The Weekly Watch

Endless War and Endless Lies

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The war based economy of the US drives senseless destruction, death, and misery across the globe. As I look back over all the US instigated wars of my lifetime, I can't think of a single one that wasn't justified by lies. The war of my youth, Vietnam, was promoted with the Tonkin Gulf false flag narrative.

“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression”, announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.
That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
But there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam — no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media…leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

series of lies.png

Seems the US has been warring or conducting coups my entire life. I think the CIA is largely to blame. I suspect it is their goal to keep the MIC fed, plus all their off the books grifting with drug sales, arms trades, blackmail, and sex trafficking. I often refer to them as the mafia branch of our government. I wonder if the replacement of Henry Wallace as VP by Truman was to insure the creation of the CIA.

Excellent summary of recent and some older wars..
https://truthout.org/articles/lies-and-consequences-in-our-past-15-wars/
Here's a condensed version...

AFGHANISTAN
When the United States attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the Taliban again offered to negotiate for the handing over of bin Laden. When President George W. Bush refused, the Taliban dropped its demand for evidence of guilt and offered simply to turn bin Laden over to a third country. Bush rejected this offer and continued bombing. At a March 13, 2002, press conference, Bush said of bin Laden “I truly am not that concerned about him.”[i] When President Barack Obama announced, in May 2011, that he had killed bin Laden, the war didn’t even slow down.
LIBYA
Gadaffi had given up his nuclear program. His subsequent fate (butchered and displayed in a meat locker), along with the fate of the nation of Iraq, sends a strong message to other nations already inclined to believe that only nuclear weapons will protect them.

But Gadaffi had displeased the West and displeased the Arab dictatorships. He was unreliable. He wanted too much of Libya’s wealth for Libyans. He was too independent. He even called the Saudi monarch the worst thing in the book: “made by Britain and protected by the U.S.” And he made that remark in Qatar, another nation that became his enemy.
DRONE WARS
The bombing of Libya was intense and sustained, but U.S. drones are also being used to kill in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. They are used to kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, including children, including both identified individuals and people targeted because of a pattern of behavior that is deemed suspicious, and of course including many people who simply happen to be too close to an intended or accidental target. If drone strikes are law enforcement, the president or his designate is judge, jury, and executioner.
IRAQ II
President George W. Bush had decided on the war and sought ways to get it started for many months, while publicly pretending to be striving to avoid a war. Vice President Cheney pressured the CIA to fudge the facts, and set up an even more compliant “intelligence” operation within the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a war sales pitch to the United Nation despite his own staff having warned him that many of the claims he would be making were not backed up by the evidence. The U.N. refused to authorize the war, but Bush launched it anyway, resulting in over a million deaths and over 4 million people displaced from their homes, along with such complete devastation of Iraqi society that commentators began popularizing the term “sociocide.” This disaster cost the U.S. trillions of dollars in direct expense and indirect economic impact
...
And then there were all the subordinate war crimes that came along with the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq: targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, using antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, using white phosphorous as a weapon, using depleted uranium weapons, employing a new form of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs, collectively punishing populations including by blocking roads and electricity and water, by planting bombs in farm fields, by demolishing houses, by plowing down orchards, by detaining people without charge, imprisoning children, torturing, raping, and murdering captives. An increased use of mercenaries created a force lacking even the pretense of accountability to any body of law.
BOSNIA
In 1995, President Clinton announced that he would “help the people of Bosnia to secure their own peace.” Almost two decades later, U.S. and other foreign troops have never left , and the place is governed by a European-backed Office of High Representative.[xiv] U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia gave NATO a reason to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also not unrelated to lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver mines, cheap labor, and a deregulated market.

IRAQ I
Far-fetched claims of humanitarian intention did not begin with Bill Clinton either. On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she’d been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. Thus was born the Gulf War, a war that would never really end, but would be radically expanded in 2003.

PANAMA
When Bush the Elder had first sought, among other things, to prove he was no “wimp” by attacking Panama in 1989, the most prominent justification was that Panama’s leader was a mean, drug-crazed, weirdo with a pockmarked face who liked to commit adultery. An article in the New York Times on December 26, 1989, began:

“The United States military headquarters here, which has portrayed General Manuel Antonio Noriega as an erratic, cocaine-snorting dictator who prays to voodoo gods, announced today that the deposed leader wore red underwear and availed himself of prostitutes.”

Never mind that Noriega had worked for the CIA, including at the time he’d stolen the 1984 election in Panama. Never mind that his real offense was refusing to back U.S. war making against Nicaragua. Never mind that the United States had known about Noriega’s drug trafficking for years and continued working with him.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC AND GRENADA
Often one of the initial excuses for military action is to defend Americans in a foreign country who have supposedly been put at risk by recent events. This excuse was used, along with the usual variety of other excuses, by the United States when invading the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989. In the case of the Dominican Republic, U.S. citizens who wanted to leave (1,856 of them) had been evacuated prior to the military action.
...
In the case of Grenada (an invasion that the United States banned the U.S. media from covering) there were supposedly U.S. medical students to rescue. But U.S. State Department official James Budeit, two days before the invasion, learned that the students were not in danger. When about 100 to 150 students decided they wanted to leave, their reason was fear of the U.S. attack. The parents of 500 of the students sent President Reagan a telegram asking him not to attack, letting him know their children were safe and free to leave Grenada if they chose to do so.
KOREA
The forgotten war in Korea, however, was the war that did away with Congressional declarations and established war as a permanent industry and global project, with the heavy taxes that go along with funding that. Americans were told that North Korea had attacked South Korea and had done so at the behest of the Soviet Union as part of a plot to take over the world for communism. In fact, the evidence suggests that the South was the aggressor. But, whichever side attacked, this was a civil war. The Soviet Union was not involved, and the United States ought not to have been. South Korea was not the United States, and was not in fact anywhere near the United States, yet this war was advertised as “defensive.”

