CIA

John Pilger’s 2014 Warning About Ukraine

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Originally published by The Guardian, May 13, 2014
In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia
Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world
By John Pilger

Republished by Consortium News, September 24, 2022

In an article on May 13, 2014 in The Guardian, republished here, John Pilger warned the “U.S. is threatening to take the world to war” over Ukraine, words that have taken on new meaning.

Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his “updated summary of the record of U.S. foreign policy” which shows that, since 1945, the U.S. has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – “our” terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the U.S. state department noted that, following Nato’s campaign in 2011, “Libya has become a terrorist safe haven“.

The name of “our” enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to U.S. domination.

The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.

“If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained ‘pariah’ role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.”

Washington’s role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the U.S. is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the U.S. and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But Nato’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with U.S.-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend’s provocative referendum.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine’s population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels”, as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a C.I.A. theme park – run personally by C.I.A. director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of “special units” from the C.I.A. and F.B.I. setting up a “security structure” that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.

A doctor described trying to rescue people, “but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn’t even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent.” [see footnote]

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta’s defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on “insurgents” would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow “trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation“, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama’s grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its “remarkable restraint” after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is “duly elected”. As Henry Kissinger once said: “It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.”

In the U.S. media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says“. Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia’s “undeclared war”. For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that “the world changed” following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs “special operations” – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?_______________

FOOTNOTE: The Guardian attached the following footnote to Pilger’s story, which Pilger says suggests “that a quote of a witness to the Odessa atrocity is unverified. This appeared only in the last edition. In fact, the quote didn’t come from a Facebook entry, but from a Voice of America broadcast and was verified.” This is The Guardian‘s footnote: ” The following footnote was appended on 16 May 2014: The quotation from a doctor who says he was ‘stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals’ was from an account on a Facebook page that has subsequently been removed.”

John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com

[John Pilger died December 30, 2023]

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/24/john-pilgers-2014-warning-about-ukraine/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

Using Ukraine since 1948

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From Consortium News

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

The United States has for nearly 80 years seen Ukraine as the staging ground for its once covert and increasingly overt war with Russia. 

After years of warnings, and after talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia fought back two years ago. With neither side backing down, Ukraine is increasingly becoming a flashpoint that could lead to nuclear war. 

The West thinks Russia is bluffing.

But its doctrine states that if Russia feels its existence is threatened it could resort to nuclear arms. Instead of taking these warnings seriously, NATO is recklessly opening corridors for a ground war against Russia in Ukraine; France says it’s putting together a coalition of nations to enter the war, despite Russia saying French or any other NATO force would be fair game. 

In Paris the other day Joe Biden said Russia wants to conquer all of Europe but can’t even take Khariv. It is this kind of inflammatory nonsense, combined with allowing Ukraine to fire NATO weapons into Russian territory, that is imperiling us all. 

The danger started building up many years ago but it is now reaching a climax. 

The U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and its extremists, to undermine Russia began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. 
https://en%5Bdot%5Dwikipedia%5Bdot%5Dorg/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.  [https://www.archives[dot]gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf]

Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union. 

The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. …

Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe.

Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991.

“Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.” 

Continued Until and Beyond Ukrainian Independence

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved.

Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998.

He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the U.S. National Archives study says.  

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.
https://www.ibtimes%5Bdot%5Dco%5Bdot%5Duk/america-backing-neo-nazis-euromaidan-1437848
https://www.ibtimes%5Bdot%5Dco%5Bdot%5Duk/ukrainian-parliament-impeaches-president-yanukovich-1437539
http://www.facebook%5Bdot%5Dcom/MaidanUSA

That is a direct link between the U.S.-backed 2014 Maidan coup against a democratically-elected Ukrainian government and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism. 

[See: Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story] 

Since 2014, the U.S. pushed for an attack on the Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who had rejected the coup, and NATO began training and equipping Ukrainian troops.  Combined with talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia reacted after years of warning. 

More than two years after Russia’s intervention, with Ukraine clearly losing the war, Western leaders will do just about anything to save their political skins, as they’ve staked too much on winning in Ukraine.   Don’t listen to them.  They need a West in denial of the dangers facing us.

As President John F. Kennedy said in his 1963 American University speech:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
https://www.jfklibrary%5Bdot%5Dorg/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610

The world may wake up when it’s too late — after nuclear missiles have already started flying.   


Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/10/using-ukraine-since-1948/

America’s $100-billion Germ Warfare Industry is a “Criminal Enterprise”, says author of U.S. Biowarfare Act

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From World Politics, Human Rights and International Law
Francis A. Boyle
(2021)

October 11, 2015 Interview and article by Sherwood Ross

The American legal authority who in 1989 drafted the law Congress enacted to comply with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention says the U.S. today [October 11, 2015] is in flagrant violation of that Convention.

“Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have spent somewhere in the area of $100 billion” on offensive biological warfare, charges Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign. 

Boyle said an estimated 13,000 “death scientists” in 400 laboratories in the U.S. and abroad, are employed making new strains of offensive killer germs that will be resistant to vaccines. 

For example, Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s group at the University of Wisconsin has found a way to increase the toxicity of the flu virus by 200 times! Boyle says Kawaoka is “the same death scientist who resurrected the genocidal Spanish Flu virus for the Pentagon for offensive biowarfare purposes.”

As for fighting flu, the National Institutes of Health in 2006, a typical year, got only $120 million from Congress to fight flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans annually.  By contrast, Congress gave NIH $1.76 billion for “biodefense,” even though the anthrax outbreak in 2001 killed just five persons.

