Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 72

Matt Taibbi: American Stasi: Tulsi Gabbard Confirms “Quiet Skies” Nightmare

By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 8/7/24

Tuesday night, while self-styled Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard described being tracked by teams of government agents in a surveillance regime more reminiscent of East Germany than a free country. Whistleblowing Air Marshals told Uncover DC Gabbard was singled out as a terror threat under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program, and the former presidential candidate says she noticed.

“The whistleblowers’ account matches my experience,” says Gabbard. “Everything lines up to the day.”

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Examples of “Quad-S” boarding passes. Tulsi Gabbard’s air tickets, as well as those of her husband Abraham, were similarly marked

Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics.’ And he said, oh.”

The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled.” Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening,” along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”

She called a colleague, who told her: these things happen, don’t worry. “So I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just being paranoid,’” Gabbard says. Then she saw this past Sunday’s report in Uncover DC, a site edited by the well-known Twitter writer Tracy Beanz. Uncover interviewed Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), an advocacy association for Federal Air Marshals. Disclosing Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list, the former Marshal LaBosco told a disturbing story:

According to LaBosco… Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.

Uncover DC said Gabbard was initially placed on the list on July 23rd, and that trios of Air Marshals first began following her on flights on July 25th. As Racket would learn, surveillance was conducted on at least eight flights, with different three-Marshal teams for each flight, part of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) “Quiet Skies” regimen that can literally surround people with human watchers. There are “potentially 15 or more TSA uniformed and plain clothes” at a gate for such assignments, LaBosco told Racket. The story about Gabbard was surfaced by two TSA whistleblowers, including one detailed to follow her. When Gabbard read this, she felt a shock of recognition.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, okay. So everything I was experiencing was exactly what I feared was going on,’” she says.

Though clearly outraged, Gabbard stresses the important part of her story isn’t any inconvenience or insult she’s gone through.

“This is not a woe-is-me situation,” she explains. Instead, “it’s bringing to the forefront… how brazen the political retaliation and abuse of power continues to be under the Biden-Harris administration.”

The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii’s 2nd district is far from the first American to be placed under physical surveillance as a “domestic terrorist” threat in post-9/11 America. Especially since January 6th, 2021, when the Quiet Skies program expanded to accommodate a broad effort to track people who were at the Capitol, Americans following Americans on airplanes is no longer uncommon, though the public largely has no idea of the scale of this activity.

However, Gabbard is by far the highest-profile figure to be caught up in this surveillance web. As a war veteran with no connection to J6 or any other known offense, her appearance on a terror watch list is striking, and symbolic of the way politicians and intelligence officials have turned the machinery of the War on Terror inward in the last decade. This aspect of the story galls Gabbard the most.

“I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” Gabbard says. “I was like a lot of Americans. We enlisted to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people and go after the terrorists who attacked us. And so now to have confirmation — I guarantee there are other men and women in uniform or veterans now being targeted.

“I can’t think of a word that adequately captures how I feel. The closest I can think of is the deepest sense of betrayal.” She pauses. “It cuts to the core.”

Gabbard pointed to this summer’s release of documents from the ill-fated “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” an advisory panel led by former CIA chief John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Litigation filed on behalf of former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell led to the disbanding of the group, and the production of documents identifying Trump supporters, people “in the military,” or “religious” as “indicators for extremism or terrorism.” Gabbard says this is an indication that the intelligence community is targeting people of “many stripes,” but “especially so those who still wear the uniform or who have worn the uniform.”

“IN THE MILITARY”: The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group identified soldiers as a heightened risk for domestic terrorism

Neither Gabbard nor, apparently, the whistleblowing Marshals know why the former congresswoman would be on a terror watch list. Gabbard has been a persistent, pointed critic of politicians in the current administration. The day before her reported placement on the TSA list, Gabbard appeared on the Ingraham Angle and criticized the “proxy war” in Ukraine, saying the administration was selling the public “crap” excuses for expanding its military commitment, with intent to turn Ukraine into “another Afghanistan.” A debate clash in the 2020 primary was also a factor in ending Harris’ run that year, featuring the viral line: “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked.”

Gabbard’s account squares with LaBosco’s description of how Quiet Skies works. Surveillance, LaBosco says, is “every flight, every leg. If she has three legs that day, it’ll be nine Air Marshals. So if she does three flights in a day, she’ll have a set of Air Marshals on every one of her flights.” As for canine teams, “They maneuver over to the gate area. You will have plainclothes TSA officers, you will have uniformed TSA officers and the canine teams will be running in the gate area. They’ll have them floating around to try to pick up a scent of something.” LaBosco says these dogs are only trained for explosives, not narcotics.