Even WWII was cooked...
On September 4, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a “fireside chat” radio address in which he claimed that a German submarine, completely unprovoked, had attacked the United States destroyer Greer, which — despite being called a destroyer — had been harmlessly delivering mail. Really? The Senate Naval Affairs Committee questioned Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, who said the Greer had been tracking the German submarine and relaying its location to a British airplane, which had dropped depth charges on the submarine’s location without success. The Greer had continued tracking the submarine for hours before the submarine turned and fired torpedoes.

A month and a half later, Roosevelt told a similar tall tale about the USS Kearny. And then he really piled on. Roosevelt claimed to have in his possession a secret map produced by Hitler’s government that showed plans for a Nazi conquest of South America. The Nazi government denounced this as a lie, blaming of course a Jewish conspiracy. The map, which Roosevelt refused to show the public, in fact actually showed routes in South America flown by American airplanes, with notations in German describing the distribution of aviation fuel. It was a British forgery, and apparently of about the same quality as the forgeries President George W. Bush would later use to show that Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium.

as well as WWI
In the case of World War I, the U.S. public was told that Germany had attacked our good and innocent allies, might eventually attack us, and had in fact attacked innocent American civilians aboard a ship called the Lusitania. German submarines had been giving warnings to civilian ships, allowing passengers to abandon them before they were sunk. When this exposed the U-boats to counterattacks, however, the Germans began attacking without warning. That was how they sank the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. But, through other channels, the Germans had already warned those passengers. The Lusitania had been built to specifications of the British Navy which listed it as an auxiliary cruiser. On its final voyage, the Lusitania was packed with American-made war materiel, including ten-and-a-half tons of rifle cartridges, 51 tons of shrapnel shells, and a large supply of gun cotton, not to mention 67 soldiers of the 6th Winnipeg Rifles. That the ship was carrying troops and weapons to war was not actually a secret. Before the Lusitania left New York, the German Embassy had obtained permission from the U.S. Secretary of State to publish in New York newspapers a warning that because the ship was carrying war supplies it would be subject to attack.
...
And so it goes, back through the claim that the Civil War was launched to end slavery and was needed to end slavery, even though so many other nations ended slavery without wars. Back through the endless lies about, and to, Native Americans. Back through the War of 1812 that we like to imagine as a defensive struggle and a continuation of a war for independence, although it was actually launched by the U.S. government three decades after the revolution ended, and launched with the intention of conquering Canada. Back indeed beyond the American Revolution that we justify by averting our eyes from the nonviolent liberation of many other nations.

Yes and so it goes...endlessly. Much more at the link.

Chris Hedges is back with a new show at the Real News.

Rulers divide the world into 'worthy' and 'unworthy' victims; those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. This bifurcation of the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, award-winning journalist Peter Oborne joins Chris Hedges to examine how worthy victims are used to allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just; how they are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor; and how they are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity.

War Made Easy, made by the Media Education Foundation and based off the book by Norman Solomon, reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. This film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion & exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations. War Made Easy gives special attention to parallels between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq.

Governments lie to justify wars. Newspapers and TV news programs assist governments by forwarding those lies to the American public.
The US Government has gone to war over and over based upon lies. This video focuses upon the deceit used by the government and the news media to sell wars to the American public since the end of WW2.

Bill Moyers: The Secret Government [1987]

This is the full-length 90-minute version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine.
Many more anti-war films are here: https://www.addictedtowar.com/films

But what about today's war in Ukraine, which is clearly a proxy war between Russia and NATO. Well it is same ole same ole...lies and more lies.
Here's Alex morning report on the current situation from this morning. Tactical nuke talk projection. Poland's "Stop Russia Now!" campaign. Green US Military.

The US And Ukraine Have Every Reason To Lie About The War
...
Unproven claims by the Russian government are laughable absurdities presented without evidence; unproven claims by the US government are just The News.
...
The US-centralized empire is censoring and propagandizing as though it is in a hot war with Russia currently. Officially the US and its allies are not at war, but the imperial narrative management machine is behaving as though we are. This makes sense because when two nuclear-armed powers are fighting for dominance and know a direct military confrontation can kill them both, other types of warfare are used instead, including propaganda campaigns and psychological warfare.
...
For this reason it is necessary to take everything claimed about what happens in Ukraine with a planet-sized grain of salt, whether it’s by Russia, Ukraine, or the US and its allies. Be very skeptical of anything you hear about chemical attacks or any other narrative that can be used to get military firepower moving in a way that it otherwise would not. All parties involved in this conflict have every reason in the world to lie about such things.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/12/the-us-and-ukraine-have-every-re...