“These distorted budgetary allocations,” (spending 15 times as much for germ warfare as for fighting flu) demonstrate that the priority here is not the promotion of the public health of American citizens but rather to further develop the U.S. offensive biowarfare industry that will someday ‘blowback’ upon the American people with a catastrophic pandemic,” Boyle said.

He went on to say the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) are “ready, willing, and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests…They have a super-weapons-grade anthrax that they already used against us in October, 2001.”

Boyle here was referring to the anthrax pathogens mailed to two U.S. Senators (Tom Daschle, of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy, of Vermont) and others after 9/11 that were traced back to the Government’s biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick, Md.

Boyle’s remarks came in response to written questions from Sherwood Ross, a Miami, Fla.-based columnist. Asked if the recent outbreaks of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia could be from U.S. Government-backed facilities, Boyle replied: 

“These Ebola vaccines were experimental U.S. biowarfare vaccines that were being tested out in West Africa. It was a result of testing out of the U.S. biowarfare vaccines at our lab in Kenema, Sierra Leone, that created the West African Ebola pandemic in the first place.” 

Boyle warned that the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, a high-containment research lab, has been seeking for potential biowarfare agents in the wild in other parts of the world “in order to turn them into biological weapons.”

He said, “They should shut down Galveston as an ongoing criminal enterprise along the lines of the S.S. and the Gestapo — except that Galveston is far more dangerous to humanity than Hitler’s death squads ever were.” 

Boyle added, “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the the Pentagon and the C.I.A. into death science. These include Wisconsin, North Carolina, Boston U., Harvard, M.I.T., Tulane, University of Chicago, and my own University of Illinois, as well as many others.”

(Sherwood Ross formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and was a columnist for UPI (Magazines In Review) and Reuters (Workplace.)

BOYLE CHARGES U.S. GERM WARFARE PROGRAM IS “CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE”

Q. AND A. WITH FRANCIS A. BOYLE ON BIOWARFARE

Francis A. Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 (BWATA), the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. His BWATA was passed unanimously by both Houses of the United States Congress and signed into law by President George Bush Sr. The story is told in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism (Clarity Press: 2005). He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

Q: To get some idea of the magnitude of U.S. biological warfare research involving deadly diseases now going forward, the Federal government is said to be funding 400 laboratories globally. These labs purportedly are concocting new strains of lethal microbes for which there is no cure. Right off the bat, I’d like to ask you, “Is this a criminal enterprise whose dimensions are being concealed from the American public?” 

A: Of course it is! Since September 11, 2001, we have spent somewhere in the area approaching $100 billion on biological warfare. Effectively we now have an Offensive Biological Warfare Industry in this country that violates the Biological Weapons Convention and my Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act of 1989. We have reconstructed the Offensive Biological Warfare Industry that we had deployed in this county before its prohibition by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 that was described by Sy Hersh in his groundbreaking exposé of it in his book Chemical & Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal (Bobbs-Merrill: 1968). Our putative adversaries around the world such as Russia and China have undoubtedly reached the same conclusions I have derived from the same open and public sources, and have responded in kind. So what the world now witnesses is an all-out offensive biological warfare arms race among the major military powers of the world: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, inter alia. The Biological Weapons Convention has become the proverbial “mere scrap of paper.” But my BWATA still remains the law of the land in the United States with a penalty of life-in-prison for violators. That is why the self-styled “synthetic biologists” proposed to repeal my BWATA so that they can use Synthetic Biology to manufacture new classes of biological weapons more efficiently.

Q: Exactly what is biowarfare?

A: Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission. Toxins—living organisms such as fungi—are also used.

Q: Which are the most dangerous?

A: Today several U.S.G. labs are at work on Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague, Ebola, Botulism, and the genocidal Spanish Flu virus. 

Q: What do they do with these pathogens?

A: Using DNA genetic engineering, U.S. death scientists are concocting new strains of lethal microbes for which there are no cures. Bacteria, for example, can be made resistant to vaccines, made more virulent, easier to spread, and harder to eradicate. Right now U.S. death scientists are scouring the biosphere around the world to locate any bioagent in nature that they can exploit and pervert into offensive biowarfare purposes.

Q: USA Today has done some fine reporting on this subject. Among other things, their reporters have exposed massive incidents of lax security conditions at U.S.G. labs and university labs funded by U.S.G. What might the consequences be of this disregard for safety?

A: This is a biocatastrophe waiting to happen here in the United States. In fact it has already happened in West Africa with the Ebola pandemic there. It is only a matter of time before we have a similar pandemic at home here caused by U.S. biowarfare programs. In this regard you should watch the excellent award-winning documentary by Coen & Nadler entitled Anthrax-War (Transformer Films: 2009) in which I appear and served as a consultant on.

Q: Recently, 13 cases of plague were reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah, resulting in three deaths. Could these deadly plague pathogens (infectious agents) have come from the U.S. government’s (U.S.G.) germ warfare labs? 

A: I suspect they might have. But proving it is another matter. Any time you see some mysterious and widespread outbreak of an exotic disease around the country, you have to factor into the analytical explanatory equation that it could be the result of some illegal U.S. biowarfare program.

Q: Is it a fact, as alleged, that the Anthrax pathogens mailed to two U.S. Senators and others after 9/11 trace back to the U.S.G. biowarfare lab at Ft. Detrick, Md.? You have written that Senators Daschle and Leahy, both Democrats, had opposed the Patriot Act, which gives U.S.G. unprecedented powers and abolishes Americans’ traditional personal liberties. If the Anthrax was sent by the Pentagon, was it to intimidate the Senators?