What now? Gabbard, who has spoken to at least one of the whistleblowers, is reviewing possible courses of action, contacting former congressional colleagues about a possible Hill investigation. In a seemingly related matter, Empower Oversight — the firm that represented FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Marcus Allen as well as IRS special agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in the Hunter Biden case — sent a letter Monday night to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari demanding an immediate investigation in the Gabbard case. The firm represented an Air Marshal in another ugly Quiet Skies case two years earlier (see below), and though Cuffari’s IG office promised in January 2023 to investigate, there’s no evidence it ever did, making the Gabbard story more troubling.

Worse, Empower today says it’s learned that the TSA has already initiated an investigation to identify the two TSA whistleblowers who leaked “sensitive security information” in Gabbard’s case. The firm sent another letter to the IG this morning asking for help in stopping retaliation before it begins. “A retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step for the agency to take,” the firm wrote, adding that the TSA “should be investigating the abuses on which [Marshals] are blowing the whistle.” The TSA has not commented for this article.

“Quiet Skies” is a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program for tracking “travelers who may present an elevated risk,” as well as “unknown or partially known terrorists.” It’s a signature initiative for a new vision of the federal enforcement state that, as covered in this space before, moved after 9/11 from an emphasis on making cases and building prosecutions to endless intelligence-gathering as well as “disruption” and “prevention.” In a key moment, the FBI in 2008 put out a new “baseline collection plan,” which urged agents to come with plans to “disrupt” potential “acts of violence” or other “criminal behavior.” Agents began getting credit for an internal metric called “disruptions,” which allowed them to rise without records of prosecutions or even arrests.

Because most investigations under this new system will never lead to court, agents do not have to worry about meeting probable cause standards or justifying surveillance. The behaviors may be technically permitted, even if some would consider them unconstitutional.

“It all comes under the heading of the Department of Pre-Crime,” adds Empower attorney Jason Foster, longtime Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So it’s ‘We don’t have to prove anything. We’re not going to court. We’re just following people.’”

In the wake of 9/11 programs like the TSA’s “No Fly List” and the multi-agency Terrorist Screening Center regularly made the news as the focus of controversies, with criticism often coming from Democrats. In an incident that sounds similar but in fact underscores the expansion of the scope of such programs, the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was prevented from boarding planes on five occasions in 2004, apparently because a suspected terrorist was using “Anthony Kennedy” as an alias. These programs symbolized the Bush-era reflex for wide-scale screening of mostly Muslim suspects, and came to be frowned upon as racist and anachronistic. When a judge in 2019 finally declared the Terrorist Screening Database unconstitutional, voices across the spectrum cheered, “It’s about time.”

Despite the perception that terrorist watchlists are a thing of the past, they’ve actually expanded, with Clear Skies representing an aggressive new generation of watchlisting, which no longer just targets Muslims but ranges of alleged domestic offenders. Though it’s theoretically possible Gabbard’s case will prove a mistaken-identity caper à la Kennedy’s incident (“I can’t imagine what, but they might have an excuse,” a Republican House aide counseled), LaBosco insists whistleblowers waited to make sure it wasn’t an “anomaly” before coming forward. “We thought, ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’” she says. “But then, second flight, third flight… no, this is no mistake.”

Quiet Skies eats up an astonishing amount of resources: an Inspector General’s report about the program in 2019 “identified $394 million in funds that could be put to better use,” meaning nearly half the Air Marshals’ budget was being wasted. LaBosco says this is no surprise. “Think about the overtime, the vouchers, the overnight travel, the per diems. Think of all the wasted resources that we so desperately need right now… We’re not going to find a terrorist following Tulsi Gabbard. We’re not even looking for the bad guys anymore.”

Air Marshals have complained more than once about being asked to spy on Americans. The existence of the program was first exposed on July 28, 2018, when Boston Globe writer Jana Winter published an exposé: “Welcome to the Quiet Skies.” The Globe report said 30 or more people were followed every day by Air Marshals, some of whom told the paper they worried the program “may be unconstitutional.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Z2SVm4AUmMc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

The Globe story led to a July 30th letter Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey to TSA Administrator David Pekoske, asking about reports that the TSA was “monitoring seemingly innocuous behavior such as whether a person slept on the plane, used the bathroom, or obtained a rental car.” The letter was followed by a remarkable (if mostly unattended) hearing in which Markey questioned Pekoske in September 2018.