...hot occupations involving constant violence must be distinguished from the many cold occupations consisting of foreign troops stationed permanently in allied nations. And what to make of operations involving the steady bombing of a nation from unmanned drones piloted by men and women on the other side of the world? Is that war? Are secret assassination squads sent into yet other nations to work their will also taking part in war? What about arming a proxy state and encouraging it to launch attacks on a neighbor or its own people? What about selling weaponry to hostile nations around the world or facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons? Perhaps not all unjustifiable warlike actions are actually acts of war. But many are actions to which domestic and international laws of war should be applied and which we should have public knowledge of and control over. In the U.S. system of government, the legislature shouldn’t cede the constitutional power of war to presidents simply because the appearance of wars has changed
...
Once a war is underway, however, we don’t continue it in order to defeat the evil enemies or to bestow benefits on them; we continue wars primarily for the good of our own soldiers currently deployed on the “battlefield,” a process we call “supporting the troops.” And if we want to end an unpopular war, we do that by escalating it. Thus we achieve “victory,” which we can trust our televisions to accurately inform us of. Thus do we make a better world and uphold the rule of law. We prevent future wars by continuing the existing ones and preparing for ever more.

https://worldbeyondwar.org/introduction-war-lie/

Phil Ochs wrote many good antiwar songs. Here's one

What Are You Fighting For?

Weapons of mass destruction. Bombing a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. The Gulf of Tonkin incident. There’s plenty of good reasons for journalists to question US military claims. Most importantly, because that’s their job.

In the span of a few hours one day last week, two separate Biden administration press representatives accused two separate reporters of siding with America’s enemies for asking government officials to provide evidence for public claims.

...
Much like Psaki, Price wasn’t keen on giving any evidence. Price told the reporter, “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

https://www.rightsanddissent.org/news/our-government-has-a-history-of-ly...

war lies.jpg

Most of the investor class knows what is really happening. Now their analysis doesn't always ring true, but they are pretty good at seeing through the public narrative.

Russia Secretly Hoarded Gold for This Moment; Sanctions to Backfire on U.S
"Europe has just placed its entire energy economy at risk with natural gas and oil sanctions," as the dollar strengthens and the euro weakens, asserts Byron King, author of Whiskey & Gunpowder at St. Paul Research. Russia has been increasing its gold reserves to prepare for economic sanctions, "for the last eight to nine years," he tells our Daniela Cambone. Lawmakers in the West, "did not truly understand the medium and long-term risk of truly weaponizing the dollar," King claims. The inflation levels that the United States is currently experiencing have been, "structurally built into the economy," he continues. King declares that the world is moving to a different type of international trade, "and it's going to be a basket of things including energy, gold, and various commodities." Gold has plenty of upside potential and will be a part of the commodity currency of the future, he concludes.

None of the sanction measures against Russia will have any impact on saving a single Ukrainian life. But it will devastate the European economy: Irish MEP

I wish we had politicians like her in the US, and the EU could use several more of her ilk.

"How is not selling Kerrygold butter to Russia going to save any Ukrainian lives? How is buying filthy fracked US gas going to stop the war?" Clare Daly (Daly), an Irish politician and a member of the European Parliament, asked earlier this month. In an interview with Global Times (GT) reporters Bai Yunyi and Li Aixin, Daly said, "NATO has never brought peace anywhere in the world," and sanctions against Russia will "devastate the European economy."

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202204/1259925.shtml

Yes,so it goes. Again and again. Now a days with a corporate consolidated media machine spouting CIA talking points painting Ukrainians as worthy and Russians as unworthy victims as Chris discusses above. Additionally there's social media conglomerates guarding accepted conversation and disappearing those who do not comply. What is the last war the US won? If you think it is WWII, I believe Russia deserves much more of the credit for that victory than the US. Too bad we didn't remain allies, but in fact it was after WWII when we created the CIA and made Russia the enemy because they dared to try a different form of government.

Round and round. So what to do? Enjoy the day. Speak your truth to those who need to hear it, and be a happy as you can while the war machine rumbles onward. Have a great Sunday!

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Thanks for gathering the ample evidence of the war machine and the lies used
to perpetuate it. National security is a crazy excuse to propagandize the US
public awareness of global misadventure in our name.

I found this uplifting ...

Spring after spring, it remained a live gathering and a labor of love. Then, in the gatherless disorientation of the pandemic, I joined forces with my friends at On Being to reimagine the spirit of The Universe in Verse in a different incarnation — a season of perspective-broadening, mind-deepening, heart-leavening stories about science and our search for truth, enlivened by animated poems with original music: emblems of our longing for meaning.

https://www.themarginalian.org/the-universe-in-verse/

thanks and enjoy your spring day!

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Lookout's picture

@QMS

I was amazed as I researched this piece, the copious amount of evidence of our lying about wars...way more than I included here. Makes you wonder why the public is so ignorant about the US role and guilt.

As Alex says today (and frequently), The collective west is only winning the PR/news/propaganda battle. Otherwise we're losing on the battlefield and the economic front. I guess when empires fall it isn't with a soft landing.

Lovely day here. Hope you're enjoying a nice mid-spring too!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

snoopydawg's picture

and who was behind it and why democrats did it. Here’s the 1st part.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/wsws-blows-lid-days-3-4-impeachment-...

“There is a saying attributed to the banker J.P. Morgan: “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one and the real one.”

If the alleged “organized crime shakedown” by Trump was the “good” reason for the impeachment inquiry, the “real” reason has emerged over two weeks of public congressional hearings. The hearings have lifted the lid on a massive US conspiracy to spend billions of dollars to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and foment a civil war that has led to the deaths of thousands of people.

The impeachment drive is itself the product of efforts by sections of the intelligence agencies and elements within the State Department to escalate Washington’s conflict with Russia, with potentially world-catastrophic consequences.