A: Yes! I have written about this in my book Biowarfare and Terrorism (Clarity Press: 2005). More recently my friend and colleague Professor Graeme MacQueen from McMaster University in Canada has also written about this in his book The 2001 Anthrax Deception (Clarity Press: 2014). You are free to read these two books, draw your own conclusions, and see if you agree with us. Over the years there are numerous interviews I have given on this matter that you can obtain by Googling my name and adding the word “anthrax” to their search engine. The twin purposes of these October 2001 anthrax attacks were (1) to scaremonger the American People and Congress into adopting the totalitarian and Orwellian USA Patriot Act and (2) to wage an offensive war of aggression against Iraq. As President George Bush Jr. proudly boasted: “Mission accomplished!” — on both counts.

Q: Recently, there have been outbreaks of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia. You have raised the possibility that U.S.G. may be illegally experimenting with these diseases on citizens of those African nations. Could you please elaborate?

A: These Ebola vaccines were experimental U.S. biowarfare vaccines that were being tested out in West Africa. It was a result of testing out of the U.S. biowarfare vaccines at our lab in Kenema, Sierra Leone, that created the West African Ebola pandemic in the first place. I have given numerous interviews to support my conclusion here in more detail. These can be located by Googling my name and adding the word “Ebola” to their search engine.

Q: Is such germ warfare development work illegal under the BWC Treaty of 1972? (Dr. Boyle was the American attorney who wrote the implementing legislation for the U.S. that passed Congress without a single negative vote.)

A: Yes. The U.S. is a party to the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention which bans “development, production, stockpiling and use of microbes or their poisonous products except in amounts necessary for protective and peaceful research…” Colonel David Huxsoll, Commander of the Army’s Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, has admitted that offensive research is indistinguishable from defensive research. 

Q: Although Russia said it scrapped its germ warfare program after the Communists lost power in 1991, the U.S. budget for this purpose has increased. Are there any countries or terrorist groups that might realistically attack the U.S. with such weapons? One critic has said .U.S.G.’s biowarfare push resembles “a dog chasing its own tail.”

A: The truth of the matter is that the United States government has been pursuing the development of an offensive biowarfare program and industry since the Reagan administration and his Neoconservatives came to power in 1981. I set forth this earlier biowarfare documentation on Reagan and his Neo-Cons in my previous book The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy (Transnational Publishers Inc.: 1989), Chapter 8, “The Legal Distortions Behind the Reagan Administration’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Buildup.” Interestingly enough, the Department of Defense itself reprinted my study as Current News: Special Edition: CHEMICAL WEAPONS, NO. 1586 (28 May 1987) and distributed it to thousands of high-level D.O.D. civilian and military officials all over the world.

Q: It sounds fantastic, I know, but scientists once paid by the U.S.G. to cure cancer are now being paid to develop deadlier strains of anthrax, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, tularemia, Q fever, and other dread diseases. Comment? 

A: On the relationship between cancer research and bioweapons you should have a look at the book by Dr. Len Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola – Nature, Accident, or Intentional? (Tetrahedron Inc. 1996).

Q: You have written that Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s group at the University of Wisconsin has found a way to increase the toxicity of flu virus by 200 times. What is the purpose of this horrible-sounding research and why should U.W. support it?

A: This is the same U.S. death scientist who resurrected the genocidal Spanish Flu virus for the Pentagon for offensive biowarfare purposes. Like all U.S. universities, Bucky Badger U. gets a cut out of all research funds brought in from the outside. Here at Chief Illiniwak University they publicly admitted that they take 51 cents out of every research $1 Buck brought in from the outside and charge it off to “overhead.” At most American Universities today, money talks and principles walk. My Disalma Mater Harvard is no better, no worse, and no different.

Q: During the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, the Reagan White House okayed the Pentagon’s sale of weapons-specific biological agents and poison gas to Iraq that Saddam Hussein used against Iran and his own Kurdish minority? At least 5,000 Kurds were gassed. And, according to Time magazine of Jan. 20, 2014, the CIA reckoned Iran suffered 50,000 deaths. Doesn’t this prove the White House has used biological agents offensively? 

A: Certainly chemical weapons were used illegally. In addition, the Reagan administration shipped weapons-specific biowarfare agents to Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the hope and expectation that he would weaponize them and use them against Iran. He did weaponize them. So far I have not seen evidence that he used bioweapons against Iran or the Kurds. But these biowarfare weapons that Saddam Hussein produced thanks to Reagan and his Neo-Cons did “blowback” upon U.S. armed forces when they invaded Iraq in 1991. This “blowback” played a causative role in the Gulf War Syndrome that afflicted U.S. soldiers who participated in Gulf War I under President Bush Sr. I discuss this in my book Destroying World Order (Clarity Press: 2004) and in the British TV documentary The Dirty War (1993) produced by and shown on Britain’s Independent Television Network TV4 that I consulted on and appear in.

Q: You have pointed out that the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, a high-containment research lab, admits to seeking for potential biowarfare agents in the wild in other parts of the world “in order to turn them into biological weapons.”