When Markey asked if it were true that “innocent” Americans not suspected of crimes were followed under Quiet Skies, Pekoske deflected, then said finally, “I wouldn’t use the term ‘innocent.’” The hearing also disclosed that “thousands” of Americans were in the program. Pekoske later conceded Quiet Skies hadn’t led to a single arrest, nor had it foiled any plots, a fact that is apparently still true:

Three years later in July 2021, in a story out of a Philip K. Dick novel, a Senior Federal Air Marshal with 27 years of experience discovered that his wife had been labeled a “domestic terrorist.” She was reportedly targeted for “Special Mission Coverage” for having attended the January 6th speech by Donald Trump at the Capitol, which she did not enter. When the Marshal told his supervisor, he was advised to “let it play out” as “it was not our investigation.”

Eventually, the Marshal turned to aforementioned whistleblower firm Empower Oversight, which helped him file a protected disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. The OSC on July 8, 2021 wrote back, declining to refer the matter for investigation to the Inspector General’s office. Empower then wrote directly to the Inspector General’s office, which to date has “provided no public accounting of what it has done.” The Marshal did manage to work with the FBI to have his wife’s name removed from the terror watchlist, though this did not slow the program.

Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts,” especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat… TSA is out of control against the American people.”

Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset.” After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.

“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”

Interview with Geoffrey Roberts on Stalin’s Library: A Dictator & His Books

Circus Bazaar Magazine, Episode 16, 5/26/24

This interview covered much more than Stalin. It included a discussion of the Ukraine war and Roberts elaborates on his recent controversial essay in which he suggests that eventual NATO membership for Ukraine could be part of a negotiated resolution of the war. – Natylie

YouTube link here.

Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia: What Next? With Michael Tracey

YouTube link here.

James Carden: Boot’s Big Grift

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 8/2/24

The foreign policy establishment has been shaken by scandal. 

A former CIA operative and member of the George W. Bush National Security Council staff, Sue Mi Terry, was recently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for acting as a foreign agent for South Korea for over a decade. 

Terry, who, until the scandal broke, was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is married to the neoconservative chicken hawk (forgive the redundancy) Max Boot. Boot, a columnist at the Washington Post, also worked alongside his handbag-loving spouse as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot’s political trajectory tracks with those of other high-profile neocons away from the GOP, announcing in an October 2021 column, 

I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats.

He was also among the highly-placed Washington propagandists who helped create, then cash in on, the wholly fabricated narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. According to Boot, the authoritarian menace posed by Putin’s Russia is as serious as that posed by American citizens (invariably those who live in less exalted zip codes than the Boots’) with whom he disagrees. Trump voters, as well as conservative and progressive advocates for peace, realism, and restraint, are all consigned to the “Useful Idiot” bin by Boot and his colleagues at the Washington Post.

Boot’s speciality has long been to accuse those with whom he disagrees of acting as apologists for the Kremlin. These self-styled protectors of “democracy” yell at the top of their lungs about various and sundry threats to American democracy all the while doing their very best to undermine it by anathematizing and marginalizing those who dissent from the prerogatives of the D.C. foreign policy Blob. Needless to say, they make a handsome living in the process.

For all the richly deserved opprobrium that has come Boot’s way as a result of the scandal, Terry and Boot are hardly alone among establishment elites, who as a matter of course abuse their positions of influence in order to further the interests of foreign countries. 

The twin, indeed conjoined, careers of Anne Applebaum and her husband, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, is another such relationship, rife with conflict of interest and dual loyalties. While the similarities are obvious, both Boot and Applebaum are neocons-turned–liberal darlings who have made lucrative careers out of scaremongering, their differences are equally important: Boot is a simpleton for whom war is always the answer; Applebaum is far more formidable.

In the space of four years, Applebaum has published dozens of articles and two book-length contributions to the literature of the new Cold War. Released in 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends resembles nothing so much as Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends, one of the silliest neocon tracts to ever see print (and that is saying something). 

Applebaum’s book is an account of the political migration of her former cohort from what she describes as the “the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market” center-right to what in her eyes are far less reputable precincts of political thought. At its core, it is an effort to shift responsibility away from where it rightly belongs; after all, Applebaum and her set, including Boot, William Kristol, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other neocons-turned-MSNBC fixtures, were nothing if not enthusiastic supporters of the neoliberal economic and militaristic foreign policies that have so badly damaged this country. 

