Showing posts with label American Original. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Original. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Why Is The Mainstream Media So Quiet About The Southern Border?

FAIR  |  The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (NBC, 1/14/24): “The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).

In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck (Houston Chronicle, 1/26/24) observed that Abbott’s position “has eerie parallels to arguments advanced by Southerners during the Antebellum era.”

For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war.  And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.

Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):

From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.

Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.

Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”

But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.

The “legal expert” quoted in Fox News‘ headline (1/25/24) works for America First Legal, a group founded by white nationalist Stephen Miller to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.

Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).

The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.

The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:

Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.

This is impressive by any measure.

The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Imagine Elise Stefanik Kwestioning Henry Kissinger...,

newrepublic  |  The question of Kissinger’s alleged antisemitism is a complicated one. Yes, he told a friend in the 1970s that Judaism “has no significance for me,” according to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, and is also quoted as having said in 1972, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” Another gem from that year: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”

But to be fair, these views were not as uncommon among German Jews in the United States as one might wish them to have been. One can find similarly disturbing quotes in the private discussions of say, the great pundit and political philosopher Walter Lippmann and the longtime New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When confronted with Richard Nixon’s frequently hysterical antisemitic rants about “dirty rotten Jews from New York” who dared to reveal the truth about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the Times or some such thing, Kissinger usually tried to placate the president without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing. But when he felt Jews, whether American or Israeli, were refusing to cooperate with his plans, he was more than happy to join in, once complaining to Nixon that he had “never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest” as when American Jewish leaders supported Israel’s position over that of the Nixon administration. The Israelis at various times were “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” As for American Jewish leaders, “They seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”

Kissinger was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get to do things his way. The question is, was he worse about Jews and Israel than about anyone else who refused to genuflect before what he understood to be his genius? To be fair to someone who really doesn’t deserve it, Kissinger, like Nixon, would tend toward churlish, racist reactions when anyone rebuffed him. When, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to go along with his plans for a secret opening to China, he informed the president that “well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” and Gandhi herself was “a bitch.”

But Kissinger also engaged in explicitly antisemitic actions himself. When, in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state, Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.” And as he doled out jobs to his aides, he made certain to count the Jews to ensure there were not too many of them. He explained that while he knew that it required 10 Jews for a minyan (Jewish prayer service), he could not “have them all on the seventh floor.” Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of aides scheduled to accompany the president to Germany because he said, “I don’t think too many Jews should be around.” But here again, he was likely not acting out of personal anti-Jewish animus. Rather he was behaving cravenly in the face of what he judged to be the Jew-hatred of others, especially Nixon, who famously ordered an aide to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the purpose of history, the most important aspects of Kissinger’s hostility to Jews and Israel can be seen in his conduct related to the 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Kissinger apologists have consistently attempted to give him the credit that belongs almost entirely to Jimmy Carter for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Martin Indyk, a longtime diplomat and Kissinger acolyte, actually published a 688-page book titled Master of the Game, making exactly this comical claim.

The truth is that Kissinger’s machinations were at least partially responsible for the fact of the war itself. Egypt’s visionary leader Anwar Sadat made clear to Kissinger and company that he was interested in a peace agreement with Israel (and moving his allegiance from the Russians to the Americans). The Israelis expressed interest at the time, but Kissinger instructed them that they were “wasting time” in taking Sadat seriously. To make certain the Israelis went along with his plans, he secretly bribed them with a promise of over 100 U.S. Phantom fighter jets. His overture rejected, Sadat eventually decided that another war to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice to lay the groundwork for an eventual deal. Even Indyk, who treats Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy” between Israel and Egypt after the war as one of the great achievements of American diplomatic history, admitted in his book that Kissinger “might have averted the Yom Kippur War” by taking Sadat seriously earlier.

Kissinger also helped ensure that Israel would be unprepared for the Egyptian attack. According to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s secret testimony before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began, Kissinger warned Israel that if it wanted any help from the United States in the event of hostilities, then it should not make a preemptive strike against Egypt or Syria or to mobilize the reserve army before the war actually started. These warnings were given after Kissinger insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken. Dayan then canceled his air force’s preemptive operation and objected to Golda Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserves. Kissinger is not known to have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs, Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages, in order to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath. To my knowledge, Kissinger never addressed this.