A: Right! They should shut down Galveston as an ongoing criminal enterprise along the lines of the S.S. and the Gestapo — except that Galveston is far more dangerous to humanity than Hitler’s death squads ever were. They say their work with Ebola is for a vaccine, but the same technology can also be weaponized. Galveston is working to aerosolize Ebola just as Ft. Detrick worked to aerosolize Anthrax. Aerosolization of a biowarfare agent is always the tip-off to the development of a weapon to be delivered by air to human beings who will breathe it in. Ft. Detrick should be shut down as well because it too is an ongoing criminal enterprise.

Q: Besides Ft. Detrick and Galveston, are there any other biowarfare laboratories you believe should be closed?

A: All of them. Since 1981, the Pentagon has been gearing up to fight and “win” biological warfare without prior public knowledge and review. What’s more, American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. into death science. These include Wisconsin, North Carolina, Boston U., Harvard, M.I.T., Tulane, University of Chicago, and my own University of Illinois as well as many others.

Q: Biological warfare development requires highly sophisticated technology and safe laboratories. No so-called “terrorist” group is known to possess anything like the requisite facilities. Besides America, what countries have operative biowarfare labs? 

A: U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China, Israel, for sure. There are several other countries that the U.S. has established satellite biowarfare labs in.

Q: Is there any published data on U.S.G.’s expenditures for biowarfare since 9/11? I assume it has taken off like other Pentagon outlays.

A: Yes, there are published figures on this in the open record. The last time I did a calculation from them the sum was approaching $100 billion. By comparison, in 2012 Dollars we spent $30 Billion on the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bombs that were then used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can see my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence (Clarity Press: 2002), Chapter 2, “The Lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” So that historical precedent and analogy is a pretty good indication that the U.S. Offensive Biowarfare Industry is intended for use on human beings somewhere. The momentum behind the money propels inexorably towards use of the weapons.

Q: Does the recent Pentagon mail-out of live anthrax virus to 86 laboratories here and to 7 nations abroad, bear out your prior criticism of U.S.G.’s careless handling of these pathogens?

A: Of course. But I don’t believe there was anything “careless” or “accidental” about any of this. The Pentagon knows exactly what they are doing. They are not “incompetent” at the Pentagon. This was deliberate. Just like the anthrax attacks of October 2001 were deliberate.

Q: You contend that the American pharmaceutical industry and the World Health Organization (WHO) are dumping dangerous vaccines in West Africa where the publics are already suffering from Ebola. Why would WHO get involved in this? Can you elaborate?

A: First, to make money. WHO is a front organization for BIG PHARMA. Second, to reduce the numbers of Black West Africans — genocide.

Q: It’s been estimated that 36,000 Americans are dying every year from flu. By contrast, only five Americans died from an Anthrax attack and that was back in 2001. Yet, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2006, a typical fiscal year, received only $120 million from Congress to fight flu but $1.76 billion for “biodefense”? 

A: Right! These distorted budgetary allocations demonstrate that the priority here is not the promotion of the Public Health of American citizens but rather to further develop the U.S. Offensive Biowarfare Industry that will someday “blowback” upon the American People with a catastrophic pandemic.

Q: Scientists who oppose the Pentagon’s activity insist that germ-warfare defense is clearly impractical; that every person would have to be vaccinated against every harmful biological agent. Since that likely is clearly impossible isn’t the only application of a defensive development in conjunction with offensive use?

A: We are currently stockpiling vaccines to immunize our Civilian and Military Leadership Elites for if and when they decide to wage offensive biowarfare. Pace the Constitution, “We the People of the United States” will have to fend for ourselves as best we can with our grossly underfunded and inadequate public health services that have been deliberately starved of money in order to feed the U.S. Offensive Biowarfare Industry Beast.

Q: Recently, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told a St. Louis audience of government employees, “You’re some of the nation’s most innovative and inventive physicists, chemists, and geneticists…molecular biologists,” etc. Yes, indeed. How many employees does the Pentagon now have in germ warfare work and how much is it costing the American people?

A: Overall I have read a figure that there about 13,000 death scientists in America today doing dirty biowarfare work who perversely call themselves “life scientists.” Doctor Mengele would be proud of them all! As Doctor Strangelove said: “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!” Seventy years after World War II ended the Nazis have won.

Q: Given all of the above, does it appear conceivable to you the Pentagon is developing a massive germ warfare weapon as a means of intimidating the world? After all, it has positioned itself in about 900 bases around the globe from which it can, and does, strike using conventional weapons, and it has used illegal radioactive ammunition in its war against Iraq.

A: Of course. But not just intimidation. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. are ready, willing, and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests. They already attacked the American People and Congress and disabled our Republic with super-weapons-grade anthrax in October 2001. A fortiori they will do so again to foreign states and peoples when deemed convenient. Us too! They have a stockpile of that super-weapons-grade anthrax that they already used against us in October 2001.

Q: Thank you, Professor Francis Boyle.

A: Thanks so much for doing this interview.

Ray McGovern discusses Seymour Hersh’s story on Nord Stream attack by U.S.

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from Consortium News
February 12, 2023

Ray McGovern discusses Seymour Hersh’s story, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” on Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon’s radio show, The Critical Hour. (With transcript).

Transcript

Garland Nixon

Sy Hersh has a piece at his Substack account entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. The New York Times called it a, quote unquote mystery. But the United States executed a covert C.I.A. operation that was kept secret until now. For insight into this, let’s turn to our first guest. He works with Tell the World, The publishing arm of the Ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner city Washington; has 27 year career as a C.I.A. analyst, serving as chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch and preparing the president’s daily brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he is, of course, Ray McGovern. As always, Ray, welcome back.