This summer saw the release of a second title, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a book that purports to be about the threat posed by, as Applebaum puts it, “the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others.” Yet one can’t escape the feeling that her intended target is closer to home, what she calls “the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.” The historian Heather Penatzer writes, “Applebaum’s narrative is a story of a cabal of financial elites pulling the strings of history from their headquarters in Trump Tower in close coordination with the Kremlin.” 

Indeed, any opposition to the policies Applebaum favors (war in Ukraine, war in Syria, NATO expansion, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) can be traced back to the sinister machinations of a global “cabal” of authoritarians. And how else to explain why over 70 million people voted for the American “autocrat” in 2020? It couldn’t possibly be that Midwesterners actually want, you know, jobs.

As we head closer to the November election, expect more of this kind of thing. Last week, to take one example, the Soros-funded Just Security website launched its “American Autocracy Threat Tracker” which purports to catalog all of the “actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security.” 

In the end, liberals’ tarring of their domestic political opponents as “authoritarian” is simply Russia-gate under a different guise; it is a way to smear Middle Americans as unpatriotic and, here’s the real trick, somehow also foreign—outside the acceptable, even legal bounds of American politics. Put simply: It is a scam, one that began during the 2016 campaign and continues to haunt our politics.

Boot and Applebaum and their like-minded acolytes at Just Security are neither protectors of democracy, nor avowed enemies of authoritarianism. They’re grifters, and should be treated accordingly.

FBI searches US home of Soviet-born Biden critic, Dmitri Simes

RT, 8/16/24

The FBI has executed a search warrant at the home of Russian-born US political pundit and author Dimitri Simes, who has been a vocal critic of the administration of President Joe Biden.

The search took place on Tuesday on the property located in Rappahannock County, according to a local news outlet.

The author’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr., described it as “a bandit-like intimidation attempt” by the US government in a statement released on X (formerly Twitter).

In an email on Wednesday night, FBI spokesperson Samantha Shero declined to comment on the raid, except to confirm that it had been authorized by a court, Rappahannock News has reported.

A former aide to Richard Nixon, Simes is a naturalized US citizen who immigrated to the country in 1973. He was described by US media as providing “a sympathetic platform for the Russian government in the heart of the DC policy establishment,” after Senator Rand Paul named him as a foreign policy adviser in 2014.

In 1999, he published a book on Russia’s search for a new place in the world following the collapse of the USSR. He was also the publisher and CEO of the National Interest magazine, which advocates a realist approach to international relations and geopolitics.

Simes was one of the people investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a suspected contact between Donald Trump and the Russian government. The report finalized in 2019, which failed to find any evidence of collusion between Moscow and Trump’s 2016 campaign, also vindicated the political expert, confirming that his activities were normal for how DC operates.

His family reportedly owns a 132.6-acre property in Rappahannock County, which they bought in 2021 for $1.63 million.

You the People: How Charles Heberle Was Sought Out by Russia to Teach Russian Students Democracy

Charles Heberle visited Russia as a CCI delegate in 2015, the year that CCI (comprised of only one person by then, Sharon Tennison) resumed its original mission of bringing Russian and American citizens together in peace and friendship. It was not his first experience in the country – far from it. In the early 2000’s Charles was recruited by the Russian government to “teach democracy” in a country that had, by the admission of its own experts, experienced nothing but authoritarian governmental control for 1000 years. Moving to democracy, as they were and are intent on doing, created some challenges.

With a solid knowledge of American history, Russians were curious to learn how a relatively small group of 17th century Europeans managed to get themselves out from under monarchial control, come to a virtually unexplored continent and, over the next 120 years (from the time of their arrival until the American Revolution) teach themselves how to govern themselves via a form of direct democracy that was, and still is, unique. Put in that perspective, Americans today should be as amazed, impressed and curious as the Russians.

I met Charles a few weeks ago in a coffee house in Portland, Maine, where we spent a fascinating afternoon (for me!) while he described his background (helicopter pilot, Vietnam, career in the army, ‘retirement’ career in international organizations) and his eight years in Russia implementing his program, “You the PEOPLE.” It was an enormous undertaking covering the Republic of Karelia and centered in its capital, Petrozavodsk. If you haven’t seen it yet, please watch the video interview with Charles made by Mel Van Dusen, another 2015 CCI delegate, to catch the flavor of the complexity of that program.

One thing that struck me as Charles described how he guided the Russians to learn the art of democracy was that we, modern Americans watching our shining example become tarnished by hatred and corruption, could stand to take a lesson from the Russians; perhaps it’s time we (re)learned democracy, too?

As always, we look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Paula, Center for Citizen Initiatives

YouTube link here to interview with Charles Heberle.