(the photo)
https://www.wsws.org/asset/b1b0532e-c1c2-4265-851c-7585d61378ab?renditio...

On Thursday, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell showed a photo of Ukrainian President Zelensky in body armor on the “front lines” of the civil war in eastern Ukraine. He asked the State Department witnesses “why it’s so important that our hard-earned tax dollars help President Zelensky and the men standing beside him fight Russia in this hot war?”
David Holmes, political counselor at the US embassy in Kiev, replied:

Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine, but rather to double down on it. As we sit here, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory against Russian aggression.
Later in his testimony, Holmes pointed to the massive sums expended by the United States and its European allies to fight this “hot war,” saying the US had provided $5 billion and its European allies $12 billion since 2014.
In her testimony last week, the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich recalled that as ambassador:

I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war… sometimes literally as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put to use.
She added:
Ukraine, with an enormous land mass and a large population, has the potential to be a significant…force multiplier on the security side… And now Ukraine is a battleground for great power competition with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to control Ukraine’s leadership.

She explained that the US-funded and fascist-led “Maidan Revolution” of 2014, which she and other State Department officials absurdly called the “Revolution of Dignity,” was part of this conflict. “That’s why they launched the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, demanding to be a part of Europe,” she declared.

Diplomat George Kent invoked the same theme in his testimony last Wednesday, saying:
Ukraine’s popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian leadership to flee to Moscow. After that, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying seven percent of its territory, roughly equivalent to the size of Texas for the United States…
Since then, more than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. American support in Ukraine’s own de facto war of independence has been critical in this regard.

Kent subsequently compared the role of the United States in the Ukrainian civil war to that of Spain and France in the American War of Independence. In that conflict, Spain and France were officially at war with Great Britain, including formal declarations of war in 1778 and 1779.

If Kent’s analogy is true, then the United States is in an undeclared war with Russia.
But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a congressional vote to authorize it? Does anyone believe that if the question, “Do you want to spend billions of dollars to help Ukraine fight a war with Russia,” were posed to the American public, the percentage answering yes would be anything more than minuscule? Of course, that question was never asked.” [snip]

“But in the congressional hearings this week, government officials declared that any questioning of this aid is virtually treasonous. In her testimony on Thursday, former National Security Council officer Fiona Hill accused anyone who questions that “Ukraine is a valued partner” of the United States of advancing “Russian interests.”

“When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces,” she said, threatening the “president, or anyone else, [who] impedes or subverts the national security of the United States.”

In 2017, Hill penned a blog post for the Brookings Institution calling Trump a “Bolshevik,” echoing statements made more than 60 years ago by John Birch Society leader Robert W. Welch, who declared that President Eisenhower was a “communist.”

Underlying the mad allegations of the Democrats that Trump is functioning as a “Russian asset” is a very real content: The extremely dangerous drive by factions within the state for a military confrontation between the United States and Russia, whose combined nuclear weapons arsenals are capable of destroying all of humanity many times over.

There is no “peace” faction within the American political establishment. No credence can be given to either one of the parties of US imperialism, which have, over the course of decades, presided over the toppling of dozens of governments, the launching of countless wars and the deaths of millions of people."

H/t blue republic for reposting this.

Again for those in the back. Russia didn’t start this war. We did.

Here’s another must read on the Nazis we have been supporting.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/despite-a-jewish-president-ukraine?s=r

Yesterday I saw videos from a anti war protest in NYC where people were cheering the Nazis! Gawd’s nightgown. Americans should be ashamed of how much propaganda they believe from the media because no one should trust a damn thing they say after they lied about the reasons Bush invaded Iraq.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

Trump called to Ukraine asking them to investigate the CrowdStrike server

During his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump made a brief and cryptic reference to CrowdStrike. According to a reconstructed transcript of the call released by the White House, which is not a verbatim account, he said:

“I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike . I guess you have one of your wealthy people . The server, they say Ukraine has it.” Trump added that he’d like to have Attorney General William Barr call “you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”

More here on the call

But what was the impeachment was about...
Democrats impeach Trump for withholding arms to Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Despite this public admission by Biden:

Thanks for Wendy's piece

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

Nunes described the farce that the impeachment was.

Neither Biden or Trump should run again. But it’s funny watching Trump go after Biden.

The world is laughing at us for our 2 party system that elects worse people every time.

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8 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

an impeachment in search of a crime.

And Trump's line...the Easter Bunny is a political operative.
But his pitch is as stupid as ever...make America great again,again....is pretty weak.

Let's see, exactly when were we great?

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

enhydra lutris's picture

of course, partial - it has to be, the truth of all the US lies, coups, assassinations and attempted assassinations and the like would be a very large book indeed. The CIA as Mafia is a good analogy, they are certainly criminals and a criminal conspiracy, also global terrorists. Too bad that Kennedy spoke openly about getting rid of them wjhen he did instead of simply doing it first and talking later, much world history would likely have gone much better, and maybe much us history too.

Overcast here, but not raining and even drying out, so time to get out into the yard - runaway growth of far too much that isn't supposed to and the need to get crops into the ground as well. We can't grow much, but every little bit helps.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Lookout's picture

@enhydra lutris

Enjoy your day out and about. I went down and watered earlier. Things are coming along. Love all the shades of green up and down the mountain this season.