Kissinger wanted Israel to suffer a significant setback before it finally won the war. He succeeded at this at an enormous cost in lost lives on both sides. As the Egyptian army marched toward Tel Aviv, he informed Sadat and company that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting, however, Nixon insisted, over Kissinger’s objections, on implementing a massive emergency weapons airlift. He did this despite Kissinger’s warning that victory would make Israel “even more impossible to deal with than before.”

Kissinger came in for extremely harsh criticism from some American Jews in this period. Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler. To try to disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals and another with leaders of Jewish organizations.

The former group spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it. Kissinger posed as Israel’s savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out support for Israel in Congress. (Actually, the opposite was true. Congress was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger was.) He pointed out that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely success of the “extremely effective” OPEC oil embargo, which would give the Arab world more leverage over the West and turn consumers in both the U.S. and Europe against Israel. Israel was “in great danger.” What he needed, he explained, was for influential American Jews to “privately … make clear to the Israelis that you understand the situation.” The meeting broke up, according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm expressions of gratitude.”

Kissinger Understood You Can't Be Both Oppressor And Victim

NYTimes  |  Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning.

Sure enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.

Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.

“Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.

Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.

Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.

There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”

Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”

Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.

In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.

Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.

Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Maybe, the man said.

 

 

 

Sunday, December 03, 2023

The Simple Answer To Democrats Reality Censoring Desperation

TheHill |  Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.

Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly to save democracy.

Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black. Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.

This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot. 

And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been cast.

This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and, on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. 

As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not become them.”

In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.

There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”

The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice. 

In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t Trump.” 

They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. 

This effort is being supported by academics such as Laurence Tribe, who previously called for Trump to be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Mike Pence.

 

 

 

 

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Bill Gates Is An Expression Of Official American Foreign Policy Toward Africa

 

Thursday, November 16, 2023

400 U.S. Officials Sign Letter Critical Of Biden's Israel Policy

antiwar  |  More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government.

“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the letter reads.

According to The New York Times, the majority of the signatories to the letter are political appointees who work throughout the government, including in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Security Council. Some signatories helped get Biden elected and said they were worried his support for the onslaught on Gaza was opposed by many Democratic voters.

The letter says that the “overwhelming majority of Americans support a ceasefire,” citing a poll from Data For Progress that found 66% of voters believe the US should push for a ceasefire, including 80% of Democrats. “Furthermore, Americans do not want the US military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East,” the letter says.

President Biden and his top aides have called for “pauses” in the fighting but refuse to use the term “ceasefire,” demonstrating that they are committed to continuing support for the Israeli war, which has killed at least 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children.

Since October 7, the US has shipped weapons to Israel on a near-daily basis and is providing special operations support, including surveillance drone flights over Gaza. Besides the new letter, Biden’s full-throated support for the brutal war has drawn three dissent memos from State Department employees and an open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Is The Israel Lobby The Most Powerful Force In "American" Governance?

strategic-culture  |  What is the ‘elephant’ (or elephants) in the room? Blinken’s recent regional diplomacy was ‘a bust’. None of the regional leaders that Blinken met would talk further about Gaza beyond demanding stridently, ‘no Palestinian population displacement into Egypt’ a ‘stop to this madness’ – the carpet bombing of Gazans – and the demand for an immediate ceasefire.

And Biden’s calls for a ‘pause’ – softly, at first, and the more strident now – is being bluntly ignored by the Israeli government. The spectre of President Carter’s impotence during the Iran hostage crisis hangs ever more soberly in the backdrop.

The truth is that the White House cannot force Israel to do its will – the Israeli lobby holds the more clout in Congress than any White House team. Thus, ‘no exit’ from the Israeli crisis is readily to be seen. Biden ‘made his bed’ with the Netanyahu cabinet and must live with consequences.

Impotence then, as the Democratic Party fractures beyond the simplistic division between centrists versus progressives. The polarisation emanating from the ‘no ceasefire stance’ is having stark destabilising effects on politics, both in the U.S. and Europe.