Jeff Childers Analyzes WSJ’s Incredible Report on the Nordstream Pipeline Attack

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 8/15/24

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal dished up a steaming pile of deep-state horse hockey, an ‘exclusive’ with the wild and (literally) unbelievable headline, “A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage. But wait, it immediately got even better. The sub-headline claimed, “Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.”

Let’s check and see how well you guys have been following along. Take a quick test to predict where this article is going. Choose one of the following forecasts:

A. [_] The article was sourced from credible, verifiable individuals known to exist who were in positions to have personal knowledge about what happened; OR…

B. [_] The article was sourced only from loosely-identified, anonymous informants.

If you didn’t pick ‘B’, stay after class for a remedial reading assignment.

Now let’s use this piece of high fantasy as a guide for how to spot articles pre-written for media by the Operation Mockingbird department of some squiddly organization bearing an obscure three-letter acronym. This story might be the most obvious example to date; it’s like they aren’t even really trying anymore.

Ready? Let’s crack some cephalopods.

The Journal’s tall tale began with a tell: it described the story to follow as an “outlandish” —unbelievable— scheme, concocted in a bar using alcohol-muddied thinking. How relatable! Who among us hasn’t concocted wildly dangerous sabotage schemes after throwing back a few? In other words, it knew the story was a whopper and would be hard to swallow.

Prepare to throw the old canard, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” right out the window. Who needs evidence?

Here’s the Journal’s generic description of the highly-technical operation, with one key sentence highlighted. Think about that sentence while you’re reading the rest:

[image error]

Haha, they couldn’t resist smuggling a little diversity into their fabulous fiction (“one was a woman”). Women can blow up pipelines too. And they even added a laugh track! But let’s focus back on that leading sentence: “Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told.”

Can be told. That sentence was a mistake made in haste. It wasn’t written by any independent WSJ journalist. The line implied some outside force or authority always stopped the story from being told before. But now, it has granted permission. The article never explained who or what that authority was. It raises murky questions that linger like octopus ink:

Who stopped the story from being told?

Why did they stop the story about ‘private businessmen’ being told?

Why did this invisible authority decide now the story could be told?

I’ll suggest we weren’t meant to know about the outside authority. It slipped into the article by accident, as the writer struggled to explain the story’s timing. That was an unintended gift, but it wasn’t necessary to understand the game.

The article continued by claiming that President Zelensky initially approved Operation Vodka, but the CIA “found out about it,” asked the former comedian to stand down, and Zelensky complied, ordering the saboteurs to stop. But former commander-in-chief Zaluzhniy —since fired and given a sweet, immunity-laden ambassadorship— went ahead anyway.

How exactly did CIC Zaluzhniy get involved with these ‘private businessmen?’ How did the CIA find out about the plot (the article says Dutch intelligence told them, but how did the Dutch know)? Why was Zelensky involved in the first place? Was it an official military op or not?

Both Zelensky and Zaluzhniy denied the story. So our belief must rest only on the Journal’s anonymous sources, composed of “four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot.” The WSJ never sourced any of the alleged “private businessmen” (and woman!). It sounds like Operation Vodka included a lot more than “private businessmen,” but the article never stretched to connect that dot.

Think critically. How did these ‘senior officials’ learn of the supposedly private operation? Even more importantly, why would they would disclose it? Why would they disclose it to a newspaper? Why now? The Journal never said.

In whom do we readers place our trust? The named sources who denied the story? Or the Journal’s inky anonymous informants, who don’t even match the profile of the inebriated private businesspeople it claims planned the attack? Is this story just a massive appeal to the Journal’s credibility? You can trust us, because.

Enter the German connection. Based on “no evidence” (see for yourself) they issued a warrant for a Ukrainian dive instructor in June:

[image error]

No admissible evidence? Is this the same Journal that for years stubbornly insisted there was “no evidence” Ivermectin successfully treated covid infections? Now, apparently, “no evidence” is just fine when assigning blame for one of the most geopolitically significant stories in our lifetimes.

Arrest warrants are usually public information. Knowing who is supposed to be arrested is generally helpful for catching them. Pose for the mugshot! But the story never disclosed the alleged “Ukrainian dive instructor’s” identity. He could be any old octopus, for all we know.

Not only were the Journal’s claims completely unverifiable by actual humans, but the Journal even insisted verification would be impossible:

[image error]

Uh-huh. So … how does the WSJ know there is no paper trail? Is it plausible every junior bureaucrat would meekly accept a verbal approval for a massive war crime, without even wanting an email for the file? Did the conspirators never ever discuss the plan and its complicated logistics in any text messages, emails, DMs, Word documents, or even a spreadsheet?