As you said I could have gone on and on, but this was enough for today anyway. So have a good one.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@enhydra lutris if JFK actually talked openly in public about breaking up the CIA, but he did talk privately. And there was only so much he could achieve in his limited less-than-one term presidency, but he did do this:

1. fired the CIA's powerful director Allen Dulles, someone who probably planned on another decade or two in that position. How many other DCI's have been fired before or since?

2. rejected the CIA's advice on sending in US military to bail out the Bay of Pigs disaster, the next step that Dulles, Bissell et al expected Kennedy to be forced to agree to when they presented their invasion plan.

3. rejected CIA advice to bomb and invade Cuba during the missile crisis

4. rejected CIA advice to send in US combat units to VN

5. by exec order JFK took away one operational area from the CIA and gave it exclusively to the Pentagon, greatly upsetting powerful elements in the Agency

6. had 2d term plans for a major overhaul of the CIA, possibly with brother Bobby heading up the effort as DCI.

That's quite a bit of rejecting and saying No to an Agency that was used to total acquiescence from previous presidents. JFK's idea to put his brother in charge would have been a radical stroke of genius as Bobby would have immediately and aggressively begun cleaning house and reforming. Of course neither was fully appreciative of the great danger such an undertaking would entail, as Dallas would show.

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Lookout's picture

@wokkamile

After the Bay of Pigs disaster, where the CIA had defrauded Kennedy, he was so angry that he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and is reputed to have vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds.” That necessarily means Kennedy was determined to eradicate the CIA from American life. But the CIA would not go quietly into the night. It fought back, and it won.

https://www.fff.org/2021/05/13/splinter-the-cia-into-a-thousand-pieces-a...

Consequently, Joseph Kennedy recommended that the CIA’s power to engage in covert activities be terminated and that the CIA be strictly limited to collecting intelligence and empowered to do nothing else.

According to Kennedy Jr., “Allen Dulles never forgave him — never forgave my family — for that.”

I wasn’t aware of that fact. I assumed that the war between President Kennedy and the CIA had begun with the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The additional information added by Kennedy Jr. places things in a much more fascinating and revealing context.

...

And then Kennedy did the unforgivable, at least insofar as the CIA was concerned. In his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, he declared an end to the entire Cold War and announced that the United States was going to establish friendly and peaceful relations with the communist world.

https://www.fff.org/2020/08/18/the-cia-versus-the-kennedys/
2 min clip

Whole speech here.

That's why he was assassinated by the CIA, et al. IMO of course.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@Lookout the author states JFK was "reputed" to have said "break the CIA into a thousand pieces ..." I.e., it wasn't a public statement which we can nail down but something likely said in private.

On the Joe Kennedy info, that's interesting, wasn't aware of it. Though, imo, just one person among 6-7, and what JFK did as president was far more threatening to the Agency than one recommendation from the father not implemented by Ike.

On the American Univ speech, iirc it was unique also in that unlike presidential speeches dealing chiefly with foreign relations, for this one JFK deliberately did not allow the State Dept and Pentagon to review it first. For our political establishment then and now, it's the one major JFK speech that gets short shrift in their occasional reviews of his presidency, an unwelcome set of ideas it would rather not repeat to the public, similar to how MLK's bold Riverside Church speech against the VN War gets little attention as against his more acceptable March on Washington speech.

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Lookout's picture

@wokkamile

it's the one major JFK speech that gets short shrift in their occasional reviews of his presidency, an unwelcome set of ideas it would rather not repeat to the public, similar to how MLK's bold Riverside Church speech against the VN War gets little attention as against his more acceptable March on Washington speech.

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ggersh's picture

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" A. J. Liebling

Looking back at the amerikkkan press, Operation Mockingbird", Wikipedia, etc.etc.etc. it's difficult at best to think that we ever had a "free press". Clinton also certainly killed off whatever notion of a "free press" was left in america with passage of the Telecommunication Act 1996.

So it appears as if lies, lies and more lies is what the empire was built on and when those lies are
the silly can see through lies of today it leads me to believe that the empire is crumbling not around the fringe's but in it's core.

For both the world and humanity to survive this needs to happen

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Lookout's picture

@ggersh

To start somewhere, how about "Remember the Maine" at lie to get us into the Spanish American war
https://iacenter.org/2022/04/20/remember-the-maine-u-s-war-lies/ Set up by Hearst.
By the time the USS Maine, an American warship in Havana Harbour was blew up under questionable circumstances with over 250 hands lost, the American public had already formed their united stand on the rebellion in Cuba. Two leading newspapers of the time, Joseph Pulitzer’s The World, and William Randolph Hearst’s the New York Journal, both informed their readers of the virtue of the Cubans and the perfidy and cruelty of the Spaniards.

quote-you-furnish-the-pictures-and-i-ll-furnish-the-war-william-randolph-hearst-109-97-36.jpg
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snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

We are imploding from within the country and the government is doing more damage than any enemy could do. Another great read from Eric Zeuss on the impeachment and what was behind it.

http://thesaker.is/ukraine-trump-biden-the-real-story-behind-ukrainegate/

One can’t understand the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump unless one understands accurately what was happening in Ukraine and what the motivations were of the persons who were involved in U.S.-Ukraine policy, first under U.S. President Barack Obama, and then under his successor Donald Trump. Information will be presented here, about those matters, which probably won’t come up in the House impeachment hearings. These matters are likelier to be publicly discussed afterward, when the case goes to the Senate, but might be too ‘sensitive’ to be brought up even there — especially if they make both Democratic and Republican officials look bad, such as, for example, if both Democrats and Republicans had participated in a February 2014 coup against, and overthrowing, Ukraine’s democratically elected Government,