Impotence then, as the shape of the Middle East crystallises into sharp antagonism towards the West’s perceived accommodation of the mass slaughter of Palestinian women, children and civilians. The die may be too far ‘cast’ to brake the ongoing tectonic reset already underway. Western double standards are just too inescapably obvious now to the Global Majority.

The large ‘elephant’ is this: Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of high explosives since 7 October (the 1945 Hiroshima nuke was 15,000 tons equivalent). What exactly is Netanyahu and his war cabinet’s aim here? Ostensibly, the earlier military operation in Jabalia Camp was about targeting a Hamas leader suspected of lurking under the camp – but six 2,000 lb bombs for one Hamas ‘target’ in a crowded refugee camp? And why too the attacks on water cisterns, hospital solar energy panels and hospital entrances, roads, schools and bakeries?

Bread has almost disappeared in Gaza. The UN says all bakeries in northern Gaza have closed following the bombing of the last bakeries. Clean water is desperately short, and thousands of bodies are slowly decomposing under rubble. Disease and epidemic are appearing, whilst humanitarian supplies are being tightly restricted as a bargaining tool toward further hostage releases..

Editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, puts the Israeli strategy very plainly:

“The expulsion of the Palestinian residents, transformation of their homes into piles of construction rubble, and the restriction of the entry of supplies and fuel into Gaza are the “tiebreaking move” employed by Israel in the current conflict, unlike all previous rounds of fighting in the Strip”.

Of what are we talking here? This clearly is not about avoiding collateral civilian deaths occurring as the IDF battles with Hamas. There have been no street battles in Jabalia, or in and around the hospitals – as one soldier commented: “All we’ve done is ride around in our armored vehicles. The boots on the ground stuff will come later”. The pretext of a ‘humanitarian evacuation’ therefore is bogus.

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Not A Fan Of Mayor Eric Adams - But - What Did He Do To Become An Enemy Of The State?

epochtimes  |  An attorney for New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed on Friday that the FBI seized the mayor's phones and an iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign financing.

“After learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported to investigators. The Mayor has been and remains committed to cooperating in this matter," his attorney Boyd Johnson said in a statement.

"On Monday night, the FBI approached the mayor after an event. The Mayor immediately complied with the FBI’s request and provided them with electronic devices. The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the investigation."

Mr. Adams also denied any wrongdoing in a statement.

“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation—and I will continue to do exactly that. I have nothing to hide,” he stated.

Last week, the FBI raided the home of Brianna Suggs, one of the mayor's chief political consultants, after which the mayor also issued a statement that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

“I feel extremely comfortable about how I comply with rules and procedures. I’ve stated this over and over again. I hold myself to a high standard, I hold my campaign to a high standard, and I hold my staffers at city hall to a high standard,” he said. He also said that Ms. Suggs was a "real professional" and would remain on his team for his 2025 reelection campaign.

“I am outraged and angry if anyone attempted to use the campaign to manipulate our democracy and defraud our campaign,” Mr. Adams said in the statement.

“I want to be clear, I have no knowledge, direct or otherwise, of any improper fundraising activity—and certainly not of any foreign money.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan declined to comment.

Investigation

The FBI has not made public details of the investigation, but a search warrant was first reported by the New York Times, which reported that the federal investigation is related to alleged corruption in Mr. Adams's 2021 campaign and possible ties to the Turkish government.

The seized devices, which the FBI has likely made copies of, were returned days later.

The mayor's staff has confirmed that his office has met with the federal prosecutors, but did not disclose what they discussed.

After the raid on Ms. Suggs's home, media reported that the relationship between the mayor's 2021 campaign and Brooklyn-based KSK Construction Group's ties to Turkey is the center of the probe.

The KSK Construction Group owns apartment buildings and condominiums throughout the city. It is owned by the KiSKA Construction Corp., a company that possesses two branches of a Turkish hotel chain in the United States.

Turkey

Mr. Adams has visited Turkey multiple times, including as part of official duties in different public offices.

“I’m probably the only mayor in the history of this city that has not only visited Turkey once, but I think I’m on my sixth or seventh visit to Turkey,” Mr. Adams said at a Turkish flag-raising ceremony in New York recently.

Two of those trips were made while he was the Brooklyn Borough President.