The remainder of Journal’s article was packed with convoluted, mind-numbing details and speculations that would be inadmissible in county court. But there was an even bigger hole in the story. Again, think critically.

If the Journal just broke an explosive exclusive resulting from terrific, Pulitzer-level investigative reporting, where are those details? Where is the Journal’s triumphant narrative about how it broke the story of a lifetime and solved a war crime that the World’s governments have been unable to crack?

As to how the Journal pulled off this exclusive, there was nothing but radio silence. No paper trail. Just the inky water left behind.

Here’s what the Journal’s “Exclusive Investigation” amounted to: Anonymous informants, implausibly precise and highly technical operations (by civilians!), unnamed perps, critical internal contradictions, vague and convenient claims that evidence does not exist, denials by named sources, lack of source transparency, unexplained timing, and an invisible investigation.

Great work, Wall Street Journal. By “great “work,” I mean deplorable hackery. So this article could only have been yet another spectral fairy tale planted by the subterranean security state. But why? And why now? What we’ve learned in the past about these kinds of fantastic one-off stories, which quickly sink into the Baltic without a geopolitical ripple, is that they were intended to discipline Ukraine, by showing the deep state’s whip hand.

What are they trying to force a recalcitrant Zelensky to do now?

Oh well. A least now the story “can be told.” Thanks for letting us know, I guess. We live in a time of media malfeasance and control beyond any nightmarish, tentacular villain Orwell could possibly have dreamed up following a drunken oyster-eating contest. Stay frosty.

Scott Ritter: Voting Against Nuclear War

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 7/29/24

As America wrestles with the question of who will emerge victorious from the three-ring circus that is the 2024 Presidential election, there is increasing talk about the existential nature of this election and the role played by the two primary candidates — the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, and her challenger, the Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump — in taking the nation to the brink when it comes to the future of American democracy as an institution.

The choices couldn’t be starker — the living embodiment of “DEI establishment politician” (Harris) versus the textbook definition of a “populist political outsider” (Trump).

In many ways, the rhetoric about the critical nature of the 2024 Presidential race isn’t exaggerated — in terms of sustained political viability, the stakes couldn’t get any higher.

A Harris victory would effectively end the MAGA movement, since it is largely a populist exercise built around the cult of personality that has surrounded Donald Trump, whom most people agree is running his last political race.

A Trump victory, however, would project into the political mainstream his running mate, J.D. Vance, who would be given the opportunity to claim the MAGA throne in 2028, setting up the potential for a 12-year MAGA run which could very well spell the end of establishment politics in America as we know it.

America has gone through numerous presidential contests in its 248-year history in which the essence of the nation could be said to be at stake.

The first of these took place in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in a race that literally decided the future of the United States by ending the conservative Federalist hold on political power and replacing it with the more progressive Democrat-Republican party.

Andrew Jackson’s 1824 victory over John Quincy Adams saw the reemergence of the Federalist ideology in the form of the new Democratic Party prevail over Adams and the Republicans in an election that served as the foundation for the emergence of the two-party system that dominates American politics until today.

And the 1860 election, won by Abraham Lincoln, literally carried with it life or death decisions which propelled America into a Civil War. It is the only American election which can genuinely be described as existential in terms of its consequences.

The point to be made here is that no matter what anyone says about 2024, while the future direction of American politics, and the societal issues thus manifested, will be decided in November, the existential fate of the United States is not on the line.

Neither is the fate of “American democracy.”

All Existence Is at Stake

The 2024 presidential race, however, does directly impact the existential survival of the United States, the American people, and indeed the entire world, but not because of its outcome.

The harsh reality is that regardless of who among the two major candidates wins in November, American policy vis-à-vis Russia, especially when it comes to nuclear posture and arms control, is hard-wired to achieve the same result.

And it is this result that seals the fate of all humanity unless a way can be found to prompt a critical re-think of the underlying policies that produce the anticipated outcome.

A future Harris administration is on track to continue a policy which commits to the strategic defeat of Russia, the lowering of the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons in Europe, the termination of the last remaining arms control treaty (New START) in February 2026, and the re-deployment of intermediate-range missiles into Europe, also in 2026.

Trump, meanwhile, has proffered rhetoric which has led many to believe he would end the conflict in Ukraine, and thereby open the door for better relations with Russia.

The ‘Perfect Call’

But this policy is predicated on the concept of the “perfect phone call” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin where the Russian leader accedes to American-dictated terms regarding Ukraine which would fall far short of Russia’s stated goals.

