Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 23
August 23, 2025
The Trump Crime-Family Now Outdoes the Biden Crime Family
Eric Zuesse
The neocons, or supporters of further expansion of the U.S. empire (otherwise known as agents of the military-industrial complex, or sales representatives and promoters of America’s armaments manufacturers) come in two flavors: the conservative type, which is represented by people such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton; and the liberal type, which is represented by people such as Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
Though they tend to disagree with one-another about domestic policies (because those are America’s only two political flavors: Republicans versus Democrats — conservatives versus liberals), they fundamentally agree with one-another about foreign policies: America must achieve “hegemony” — control over the entire world.
They don’t say what they will do if some nations are willing to go to war against America in order to prevent their becoming taken over by the U.S. Government, but basically they are committed to going as far as to World War Three in order to ‘win’ (achieve global control). After all: this — neoconservatism — is the best marketing plan for America’s armaments contractors (who receive their incomes from sales to the U.S. Government, their main if not only market). So: America’s politics is competition between those two types of neoconservatives.
Here is a Democratic Party U.S. Senator saying that Trump is unacceptably corrupt: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNn8VYSNR0C
The neocon (who nonetheless calls himself a ‘progressive’ but is actually just a liberal neocon, like almost all Democratic politicians are) Democratic Party U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy, who never voted against an increase in the budget for the ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department (which is the U.S. Government’s most-corrupt of all federal Departments) explains why the neocon Republican Trump crime family is going too far in THEIR corruptness: He points out that (and all of this is true, except his second sentence in it, because Joe Biden, a profoundly corrupt politcian, wasn’t “brought down” by his corruptness):
Every day there’s a new corruption story. Any one of these could bring a Democratic president down. But because we normalize Trump’s corruption, we don’t even notice some. Like this one: the Trump family is getting into the drone manufacturing business. [Ed or their launch of a new new cryptocurrency business coinciding with the passage of the Genius Act].
This is the privatization of the U.S. Government. The great historian Germa Bel has documented that the first-ever privatizations of Governmental assets were by Mussolini and then by Hitler. So, we know that the modern word for countries such as Mussolini’s and Hitler’s and Reagan’s and Thatcher’s, and, of course now Trump’s, is “fascism.” It is ‘free-market’ and extremely anti-social capitalism: a person’s worth is his or her net worth. If racism is added to it, then the ideology is instead called “nazism.”
Chris Murphy presents it as being a partisan matter, but actually it isn’t. The examples of Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be cited.
Here was my 18 May 2014 article about the corruptness inside the White House during the latest Democratic Party Administrations: Barack Obama and Joe Biden [Ed lest we forget the Hunter Biden Burisma scandal]
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Beware Universal Mental Health Screening
How would your child score on a common mental health screening?
A mental health professional might view the results and conclude that your child has a mental health problem…that needs to be psychiatrically diagnosed and treated, even medicated.
Will this help your child thrive? Or will it reshape their identity in undesirable ways? Will you be comfortable with your child taking medications that alter their developing brains and could perturb their sexuality? When your child reaches adulthood, will they be able to withdraw from these drugs, or will they despair to find out that their body and brain have adapted to them, making this difficult or maybe even impossible?
For any parent with even minor reservations about our current medical and mental health system, these aren’t theoretical questions. A new public policy has just made them very salient.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a new law mandating universal mental health screenings for every child in public school. This includes healthy children with no signs of behavioral problems. Parents can theoretically opt out, but they’ll have to do so repeatedly, as the screenings will be given at least once a year from grades 3-12.
Media coverage has been laudatory, expounding on the importance of “getting kids the help and support they deserve.” But do you know what a mental health screen is and how it works? Before sounding the applause, parents need to understand what these screenings are, how they’re used, and what the potential outcomes of their use might be.
The new law does not specify how children will be screened, what questionnaires will be used, or what procedures will be followed when a child’s answers are seen as troubling. But to get a sense of the ground that self-report mental health questionnaires cover, you can screen your kids right now with a commonly used questionnaire:
While this is a self-assessment, the questions are the same whether you’re a parent or teacher filling this out on behalf of a child. Each of the 35 questions can be answered “never,” “sometimes,” or “often.” The scoring is simple:
0 = “never”1 = “sometimes”2 = “often”If the total score is at or above 28, professionals will consider it likely that your child has a mental health problem. The law doesn’t define what happens next. Ideally, there would be a lengthy (and costly) multi-hour clinical assessment for each such child that views these results skeptically, and heavily considers normal developmental issues and transitory problems. In the real-world mental health system, it’s hard to imagine that actually happening.
Unfortunately, the bias of the current system is towards overmedicalization, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment. The implementation of universal screening is likely to worsen these problems.
In the past, some physicians gave annual chest X-rays to smokers. This was a form of universal screening in response to concerns about lung cancer. At first blush, this sounds reasonable. The problem? False-positive results. Studies showed that annual X-rays did not prevent mortality. They did cause anxiety in patients. And incidental findings were common, causing unnecessary biopsies, procedures, and interventions.
