian-assange-4-in-hot-cold-war/
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“More than 250 doctors around the world have written to Joe Biden to tell him to drop the Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange in retaliation for publishing critical information about the United States.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/07/doctors-tell-biden-let-assange-go/
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The U.K. justice system — — — — just another poodle of the U.S. Imperialist warfare state. When the U.S. tells Britain to jump, Britain responds by asking, “How High?” Oh how the mighty British Empire has fallen. The lion is now but an American poodle who shits and pisses on the carpet on Washington’s command.
“A district judge in Magistrate’s Court on Jan. 4 ruled against sending Assange to the U.S. because his mental condition put him at serious risk of suicide if he were kept in isolation in an American prison. The High Court Wednesday allowed the U.S. a limited appeal of that decision only on the issue of U.S. prison conditions and not on Assange’s mental health.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/07/desperate-to-get-assange-us-promises-no-sams-prison-time-in-australia/
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“Join WikiLeaks Editor Kristinn Hrafnsson; ex-Icelandic interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson; Stundin journalist Bjartmar Alexandersson; and Australian MP Julian Hill as they discuss major developments in the U.S. case against Julian Assange. Watch the replay.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/08/watch-new-cn-live-episode-assange-on-the-brink/
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“The U.S. government hates Julian Assange. Can we trust the Justice Department to not put him in a SAM unit or to keep him out of an ADX super max prison?”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/10/john-kiriakou-doj-promises-ring-hollow/
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“Joe Biden is showing up his former boss, Barack Obama, in a key area of foreign policy. He has decided to have no public daylight between the United States and Israel, in the political interests of himself and the new Israeli government.
The strategy helps explain why Biden has had very little public criticism of Israel, while apparently jawboning the government behind the scenes to rein in its actions. And in turn why the new Naftali Bennett government in Israel has tried to defuse sources of international outrage by going slow on the continued illegal settlement of Palestinian lands. Even as the outrages quietly continue.”