Ray McGovern

Thanks for having me.

Garland Nixon

So Sy Hersh writes, last June, the Navy divers operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. This is according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning. 

What I’ll say, Ray, is usually when we hear of unknown sources, we tend to question the veracity or validity of the piece.

But if it’s Sy Hersh, I got to give it its due. Ray McGovern.

Ray McGovern

I know Sy Hersh.

Garland Nixon

I know you do.

Ray McGovern

I know him to be a meticulous reporter, winner of five Polk Awards, Pulitzer Prize, you name it. Back in the day when honest reporters were so honored. This piece has all the earmarks of Sy’s meticulous approach, and he clearly has a very good source who felt, well, he felt a constitutional obligation to honor his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme oath any of us take. And that is to make sure that you tell the truth, especially when the Constitution is being violated. 

Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple. Curiously enough, it was against Germany. And curiously enough, President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nord Stream will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen. 

And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So that’s available now. It’s available. Not Sy Hersh’s piece yet, but that interview is available in Germany.

You know, I describe Olaf Scholz as kind of the epitome of the abused spouse. Stands there and is abused not only by his master, Joe Biden, but also by this hack that he has as foreign minister. Her name is [Annalena] Baerbock. She is the the most vociferous of all the people saying that we are at war. That’s what she said. We are at war with Russia. 

So the question will be: it has been 90 years, count them, nine zero years since the Nazis were making a push for power in Germany. What happened? The Reichstag, the German parliament building was burned down at the end of January, 1933. What happened? The Germans caved. The Nazis didn’t have a majority, but they scared the living daylights out of German citizens.

First of all, Social Democrats gave in. Next to fall, the Zentrum party, the Catholic Party. No one spoke up. We know the rest of the story. All right. Now, sometimes history is replete with ironies. Here it is exactly to the month, 90 years later. Will the German people acquiesce in their industry, and then their bodies being frozen out this winter? Or will they rise up and say: “Look, Mr Scholz, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and neither does Baerbock. Get out of here!”, and replace that government? 

Now, the key to all this, of course, is the fact I have already mentioned. Sy Hersh’s piece has not been published in Germany. The New York Times hasn’t published it. The major media haven’t published. Where did Sy have to publish this? On Substack. Now, at one point he had a friend at the German newspaper, Die Welt, and they published an incredible exposé on Syria. It turned out to be true, but Sy couldn’t get it published anywhere else. He used to publish in The New York Times, then in The New Yorker. He has been banned. 

So the question is, will it be possible to inform not only the American people, but more important, the German people that they’ve been had? Okay? This is depriving them of livelihoods and industry. Will they, unlike 90 years ago, act like adults, stand up and say: “Now we’ve had it. Blowing up our our gas pipeline, that’s too far. We’re going to look at things differently. First and foremost, our involvement in Ukraine.”

Garland Nixon

Ray, domestically. Here. In this piece, if it is to be believed – which, I believe it and it certainly warrants an internal investigation here – the Biden administration admitted that what they were doing was an act of war, which means they understood that only Congress could, in fact, constitutionally clear that action. And they, with malice and aforethought, took action to mitigate their accountability to the Constitution and Congress.

And Joe Biden was the head guy there. He was the man that… eventually they decided rather than just put explosives on it, apparently Biden wanted to give the word for when it was done. This is an impeachable offense. This is a requirement of Congress, to act on it. Your thoughts on Congress not acting on it? I don’t suspect they will. And if there will be ultimately in the long term, any ramifications for that? Your thoughts on that anyway Ray.

Ray McGovern

Well, again, if the big tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? It is incredible how The New York Times – actually I’ve taken to calling The New York Times The New Yellow Times, after yellow journalism, which as most people know is what you do when you exaggerate or slant things beyond the truth.

The New Yellow Times can prevent this from being heard, and more important now, prevent corroboration from being a voice. We have corroboration now from Gil Doctorow in Brussels, Larry Johnson in Tampa, it’s coming in. And so I applaud the source that told Sy Hersh all this information. I believe it implicitly. Sy has never been wrong on really important issues like this. As I say, he’s meticulous, and he was distraught – and I know this personally – distraught at all this stuff about Russiagate.

He and Bob Parry used to – my mentor, Robert Parry, Consortium News – used to commiserate on the phone and, you know, what’s happened to the to the media? So here again, we have the media right in the middle of this thing. Only Tucker Carlson has had the cajones so far to play this story. Will it go further? I suspect… well, I don’t know but I like to try to be the optimist. Can The New York Times and the major media suppress this indefinitely? Well, I suppose they can. They’ve suppressed other stories, equally important, like the fact that the Russians are proven not to have hacked into the DNC, and that the ‘Russian offensive’ there with Facebook amounted to nothing.

So if they can deceive the American people, as the American people are willing to be deceived, then you know this will not have its desired effect. The fact that that Sy had to go on Substack to do this is really a lurid manifestation of the fact that not even the most prized, the most meticulous investigative reporter in the United States, could not get this published elsewhere.

That speaks volumes.

Garland Nixon

Part of this piece, Sy discusses meetings that Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan held in the executive office of the President, where they debated options for an attack on the pipeline. And he writes that the C.I.A. argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. And at the time, the C.I.A. was directed by Bill Burns, as Sy describes him, a mild mannered former ambassador to Russia. I know you know Burns well. He says that Burns quickly authorized a C.I.A. working group whose ad hoc members included someone who was familiar with the capacity of these Navy deep sea divers. Your thoughts on Burns’s involvement in this?