Campaign records show that he received donations from three members of a foundation opened by the son of the Turkish president.

At an event this week, the mayor answered reporters' questions about the probe and his ties to Turkey.

“We just thought it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas as we do with all these…countries and we want to attract businesses here,” he said of the trips, according to The City.

“So Turkey as well as any other country, I want to attract people to the city. There’s nothing specific about that one particular country.”

He added that he frequently told his staff to "follow the law."

“I just strongly believe you have to follow the law. It would really shock me if someone that was hired by my campaign did something that was inappropriate,” he said.

 

Friday, October 27, 2023

America Is Indispensable To Who?

responsiblestatecraft  |  In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is “the indispensable nation.” This is indeed the belief by which the U.S. foreign and security establishment lives and works.

As Biden’s speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be excused if they take place as part of America’s “indispensable” mission to lead the world towards “freedom” and “democracy.”

It is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims about the “Rules-Based Order” cannot answer this question. In the Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.

In this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that of providing stability.

Instead, it has all too often acted a force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious effort to promote a settlement.

Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.

This strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.

And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated: More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than 30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion subsequently expended in the “Global War on Terror.”

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

The "Rules Based World Order" Never Looked Particularly "Rules Based"....,

WaPo  |  On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more than 2 million people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech, Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.

But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war, principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.

A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s strategy relies on.”

In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” a senior Group of Seven diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”

It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community — but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde. “In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security is at stake in Ukraine.”

The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost. … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Dementia Among U.S. Officials Poses National Security Threat

theintercept  |   As the national security workforce ages, dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a Pentagon-funded think tank. The report, released this spring, came as several prominent U.S. officials trusted with some of the nation’s most highly classified intelligence experienced public lapses, stoking calls for resignations and debate about Washington’s aging leadership.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had a second freezing episode last month, enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leadership. Ninety-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose decline has seen her confused about how to vote and experiencing memory lapses — forgetting conversations and not recalling a monthslong absence — was for years a member of the Gang of Eight and remains a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which she has served since 2001.

The study, published by the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division in April, identifies individuals with both current and former access to classified material who develop dementia as threats to national security, citing the possibility that they may unwittingly disclose government secrets. 

“Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled classified material could become a security threat if they develop dementia and unwittingly share government secrets,” the study says.

As the study notes, there does not appear to be any other publicly available research into dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of cognitive functioning, despite the fact that Americans are living longer than ever before and that the researchers were able to identify several cases in which senior intelligence officials died of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder and the most common cause of dementia.

“As people live longer and retire later, challenges associated with cognitive impairment in the workplace will need to be addressed,” the report says. “Our limited research suggests this concern is an emerging security blind spot.” 

Most holders of security clearances, a ballooning class of officials and other bureaucrats with access to secret government information, are subject to rigorous and invasive vetting procedures. Applying for a clearance can mean hourslong polygraph tests; character interviews with old teachers, friends, and neighbors; and ongoing automated monitoring of their bank accounts and other personal information. As one senior Pentagon official who oversees such a program told me of people who enter the intelligence bureaucracy, “You basically give up your Fourth Amendment rights.” 

Yet, as the authors of the RAND report note, there does not appear to be any vetting for age-related cognitive decline. In fact, the director of national intelligence’s directive on continuous evaluation contains no mention of age or cognitive decline.

While the study doesn’t mention any U.S. officials by name, its timing comes amid a simmering debate about gerontocracy: rule by the elderly. Following McConnell’s first freezing episode, in July, Google searches for the term “gerontocracy” spiked.

“The president called to check on me,” McConnell said when asked about the first episode. “I told him I got sandbagged,” he quipped, referring to President Joe Biden’s trip-and-fall incident during a June graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, which sparked conservative criticisms about the 80-year-old’s own functioning.