Trump has made it clear that if Putin fails to bend the knee on Ukraine, he will then flood Ukraine with weapons —basically the Biden policy of strategically defeating the Russians on steroids. It was Trump who pulled out of the INF treaty in 2019, and as such put in motion the policy direction which has U.S. INF weapons returning to Europe in 2026.

And Trump is not a fan of arms control treaties, so the notion that he would save New START or replace it with a new treaty vehicle is mooted by reality.

No matter who wins among the two major candidates in November, the United States is on track for a major existential crisis with Russia in Europe sometime in 2026. The re-introduction of INF-capable systems by the U.S. will trigger a similar deployment by Russia of nuclear-capable INF systems targeting Europe.

Back in the 1980’s, the deployment of INF systems by the U.S. and Russia had created an inherently destabilizing situation where one mistake could have set off a nuclear war.

The experience of Able Archer ’83, a NATO command and control exercise that took place in the fall of 1983, bears witness to this reality. The Soviets interpreted the exercise as being a cover for a nuclear first-strike by NATO and put its nuclear forces on high alert.

There was no room for error — one miscalculation or misjudgment could have led to a Soviet decision to pre-empt what it believed to be an imminent NATO nuclear attack, thereby triggering a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The INF treaty, signed in 1987, removed these destabilizing weapons from Europe. But now that treaty is no more, and the weapons that brought Europe and the world to the brink of destruction in the 1980’s are returning to a European continent where notions of peaceful coexistence with Russia have been replaced with rhetoric promoting the inevitability of conflict.

When one combines the existence of a policy objective (the strategic defeat of Russia) which, when coupled with a policy of supporting a Ukrainian victory over Russia predicated on Ukraine regaining physical control over Crimea and the four territories of Novorossiya (New Russia — Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk), one already has a recipe for disaster.

This policy, if successful, would automatically trigger a Russian nuclear response, since doctrinally nuclear weapons would be used to respond to any non-nuclear scenario where the existential survival of Russia is at stake. (The loss of Crimea and the New Territories is like the United States losing Texas, California, or New York — a literal existential situation.)

Add to this the end of arms control as we know it come February 2026, when the New START treaty expires. The Biden administration has declared that it will seek to add new nuclear weapons “without limitation” once the New START caps on deployed weapons expires — the literal definition of an arms race out of control.

One can only imagine that Russia would be compelled to match this rearmament activity.

INFs Again in Europe

And finally, the recent agreement by the U.S. and Germany to redeploy intermediate-range missiles on European soil in 2026, and Russia’s decision to match this action by building and deploying its own intermediate-range missiles, recreates the very situational instability which threatened regional and world security back in the 1980’s.

When one examines these factors in their aggregate, the inescapable conclusion is that Europe will be faced with an existential crisis which could come to a head as early as the summer of 2026.

The potential for the use of nuclear weapons, either by design or accident, is real, creating a situation that exceeds the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the risk of a nuclear war by an order of magnitude or more.

While a future nuclear conflict would very likely start in Europe, it will be virtually impossible to contain the use of nuclear weapons on the European continent. Any use of nuclear weapons against Russian soil, or the territory of its ally, Belarus, would trigger a general Russian nuclear response which would lead to a general, global-killing nuclear war.

The question Americans confront today is what to do about this existential threat to their very survival.

The answer put forward here is to empower your vote in the coming presidential election by tying it not to a person or party, but rather a policy.

In short, empower your vote by pledging it to the candidate who will commit to prioritizing peace over war, and who pledges to make the prevention of nuclear war, not the promotion of nuclear weapons, the cornerstone of his or her national security policy.

Don’t give your vote away by committing to a candidate at this early stage — when you do this, you no longer matter, as the candidates will simply turn their attention to those uncommitted voters in an effort to win them over.

Make the candidates earn your vote by linking it to a policy posture that reflects your core values.

And this election, your core value should be exclusively centered on promoting peace and preventing nuclear war.

Such a policy posture would be built upon four basic pillars.

1. Immediately end the current declaratory policy of the United States which articulates the strategic defeat of Russia as a primary U.S. objective and replace it with a policy statement which makes peaceful coexistence with Russia the strategic goal of U.S. foreign and national security policy.

Such a policy redirection would include, by necessity, the goal of rethinking European security frameworks which respect the legitimate national security concerns of Russia and Europe, and would incorporate the necessity of a neutral Ukraine.

2. A freeze on the re-deployment of INF-capable weapons systems into Europe, matched by a Russian agreement not to re-introduce INF-capable weapons into its arsenal, with the goal of turning this freeze into a formal agreement that would be finalized in treaty form.