Ray McGovern

I do know Burns. He let me, well, in effect shame James Clapper by pointing out to an audience that Clapper had admitted that he fudged the evidence on weapons of mass destruction before the attack on Iraq. Burns was, some of us hoped, that he might be the adult in the room, but Burns is the epitome of a cog in the wheels of the system. He’s a state Department type. He got to be number two in the State Department and you don’t get to be number two in the State Department unless you salute. Whether it’s a harebrained scheme or not you salute. Well, here you have the epitome of a harebrained scheme. Did did Burns salute? Yes, as soon as the president said do it. He turned to his people and he said, Do it.

And they they rubbed their hands and said: Oh, man, this is going to be fun! We can do this. We can work with the Navy. We can do it. Okay. Now, what do the analysts say? Well, Burns didn’t give a rat’s patootie about what his analysts say, but Sy Hersh includes the notion that some of them said: You know, this is really crazy, this is really stupid. This is going to come back to bite us. 

That’s what we always used to say on cockamamie schemes like this. What’s the point here? The point here is that the operations people at C.I.A. get all the money, get all the attention and get all the influence over whatever director comes in and another side lesson here is that if you’re going to pick a director for the C.I.A., don’t go to the State Department for a yes man. You don’t go to the Congress for somebody who compromises, for God’s sake. You find somebody like Admiral Stansfield Turner, four star, who had made his own his own mark on life and was not going to take any crap from nobody else, is going to tell the truth. He’s the last guy we had like that. God forbid we keep having these, well, these bureaucrats that salute when the president says jump.

Garland Nixon

One thing I did want to ask you, I had some thoughts. You know, the last – interesting – the last sentence where, you know, whoever the source is says, Oh, yeah, they did this thing. It was a brilliant operation, blah, blah, blah. He says the only flaw was the decision to do it. Here’s what it seems to me. I’m guessing it seemed like it came from somebody in the Pentagon, based on the knowledge. They basically said: You know, these idiots in the executive department, they have not a good move.

And C.I.A. was not real smart. State Department, bad move. The Pentagon wasn’t mentioned. And there are generally, I have heard recently, there are some pragmatists. It almost seems like there may. Well, anyway, your thoughts on the origins of this, if you have any?

Ray McGovern

Well, all I can say is that Sy Hersh has proven for about 40 years now that he is a trusted journalist. And when someone – and I suspect it aptly pertained to this particular source – when someone sees that an act of war has been has been committed by our government against all the… well, against the Constitution, maybe not against the U.S. designed “rules based order,” but, you know, we all swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now this guy took that seriously. I suspect he went to that little corner in that bar where Sy meets his – I know where that is – meets his sources and told him this whole story. Sy said it only took him three months. I believe that. And American people… it’s eminently believable. The question is the fallout and whether the mass media can prevent this story from sneaking into the consciousness of Americans who have been taught, who have been brainwashed over the last seven years. Okay? Seven years now, to hate Russia. 

Okay. Will Rogers had that wonderful aphorism, the comedian way back a century or two ago. Will Rogers put it this way. He said: “The problem is this: it’s not what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so.” That’s the problem. And the people think that the Russians are just evil to the core. That Putin… Here’s an example. Okay? At the time when Sy Hersh’s story is going out, here’s The New York Times on February ninth. A yellow journalism piece by a fellow named Constant Méheut – a Frenchman, apparently – and it shows that Vladimir Putin was personally responsible for killing the 298 aboard Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over Ukraine in July of 2014. Now it says that in the title; it says that in the first paragraph; and third paragraph it says: Well, we can’t prove that Putin was really… Give me a break! Okay. So this is a day when they should have been featuring Sy’s research. They’re still at it. Blackening Putin, first and foremost, the rest of the Russians, and, you know, this was consequential. 

Let me remind you that after the coup in Kiev, after the annexation of Crimea, the U.S. could still not get the Europeans to shoot themselves in the foot by sanctions. It was only after Malaysian Airlines MH 17 was downed – according to The New York Times, by Vladimir Putin himself – that they could get real sanctions that bit the Europeans more than they bit anyone, including the Russians. So this was consequential. This was the beginning of really strict sanctions. And I just wonder if the West Europeans and the East Europeans will wake up and say: “You know, this is a this is a bad deal to get involved with, what the U.S. wants, because they want war with Russia. And this is going to come to, as the Chinese used to call it, a no good end.”

Garland Nixon

Ray McGovern, as always, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate that analysis and we look forward to having you back.

Ray McGovern

Aye and most welcome.

The views expressed are solely those of the speakers and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/12/listen-nord-stream-attack-an-act-of-war/

How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline

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By Seymour Hersh
February 8, 2023

Referenced article with photos, video, and map at
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

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It started over lunch: investigating and exposing the Iran-Contra scandal, amid news media silence

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From Consortium News
April 16, 2018

The following are remarks at the memorial for Bob Parry delivered on Saturday by Brian Barger, who shared many bylines with Bob (and a drink or two) at the Associated Press, uncovering the Iran-Contra scandal, and provoking the ire of AP editors, nervous about what the two friends were finding out.

By Brian Barger

I remember it was a pleasure to meet Bob in 1984. The CIA was ramping up its covert war in Nicaragua. News reports from the region documented atrocities committed by President Reagan’s “freedom fighters” and their CIA handlers. Congress was starting to take notice, and was threatening to cut off US aid.