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Operation Sunrise: How We Came To Be The 4th Reich

Allen Dulles was a part of Operation Sunrise and it appears he went against orders and did not negotiate an unconditional surrender but instead brokered deals with the nazis. It doesn't help that nazi sympathy was fairly rampant throughout the military and government hence the willingness to proceed with Operation Paperclip. Dulles worked for a law firm that protected IG Farben (corporation that participated in slave labor and genocide) and I'm currently looking into his prewar antics as it appears he may have been involved in helping fund the rise of the nazis from the beginning. Money was apparently stolen from a bank in England. Also, during the war Dulles had his OSS operation set up in Switzerland. The Swiss bank basically legitimatized the nazi's money and the idea that they were "neutral" is kind of ridiculous. The nazi's couldn't have operated without those bank accounts so taking their money was aiding and abetting. I still need to sit down and follow all the money, but some really fucky things were going on before the war even broke out. Don't forget the 1930's failed business plot to install a fascist leader in the US. The people involved in that likely came up with some new plans.

It's pretty amazing how the US reshaped Wernher von Braun's public persona. He was literally an SS Major and the director of a military unit making the most advanced weapon systems for the Nazis. You don't get in those positions without being heavily involved in the Nazi party.

The dossier on him literally has a 'carrot' style insertion to change "ardent Nazi" to "not an ardent Nazi." He went from a leader of Nazis to literally hosting shows on Disney about space travel.

There's quite a bit there, actually, from the Vatican-NAZI connection in the whole UFO affair, to the Knights of Malta in more recent years.

I'll start at a random point of connection:

Dulles helped Mengele flee to Argentina, where the CIA later supported a right-wing authoritarian coup

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4383422

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Argentine_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

NAZI Walter Schreiber -- who conducted LSD experiments with MKULTRA -- wound up in Argentina.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-cold-war-cia-interrogators-learned-from-the-nazis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Schreiber#Emigration

NAZIs also fled to Chile, where the CIA later backed a dictator that used NAZIs to torture dissidents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Walter Rauff was a NAZI that had CIA connections, who also worked for Mossad (Israel) and the Chilean secret service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Rauff

The NAZI-CIA connection goes beyond Paperclip. US intelligence services used NAZIs in the Gehlen Organization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization

So there's a global intelligence service / NAZI connection.

Here's the main Vatican - NAZI link: The Vatican got independence from Mussolini, who was soon allied with Hitler.

David Grusch has talked about the Vatican - NAZI - UFO connection, and there has been, from the beginning, a broad connection with intelligence services.

There's another interesting Vatican-Intelligence service link with the Knights of Malta, the only nation on the planet without any territory, it has diplomatic relations with over 100 countries, issues its own passports, is controlled by the Vatican, and has prominent representatives in the US intelligence services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta

CIA Director William Casey was a member of the Knights of Malta. William F. Buckley Jr was a member of the Knights of Malta. James J. Angleton was a member.

Buckley was also a member of the Skull and Bones -- the same secret society both George W. Bush (son of former CIA director George HW Bush) and his 2004 Presidential competitor John Kerry both belonged to (the same year no less), but which neither would discuss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwJDs1cg9Eo

So there's a CIA-Vatican-NAZI-Secret Society international right-wing apparatus that took hold on planet Earth around 1945.

I could keep going with this but I have other things to do.

But I will say the US Navy -- where the videos started leaking from -- is tied into all this to. It was, for example, and Naval intelligence officer Dr. Charles Savage was involved in LSD experiments with programs that became MKULTRA

https://ahrp.org/1947-1953-navys-project-chatter-tested-drugs-for-interrogation/

and, as we keep hearing, there seems to be an inter-dimensional component to all this, which LSD may sensitize people to. Like information about UFO's, the cognitive states unlocked by LSD are tightly controlled. LSD in the US is a schedule I substance, more tightly controlled than cocaine, and as tightly controlled as heroin.

Religious scholars like Huston Smith argued that the prohibition on psychedelics may be a prohibition on human cognitive evolution, since this experience has been with humanity since early times

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/r-i-p-huston-smith-religious-scholar-who-defended-psychedelics-spiritual-potential/

So there may be a NAZI-CIA-Vatican-UFO-Industry conspiracy that is both keeping technology from us, and also keeping our minds under tight control by limiting our ability to perceive non-desirable aspects of reality.

There's a shit ton of baggage in there.