A neoconservative believes in the rightfulness of American empire over this entire planet, even over the borders of the other nuclear superpower, Russia. Obama’s standard phrase arguing for it was “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, meaning that all other nations are “dispensable.” This imperialistic belief was an extension of Yale’s ‘pacifist’ pro-Nazi America First movement, which was supported by Wall Street’s Dulles brothers in the early 1940s, and which pro-Nazi movement Trump himself has prominently praised. Unlike the progressive U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had planned the U.N. in order to be the anti-imperialist emerging first-ever global world government of nations, which would democratically set and ultimately enforce international laws of a new global federation of nations — a global democratic federation of sovereign republics — neoconservatives are U.S. imperialists, who want instead to destroy the U.N., and to extend American power over the entire world, make America not only the policeman to the world but the lawmaker for the world, and the judge jury and executioner of the world, the global dictator. The U.N. would be weakened to insignificance. This has gradually been occurring. It continued even after what had been thought to have been the 1991 end of the Cold War, and after Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his deceptive rhetoric. Yale’s John Bolton was the leading current proponent of the America First viewpoint, much more straightforward in his advocacy of it than the far wilier Obama was; and, until recently, Trump supported that unhedged advocacy for the neoconservative viewpoint: U.S. imperialism. Regarding the campaign to take over Russia, however, he no longer does — he has broken with Bolton on that central neoconservative goal, and he is trying to reverse that policy, which had been even more extreme than Obama’s policy towards Russia was (which policy had, in fact, produced the coup in Ukraine).

That’s just one example — it’s about the role of Ambassador Yovanovitch. But the focus of Ukrainegate isn’t really that. It’s not Yovanovitch. It is what Trump was trying to do, and what Joe Biden was trying to do, and what Obama had actually done. It is also about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, because this is also about contending dynasties, and not only about contending individuals. Trump isn’t certain, now, that he wants to continue being a full-fledged neoconservative, and to continue extending Obama’s neoconservative policies regarding Ukraine. So: this is largely about what those policies actually were. And here is how Joe Biden comes into the picture, because Democrats, in trying to replace President Donald Trump by a President Mike Pence, are trying to restore, actually, Barack Obama’s policy in Ukraine, a policy of which the Bidens themselves were very much Obama’s agents, and Mike Pence would be expected to continue and extend those policies. Here will be necessary to document some personal and business relationships that the U.S. news-media have consistently been hiding and even lying about, and which might not come up even in the expected subsequent Senate hearings about whether to replace Trump by Pence:

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

We are imploding from within the country and the government is doing more damage than any enemy could do.

We are rotting from the inside out. Thanks for the additional info on the Trumped up impeachment.

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snoopydawg's picture

@snoopydawg

This follows several years of attempts by Pinchuk and Schoen to buy influence with Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as president; with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani; and with John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser in 2018 and 2019. Their attempts failed.

Pinchuk has been paying Schoen more than $40,000 every month for eight years. The amount of money is substantially greater than Biden’s son Hunter Biden was paid by Pinchuk’s Ukrainian rival Igor Kolomoisky through the oil company Burisma and Rosemont Seneca Bohai, Biden’s New York front company.

Most members of congress have their own foundations to launder bribes through them and into the pockets of the members. After HerHeinous fell from grace her foundation that was getting millions from foreign people and countries dried up and they went instead into John McCain's foundation that was also up to its eyeballs in Ukraine corruption. Pelosi's son is also involved in Ukraine and many democrats are also. Trump had to know that and I’m betting that there was a very good reason why he didn’t spill the beans. Schumer basically told Trump to play ball or else because, "the intelligence agencies have six ways to Sunday to get you." And the shitlibs trout it was funny that Trump was threatened. I think he said that to Rachel Moscow on a Sunday show that she doesn’t normally do. It was a direct threat to Trump.

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snoopydawg's picture

@snoopydawg

My frustration,” writes Peter Schweizer in his new book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” “is not that the solid reporting on Trump has been too tough, but that the reporting on the Obama administration has been way too soft or in some cases nonexistent.” The author of the 2016 sensation “Clinton Cash” says Trump and his children didn’t invent the blurring of government and business, and details a number of ethical violations on both sides of the political aisle. One example: the little-noticed private equity firm run by the sons of Democrats Joe Biden and John Kerry, as detailed in this exclusive first excerpt.

So their sons going into business together in June 2009 was not exactly a bolt out of the blue.

But with whom their sons cut lucrative deals while the elder two were steering the ship of state is more of a surprise.

What Hunter Biden, the son of America’s vice president, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (later to be secretary of state), were creating was an international private equity firm. It was anchored by the Heinz family alternative investment fund, Rosemont Capital. The new firm would be populated by political loyalists and positioned to strike profitable deals overseas with foreign governments and officials with whom the US government was negotiating.

Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals often with those same foreign governments.

Some of the deals they secured may remain hidden. These Rosemont entities are, after all, within a private equity firm and as such are not required to report or disclose their financial dealings publicly.

Link

This is legalized pay to play like what Hillary did with her foundation when she was Secretary of State and countries would donate money to her foundation and she would smooth things over for them if they had a tiff with the government. Most members of congress have people in their families working for their foundations and everyone gets rich from doing it. It’s kinda like how congress has made insider trading legal for them, but not for thee.

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

We need to start a foundation. How about a C99 foundation with tax exempt donations?