I got a call from Betsy Cohn, a Latin America scholar from Georgetown University, saying I should meet this guy from the AP. Over lunch we shared notes. I’d done much of my reporting from Central America and Miami, and Bob from Washington. We agreed there was a lot of low-hanging fruit on this story, and we talked about why there was such reluctance to cover it, particularly among the Washington press corps. We agreed that this could be a good reporting partnership.

And it was in these early days that I learned some important lessons about journalism from Bob.

It started over that lunch, when Bob politely reminded me that I’d buried the lede in a recent story that should have received wide attention – but didn’t. This was Bob Parry journalism lesson number one: Don’t bury the lede.

The story was about a blue, cloth-covered manual produced by the CIA and distributed to contra commanders in Honduras. Bob wanted a copy. So, Bob Parry journalism lesson Number Two: Be persistent. I gave it to him, and Bob produced a deeply reported piece on what thereafter was known as the CIA assassination manual. Lesson number three: Make those ten extra phone calls before calling it a day.

This was the beginning of an enduring friendship that lasted 35 years. It was also the beginning of an enduring work relationship. Over the next two years, we peeled back the story about White House aide Oliver North and the White House role orchestrating a secret war in Nicaragua.

For the rest of the story: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/16/it-started-over-lunch-and-ended-with-the-exposure-of-one-of-the-greatest-scandals-in-u-s-history/

Billions of dollars’ worth of weapons brought into Syria, “arms traffic organized by CIA and Pentagon”

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By Thierry Meyssan
Global Research, July 20, 2017
Voltairenet.org 18 July 2017

Over the last seven years, several billion dollars’ worth of armament has been illegally introduced into Syria – a fact which in itself is enough to disprove the myth according to which this war is a democratic revolution. Numerous documents attest to the fact that the traffic was organised by General David Petraeus, first of all in public, via the CIA, of which he was the director, then privately, via the financial company KKR with the aid of certain senior civil servants. Thus the conflict, which was initially an imperialist operation by the United States and the United Kingdom, became a private capitalist operation, while in Washington, the authority of the White House was challenged by the deep state. New elements now show the secret rôle of Azerbaïdjan in the evolution of the war.

During the liberation of Aleppo and the capture of the Saudi military staff who were on site, Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva noted the presence of weapons from her country in nine warehouses abandoned by the jihadists. She carefully noted the information on the boxes, and once she returned home, she investigated the way in which the weapons had been delivered to Syria.

Since 2009 – with the short exception of the period between March 2013 to November 2014 – Bulgaria has been governed by Boïko Borissov, a highly colourful character allegedly with links to one of Europe’s main criminal organisations, the SIC. Let’s remember that Bulgaria is a member of both NATO and the European Union, and that neither of these two organisations offered the slightest criticism concerning the accession to power of a Mafia lord who had been identified as such a long time previously by the international police services.

It is therefore clearly at the risk of their lives that Dilyana Gaytandzhieva uncovered the organisation, and the editors of the Sofia daily, Trud, published her article [1]. While Bulgaria was one of the main arms exporters to Syria, it received help from Azerbaïdjan.

The gigantic CIA arms traffic against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and India

Since the beginning of the Arab Springs, a gigantic arms traffic was organised by the CIA and the Pentagon in violation of a number of resolutions by the UNO Security Council. All the operations that we will be mentioning here are illegal under international law, including those organised publicly by the Pentagon.

As far as arms traffic is concerned, even when individuals or private companies are used as shields, it is impossible to export sensitive equipment without the authorisation of the governments concerned.

All the weapons we will be mentioning, apart from the electronic intelligence systems, are ’Soviet-type’. By definition, even if we pretend that the armies supplied with NATO-type weapons are indeed the final recipients, this is an impossibility. These armies serve only to cover the traffic.

We already knew that the CIA had contacted the SIC, and that Boïko Borissov had been called upon to manufacture an emergency quantity of Captagon destined for the jihadists, first in Libya, then in Syria. Since Maria Petkova’s investigation, which was published in the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), we knew that between 2011 and 2014, the CIA and the SOCOM (Pentagon Special Operations Command) had bought 500 million dollars’ worth of weapons from Bulgaria on behalf of the jihadists. Then, later, we learned that other weapons were paid for by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and transported by Saudi Arabian Cargo and Etihad Cargo [2].

According to Krešimir Žabec, of the Zagreb daily Jutarnji list, at the end of 2012, Croatia delivered 230 tonnes of weapons to the Syrian jihadists for a value of 6.5 million dollars. The transfer to Turkey was handled by three Ilyushins from Jordan International Air Cargo, and the weapons were then parachuted by the Qatai Army [3]. According to Eric Schmitt of the New York Times, the whole system had been created by General David Petraeus, director of the CIA [4].

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How America armed terrorists in Syria

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From Consortium News

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” to curb weapons going to Al Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria, has attracted only 14 co-sponsors pointing to hypocrisy in the “war on terror,” as Gareth Porter explained at The American Conservative.

By Gareth Porter
June 23, 2017

Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

President Barack Obama walks along the Colonnade at the White House with then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Dec. 7, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups — meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history.  The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism” — the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

The policy of arming military groups committed to overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad began in September 2011, when President Barack Obama was pressed by his Sunni allies — Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — to supply heavy weapons to a military opposition to Assad they were determined to establish. Turkey and the Gulf regimes wanted the United States to provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, according to a former Obama administration official involved in Middle East issues.