Bonus weirdness:

Timothy Leary was using LSD to channel messages from aliens in Sirius

https://incaseyoureinterested.com/2018/03/06/tomorrow-tuesday-tim-learys-starseed/

http://rawilsonfans.de/en/the-starseed-signals/

Aliester Crowley was also channeling messages from Sirius, as well as an entity he called "AIWAS"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley

Here is what AIWAS looked like

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/36/e1/eb36e169f555d973eb307bf3297218cb.png

The first head of the US Jet Propulsion lab was a follower of Crowley, named Jack Parsons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons

 

Thursday, August 03, 2023

True Facts: The Consequences Of Nuclear War Were Largely Unknown When It Happened

Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading Japan on while assembling an invasion.

“There is a school of thought, and I don’t know how well accepted it is now, that the reason we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August despite Japan suing for peace through non-US diplomatic channels since IIRC April 1945 is we wanted to put the Soviets on the back foot by showing how far we had gotten with our nuclear program.”

There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.

The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well, necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer planes and bombs.

You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments. There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima, as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the 1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on target.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the original objective) were targeted because they were significant military targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).

Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general. Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent thought process to it.

The Day After Trinity (Watch On Youtube To Access The Whole Playlist)

NYTimes  |  One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.

It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.

Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.

He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.

Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.

In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)

“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”

Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.

 

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

The Unspeakable Shydte That Oppenheimer Left Out

responsiblestatecraft  |  On July 16, 1945, the world ended. Or at least it seemed that way to residents of the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico.

Unbeknownst to local civilians, J. Robert Oppenheimer had chosen their backyard as the proving ground for the world’s first nuclear weapon. The explosion, which U.S. officials publicly claimed to be an accident at a local ammunition depot, tore through the morning sky, leaving a 40,000-foot-tall cloud of radioactive debris that would cake the surrounding area with dust for days on end.

Tina Cordova, whose hometown of Tularosa lies just 45 miles from ground zero, remembers her grandmother’s stories about wiping that infernal dust off every nook and cranny of her childhood home. No one knew what had happened quite yet, but they figured it must have been something special. After all, a local paper reported that the explosion was so bright that a blind woman had actually seen it.

When the initial shock wore off, the 40,000 locals who lived within 50 miles of ground zero returned to their daily lives. They drank from cisterns full of radioactive debris, ate beef from cattle that had grazed on the dust for weeks on end, and breathed air full of tiny plutonium particles. Only later would the real impact become clear.

Bernice Gutierrez, born just eight days before Oppenheimer’s “Trinity Test,” moved from a small town near the blast site to Albuquerque when she was 2 years old. Cancer followed her like a specter. Her great grandfather died of stomach cancer in the early 1950s. She lost cousins to leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Her oldest son died in 2020 after a bout with a “pre-leukemia” blood disorder. In total, 21 members of Gutierrez’s family have had cancer, and seven have died from it.

“We don’t ask ourselves if we’re gonna get cancer,” Gutierrez told RS. “We ask ourselves when, because it just never ends.”

“Oppenheimer” — the latest film from famed director Christopher Nolan — is a three-hour-long exploration of the “dilettante, womanizer, Communist sympathizer,” and world-historic genius behind the ultimate weapon. The movie, based on the book “American Prometheus,” delves deeply into Oppenheimer’s psyche, from his struggles as a young student at Cambridge to his profound melancholy over the world he helped create.

Yet nowhere in the film will viewers find an acknowledgement of the first victims of the nuclear era. Indeed, the movie repeats the myth that the bomb site was in a desolate area with “nothing for 40 miles in either direction.” This was not for lack of effort, according to Cordova, who leads an activist group called the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. (“Downwinders” refers to those who live in the fallout zone of nuclear tests.)

When Nolan’s team got to New Mexico to film, Cordova and her team published an op-ed in the local newspaper that called on the Oppenheimer crew to “grapple with the consequences of confronting the truth of our stories, of our history.” When that didn’t work, she reached out to the production through Kai Bird, the journalist who co-wrote American Prometheus, in an attempt to get a meeting. She received a flat “no.”

Africom Expelled From Niger Just Like Little French Bishes...,

abcnews  |   On Saturday, following the meeting, the junta’s spokesperson, Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, said U.S. flights over Niger’s ter...