Speaking of which, I hope those that are able are contributing to JtC so he can afford to maintain he site.

We need some of that CIA drug, etc. money.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

Hunter Biden’s new firm got connected to the highest people in China right around the time Joe Biden was working on some deal with China as VP. Another way rich people game the system is donating their foundation money to another person’s foundation and taking the tax write offs. Meanwhile more Americans fall through the increasingly wide cracks in the system. The sooner this country implodes from the corruption the better. I hope I’m alive to see it happen.

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

The level of corruption is quite extensive. We are indeed rotting from the core.
Kim dotcom says it will cost Joe is presidency.
https://www.eutimes.net/2022/04/kim-dotcom-hunter-biden-will-go-to-jail-...

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lotlizard's picture

@snoopydawg  
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/its-been-more-than-seven-months-a...

The fact that [Robert] Kaplan was making directional bets with S&P 500 futures in 2020 while simultaneously having access to inside information warranted a criminal referral by Fed Chair Jerome Powell to the U.S. Department of Justice. Instead, Powell said this when Kaplan abruptly announced his “retirement” as Dallas Fed President on September 27, 2021:

“We are grateful for Rob’s six years of service as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and as a valued colleague in the FOMC. He has been a passionate and forceful public voice on a wide range of issues, including the critical value of early childhood education and literacy. In addition, he strengthened the Bank’s economic research and played a very constructive role in System-wide management, budget and technology efforts. We wish him well.”

Kaplan’s “retirement” announcement came on the same day that Wall Street On Parade filed an in-depth report, revealing that Kaplan had been making his S&P 500 bets for the entire five years he had been President of the Dallas Fed, including the pivotal year of 2020.

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None of them good wars, even if WWII came a bit closer than usual. And we should always look back to the 100 Years War as the starting place for exercising our right to steal in the name of our fabulous freedoms. From there, we have gotten more deluded about what is right, what is dead wrong. The trajectory of the US. Keep thanking soldiers and sailors for their service.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Thought it would sort of fit with today's ot: the environment is being destroyed by our military.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/24/the-us-military-is-driving-environment...

edit for observations on our crooked CIA from one who knows:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/24/john-kiriakou-on-abu-zubaydah-and-unet...

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Lookout's picture

@on the cusp

is something which should be said to every true public servant.

The U.S. military emits more carbon than 140 countries combined, fueling climate change and environmental degradation.

Greater than most other countries.

and from the 2nd link...

...the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was severely wounded and eventually turned over to the FBI for interrogation at a secret prison controlled by the CIA. That interrogation actually produced actionable intelligence. But the CIA hated that the FBI was in charge, and on August 1, 2002, the CIA and two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen began to torture him. The torture produced nothing. What it did do, though, was to put Abu Zubaydah in a legal twilight zone that continues 20 years later.

reveals the sick nature of the entire NSA conglomerate.

Is it difficult to be a lawyer in these times of 'the law TPTB accept' rather than the constitution?

Hope y'all are enjoying your garden and various projects!

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Creosote.'s picture

@Lookout
has never apologized for or even recognized much less condemned the actions of those two analysts/psychologists who so far as I know still hold positionns of power in the American Psychological Association.
[edited to fix spelling]

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snoopydawg's picture

I think Liz Cheney is also getting the reward. Funny how democrats are dragging out the 1/6 saga where nothing will happen to Trump. But hey it keeps the shitlibs occupied.

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

speaking out about the hypocrisy.

I'm glad they didn't kill him.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

But I thought he had his computer taken? Or was that unverified?

Here’s how busy democrats have been.

I don’t see how they can go after people funding Trump’s speech that day or go after him for what he said because we still have free speech for now. And one of the last things he said to his supporters was to be peaceful at the capital. And nothing the republicans did on the vote certification was illegal. Weird how people have forgotten that democrats have done that same thing 5 times since 2000.

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

...and seemingly unable to think critically.

Yes , Gonzalo said his computer and phone was seized, but he obviously has access to another, and has also opened new accounts. I'm glad it wasn't Azov that capture him but the SBU, but they're no angels either.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

At the end, buy into companies and industries that make stuff. One pundit said that Russia will survive because they have an economy which makes a lot stuff. America's economy is based on finance. Back when I grew up there were people known as "industrialists". Now the richest people in the US have wealth based on the manipulation of paper and regulations. The only industrialists we have is a
comic book character (Tony Stark).

It seems like one reason the West is collapsing is that we have ignorant policy people and politicians. They operate from cliched and ideological views of Russia and many other countries. It seems the people imposing sanctions never thought about obvious implications both big and small. This includes everything around the pandemic.

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Lookout's picture

@MrWebster

The US offshored their production and now is dependent on imports, mainly from China.

I taught in Ft. Payne most of my career, which at the time was the sock mill capitol of the world. Only one small mill remains (run by one of my students from many years ago)...the mills went to Mexico or China.

We could regenerate our manufaturing but the impetus seems otherwise.

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lotlizard's picture

@MrWebster  
came true regarding industrialists abandoning their efforts in America… but instead of going on strike and going into hiding, they just moved their operations to China, rather than building a capitalist Wakanda in “Galt’s Gulch”?

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Creosote.'s picture

@MrWebster
I now call people like this "finished products."
Their manufacture-to-order has been completed.

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The exception that proves the rule.

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a new war. Like clockwork, or like a paycheck.