Obama refused to provide arms to the opposition, but he agreed to provide covert U.S. logistical help in carrying out a campaign of military assistance to arm opposition groups. CIA involvement in the arming of anti-Assad forces began with arranging for the shipment of weapons from the stocks of the Gaddafi regime that had been stored in Benghazi.

Shipments from Benghazi

CIA-controlled firms shipped the weapons from the military port of Benghazi to two small ports in Syria using former U.S. military personnel to manage the logistics, as investigative reporter Sy Hersh detailed in 2014. The funding for the program came mainly from the Saudis.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress on Jan. 23, 2013, about the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. 2012. (Photo from C-SPAN coverage)

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo.

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CIA’s eternal military occupation and crimes

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From Space4Peace, Organizing Notes

By Bruce Gagnon
May 1, 2017

I recently bought this book and immediately began to read it.  Douglas Valentine has been writing about the CIA’s role in counterinsurgency for many years.  That word, to be properly understood though, needs much more definition.

Valentine undertook a detailed study and analysis of the CIA’s ‘Phoenix‘ program of counterinsurgency in Vietnam.  He interviewed many of the key players who created and directed Phoenix.  Then Valentine took what he learned from the Vietnam program and shows how it has been refined and implemented in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and more recently in Ukraine.  He illustrates how the mainstream media plays its role in furthering CIA lies and ensuring a docile American public.

Here are a few illustrative bits from the book:

This [American] ruling class within the National Security Establishment, represented most perfectly by Hillary Clinton, knows that its enemies, foreign and domestic, must be suppressed ideologically as well as militarily.  Thus they have embraced the Phoenix concept of employing implicit and explicit terror to control, organize and pacify societies.

The success of the Phoenix doctrine is most evident in the ability of its advocates in the ruling class to corrupt Congress and force it to divert massive amounts of public money into the militarization of foreign and domestic policy.

Now that the corrupt and corrupting Phoenix institutional structure is firmly in place in America, it is only a matter of time until we enter the next Phoenix phase of explicit terror here at home.

The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.

The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle [during the Vietnam War], just like they’ve been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years. They were funneling heroin and opium to their warlords in South Vietnam as a payoff for advancing the US policies that were detrimental to their own country.

The truth about US wars is less about combating Islamic terrorism or ‘protecting the homeland’ than it is about the dark side of the American psyche, rooted in slavery and the genocidal conquest of a continent.  For American businessmen, the global War on Terror with its relentless bombing campaigns and extra-legal methods shrouded in official secrecy, translates into big profits.

The Afghan people hate the Americans more and more, year after year.  And that makes the CIA happy, in so far as it spells protracted war and increased profits for its sponsors in the arms industry.

Afghan anger means more resistance.  And more resistance provides a neat pretext for the eternal military occupation of a disposable nation strategically located near Russia, [Iran] and China.

But it also means spiritual defeat for America, as it descends ever further into the black hole of self-deception, militarism and covert operations.

Valentine names the names of those who developed this global counterinsurgency operation.  He also names some of the ‘progressive’ activists and alternative media that play ball with the ruling oligarchy here at home by taking money to run their operations.

The book is endorsed by highly respected figures like NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou, academic Peter Dale Scott who came up with the tag ‘deep state’ and the truth-telling Robert Parry at Consortium News (which happens to be one of my favorite sources for news and analysis).

If you want to see the big picture of US empire, understand how it works, understand who many of the insiders are (or have been), and get a glimpse into what is coming to America in the near future – then I highly recommend this book.

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2017/05/cias-eternal-military-occupation-and.html

Former CIA agent Philip Agee: President Truman invented Soviet/Russian threat to justify militarizing economy

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From Space4Peace Blogspot

By Bruce Gagnon
February 16, 2015

…I had the great fortune to meet Agee twice – the first time organizing a speaking event for him in Orlando in the 1990’s that drew folks from across Florida.  The second time I visited his home in Hamburg, Germany in 1995 while on a speaking tour against NASA’s Cassini plutonium launch.

Agee is one of my heroes – he was a man of true conscience who left the CIA after serving for about a dozen years in Latin America.  He was determined to publish a book exposing the wicked work of the CIA and after a difficult four-year period he was able in 1974 to release his book entitled Inside the Company.

From that day on, Agee was marked by the CIA as its enemy.  He was hunted, arrested, threatened, expelled from country after country (often illegally) and sometimes prosecuted.  He tells this riveting story in the 1987 book entitled On the Run.  This is the book Agee gave me when I visited him in 1995 and began rereading last night.

…When I visited Agee in Hamburg he took me on a walking tour of parts of the city…We had fascinating discussions about his life-long efforts to expose the crimes of the CIA. He was a very humble and ordinary guy and I really grew to admire him tremendously.

In his later years Agee moved to Cuba and started a travel business to help people make the trip to that ‘forbidden nation’.  He died there in 2008.

Agee was truly in the mold of Ellsberg, Snowden, Manning and other such remarkable whistle blowers.

In On the Run Agee wrote:

I would try to show how our [CIA] operations help sustain favorable operating conditions for US-based multi-national corporations.  These conditions, together with political hegemony, were our real goals.  So-called liberal democracy and pluralism were only means to those ends.  “Free elections” really meant freedom for us to intervene with secret funds for our candidates.  “Free trade unions” meant freedom for us to establish our unions.  “Freedom of the press” meant freedom for us to pay journalists to publish our material as if it were the journalists’ own.  When an elected government threatened US economic and political interests, it had to go.  Social and economic justice were fine concepts for public relations, but only for that.

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2015/02/remembering-philip-agee.html