3. A commitment to engage with Russia on the negotiation and implementation of a new strategic arms control treaty which seeks equitable cuts in the strategic nuclear arsenals of both nations, a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons each side can retain in storage, and which incorporates limits on ballistic missile defense.

4. A general commitment to work with Russia to pursue verifiable and sustainable nuclear arms reduction globally using multi-lateral negotiations.

I will be working with Gerald Celente, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Garland Nixon, Wilmur Leon, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Jeff Norman, Danny Haiphong, and many others to put together an event, Operation DAWN, on September 28, 2024.

The goal of this event will be to get as many American citizens as possible to tie their vote to the policy posture spelled out above, and then to leverage these commitments in a way that compels all candidates for the presidency to articulate policies that meet this criterion.

In doing so, the voter would be fighting for a chance to save democracy by making his or her vote count, save America and the world by creating the possibility to avert nuclear conflict, all by making the candidates for presidency earn their vote, as opposed to simply giving it away.

Operation DAWN is still in the preliminary planning stages. More details will be published here as the planning progresses.

James Carden: The Kursk Offensive and the Risk of a Wider War

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 8/15/24

As the Kursk offensive heads into its second week, Ukrainian forces now claim to control nearly 30 Russian villages comprising 1,000 square miles of Russian territory. In a meeting with security advisers at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin directed his ire at Ukraine’s sponsors, claiming, “The West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” The Kursk offensive marks a significant escalation in the two-and-a-half-year-long conflict. 

So, what are some of the broader implications of the Kursk offensive? 

A few observations:

The Kursk offensive highlights, among other things, the inherent risk of what I would call “non-allied allyship.” Washington has no treaty of alliance with Ukraine, yet the Biden administration persists in acting as though Ukraine is not just a treaty ally—it acts as though Ukraine’s survival in the form it took for three short decades (1992–2022) is essential to the national security of the United States. Washington’s granting of non-allied allyship to Ukraine has led Kiev to act in ways that are detrimental to its own survival—including through Kiev’s refusal to implement agreed-upon provisions of the Minsk Accords, which, if implemented, would probably have demonstrated to the Russians that waging a war of choice was unnecessary.The Kursk offensive also shows, once again, that the idea that “if the Russians are not stopped in Ukraine they will go on to conquer Eastern Europe” is patently absurd. Russia could not conquer Kiev in 2022 and has been fighting a costly war of attrition even since. Russia remains, however, the world’s leading tactical nuclear power, and as such Ukraine’s raid on Kursk puts it and its military and financial backers, including the US and NATO member states, at risk for retaliation.Despite the success of the incursion and the loss of prestige suffered by Russia, it is important to remember that, on balance, Ukraine is losing the war. According to a new report in the Financial Times, “The amount of territory captured by Russian troops since early May is nearly double that which Ukraine’s military won back at heavy cost in terms of lives and military materiel with its summer offensive a year ago.”The decision by President Volodomyr Zelensky to bring the war to Russia—while no doubt viscerally satisfying to Ukraine and its many supporters here in Washington—will also demonstrate to Moscow that it has no one with whom to negotiate in Kiev and that the decapitation of the Ukrainian military and political leadership is a necessary precondition to achieving their ultimate war aim, namely, Ukrainian neutrality. Kursk is surely a morale boost to Ukraine and an embarrassment for Russia. It will also likely prolong the war. The incursion into Russia shows once again that President Joe Biden and his national security adviser Jake Sullivan, far from being too cautious—as a number of high profile neocons have alleged— are, instead, facilitating Kiev’s journey up the escalatory ladder. It is a journey to an unknown destination. Ukraine would not have been able to pull the offensive off without the approval and material support from Washington. As such, the U.S. and Europe are seen as complicit in this highly symbolic attack on Kursk, which is, after all, the site of the largest tank battle in history. The 1943 battle against the Nazis cost the Russians an estimated 800,000 casualties. The conclusion now being drawn in Moscow as they once again face German tanks on their territory is not difficult to surmise. 

In the end, the administration has not been honest about what is actually at stake in Ukraine. Now would be an opportune time for the president or the current vice president to articulate, and without recourse to received ideas such as those about defending “democracy,” why Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the matter of who governs a handful of Eastern Ukrainian provinces is worth risking a war with Russia. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do believe it is, they ought to explain why—perhaps during prime time at next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Active Measures: Ukrainian Nazi Group Plotted Terror Attacks in NYC

YouTube link here.