BAR has multiple relevant articles up. This one is from March but worth a read or re-read.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/biden-has-money-war-not-poor

Joe Biden has provided $14 billion in aid to Ukraine in a span of weeks, much of which will be used for military purposes.

U.S. sanctions on Russia have already sent shockwaves throughout the global capitalist economy. Working class people are being told to return to their offices amid a global pandemic while facing gas prices that are upwards of 50 percent higher than prior to the intensified U.S. sanctions regime against Russia. The failure to maintain tax credits for working class families has increased the rate of child poverty by 41 percent . Deaths from COVID-19 are approaching the one million mark and Biden has shown that both he and his corporate masters are ready to move on from a pandemic that has yet to end.

At the very least, (aside from the other issues like needless death, slaughter of innocents and civilians and people who just want to live out their lives in peace) don't people ever wonder if there is a better way to use our tax money. Just think what we could do with that money here instead of using it to blow things up.

Warmongers in Washington have attempted to push through this contradiction with a non-stop propaganda blitz that predictably weds the interests of humanity with that of their New Cold War aims. Stopping Russia at all costs, according to Biden, is a crusade for “democracy” against “autocracy.” Millionaire celebrities have repeatedly lectured workers at risk of homelessness and unemployment that they should pay higher gas prices to support Ukraine. But what about democracy in the United States? Who decides whether the U.S. wages war abroad or invests in the needs of the people at home?

I will never understand it.

Thanks Lookout for a very good summary and update.

I watched that Hedges' interview with Peter Oborne. Oborne said that the actions of our respective governments betray a repudiation of our basic values like freedom of the press, the Rule of Law , and the ideal of Democracy. That's a paraphrase but close, I think, to what he meant. It resonates with me and is very sad. It seems to me we are discarding the best aspects of our society.

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Lookout's picture

@randtntx

rang true to me as well. Ukraine as worthy victims, but Russians (even those in Ukraine) are unworthy.

That is the way MSM paint people. Or let's take it a step farther into the absurd. Israelis are worthy victims, but Palestinians are unworthy and Yemenis don't matter but Saudis do. On and on we could go, but you catch my drift.

Nice to "see" you today. Thanks for coming by!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@Lookout . And muchas gracias.

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lotlizard's picture

@Lookout  
as well as having set up a “Donbass” of its own in the northern half of Cyprus that has endured without international recognition for going on fifty years.

Morocco can invade, occupy, and claim to have annexed Western Sahara in defiance of UN resolutions.

The U.S. and E.U. and their lying media and academia lapdogs are fine with all of this and don’t say a thing.

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Lookout's picture

@lotlizard

Thanks...

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Creosote.'s picture

@lotlizard
left suddenly last fall "for two years" to go to Morocco, leaving ladders leaning against the house, shovels against a tree as if driving to the store. Seemed to have a lot of tech background.

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snoopydawg's picture

I don’t know what to say about this. But of course there will be people who see it and believe that’s all it was. Our media is beyond worthless and sold out. Imagine spending years getting your degree in journalism only to sell out your principles once you did.

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAgji1vzZyQ&t=140s]
Once a liar, you can't stop. She's been at it for quite awhile.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

I shouldn’t have watched that on an empty stomach. Gawd her condescending smile and uhh umms. Wish someone would wipe that obnoxious smile off her face.

But did you catch that?

"Ukraine has the right to self determination."

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Lookout's picture

@snoopydawg

which is lying to protect the powerful.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I hadn't heard of this one:

On September 4, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a “fireside chat” radio address in which he claimed that a German submarine, completely unprovoked, had attacked the United States destroyer Greer, which — despite being called a destroyer — had been harmlessly delivering mail. Really? The Senate Naval Affairs Committee questioned Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, who said the Greer had been tracking the German submarine and relaying its location to a British airplane, which had dropped depth charges on the submarine’s location without success. The Greer had continued tracking the submarine for hours before the submarine turned and fired torpedoes.

Can't help but note the parallels to the Moskva sinking:

It has now been revealed that the US military ran the entire operation to sink the Moskva, including running the tracking of the ship via a P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft, which then handed off fire solutions to the Ukrainians who were all trained by the US military as well. Thus, the United States provided the weapons, the training, the tracking and the fire solution to sink the Moskva. All Ukraine did was press the “fire” button, essentially. This is so widely known know that it’s even being reported by the UK Daily Mail. It reports:

REVEALED: US maritime surveillance plane was over Black Sea minutes before Russian flagship Moskva was ‘hit by Ukrainian missiles’
A P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft was patrolling the coast before the attack

The high-tech jet can spot ships on radar at ranges of more than 100 miles… The US Navy used its new marine surveillance aircraft to provide accurate targeting data to Ukrainian forces to sink the Russian Black Sea flag ship Moskva on April 13.

By sinking the Moskva, the US just handed Putin something akin to “Russia’s Pearl Harbor moment,” in which Putin can claim to his people that the USA initiated an attack on the Russian Navy, sinking one of their ships and killing hundreds of their people. This news has, of course, been paraded all across Russian media, driving domestic support for Putin even higher than before.

Source

Of course the MSM coverage has it that the Ukrainians managed this all by themselves and that the sinking has fueled anti-war sentiment in Russia. To some extent that's probably true, but it may be far outweighed by anti-US/Nato sentiment.

No mention, either of whether there may have been nukes aboard the Moskva - now at the bottom of the Black Sea and little discussion except on some military-oriented web sites and channels about the implication of the sinking in terms of the vulnerability of surface ships to such attacks...

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