Current screening guidelines now target high-risk individuals. This is an example where the medical establishment carefully weighed the risks and benefits of universal screening and concluded that it was not in the interests of patients, and with a well-defined disease in mind, lung cancer.
Mental health diagnosis is not like cancer. It is a fuzzy, subjective enterprise. We don’t have blood tests or brain scans; we have flawed checklists and clinical judgment. And obviously, being improperly identified as having a mental disorder comes with a real cost for the child.
Screening every single child makes it inevitable that some healthy children will be thrust into the mental health pipeline. Even assuming that the questionnaires work reasonably well, a 15% false-positive rate is likely. Combine this false-positive rate with twice-a-year universal screening from grades 3-12, and your child will have 20 separate chances to be wrongly identified as having a mental health problem…at which point the government ostensibly gets involved in the mental health of your child.
It’s easy to imagine the catastrophic results. A child’s mental health screen inaccurately identifies a mental health problem; the busy therapist confirms a diagnosis; there’s eventually a referral to a psychiatrist, who prescribes psychotropic medication. Out of 20 screenings, this only has to happen once to alter your child’s life forever.
I (C.D.) know, because it happened to me.
I was caught up in a similar diagnostic dragnet in 1991, when my teacher read about Ritalin in Time magazine and began “identifying” students she believed might have the condition, which at the time was known as “ADD” (the “H”, for hyperactivity, came later). My parents chose not to medicate me, but did send me to a psychologist and a pediatric psychiatrist. From them, I learned that my constant chair-tipping, foot-tapping, wiggling, and inability to tolerate boredom — the very traits that drove me to act out in class and leave little space between impulse and action — weren’t just part of me, but symptoms of a medical condition. It was presented as both permanently part of my nature and “acceptable,” yet somehow also extrinsic to me and framed primarily as a “deficit.” (At that time, ADD was not as widely viewed as a full disability as it is today.)
At 17, when I was legally able to decide for myself — though I now view the “informed” part as questionable — I chose to begin drug treatment. Even without the drugs, however, the diagnosis had already shaped my sense of self: diminishing my agency, reinforcing a feeling of abnormality, and feeding the belief that my more organized, conscientious, and inconspicuous peers possessed something essential that I never would. You can hear a fuller account in The Atlantic’s Scripts podcast series (“The Mandala Effect,” Episode 2, on YouTube).
My experience is just one example of how a single screening can lock a child into a lifelong diagnostic identity — and once that process starts, there are few real off-ramps. Surely no one in favor of this law wants that scenario to come true for any child.
But with 1.4 million schoolchildren in Illinois, we’re talking about dealing with the results of up to 28 million separate mental health screenings in the decade after implementation. Will the mental health professionals dealing with this deluge approach the medicalization of your child’s supposed problems carefully, gingerly, sensitively? A 2004 study found that screening 1,000 children for ADHD using the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM criteria would result in 370 false positives. And it’s common for children to be prescribed psychotropic medication at their first consultation with their physician or psychiatrist.
A comprehensive, in-depth psychological assessment for each child might help reduce false positives — but it would also mean spending 3-6 hours assessing each child, which represents a high burden in terms of both time and money. School districts in Illinois already report that a lack of time, expertise, and financial resources presents challenges to implementing universal mental health screening. The law passed anyway.
It’s hard to argue that attempts to identify and measure human misery, suffering, and emotional pain are a bad thing, etc.—especially when the goal is “getting people the help they need.” It sounds right. But the kids who will be screened every year in Illinois? They have many kinds of problems: social, relational, environmental, academic, psychological, and physical problems. Children today have issues navigating a modern life dominated by endless screens, scrolling, and even more endless data.
And also, they have some problems that you’re supposed to have—problems that have been a critical part of growing up since the dawn of time.
Our culture is currently debating the medicalization of human problems, the credibility of medicine, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and the ethics of imposing medical authority as state policy. Covid lockdowns were a prime example of this, and, similar to universal mental health screening, they were imposed without consideration of the unintended consequences.
Mandatory Covid vaccinations also led many Americans to rethink the role of government in their bodily autonomy, and to consider how arbitrary social policy could be when it claimed to be for the greater good (e.g., insisting that those with immunity to Covid must still get vaccinated). For those who have grown skeptical of medical authority, universal mental health screening will likely be viewed as another overextension of the government into the lives (and minds) of their children. Children aged 12-17 can already receive psychotherapy in Illinois without parental consent; universal screening offers a new on-ramp to this process.
The new Illinois law seems almost tone deaf, out of step with the lessons learned from Covid. This critique is cultural, social, and ethical in nature. But universal mental health screening is supposedly based on science. The new Illinois law does not give details; it just authorizes universal screening as if it is an unmitigated good. The devil (and the science, or lack thereof) will be in these details – how the policy is implemented. Assuming that the rationale for universal screening is scientific, we present critically important questions that should be addressed as procedures are developed:
What is the evidence that universal mental health screening improves real-world outcomes for children? Is there evidence that it could cause harm? The scientific rationale for the program needs to be stated clearly, citing compelling data, and explicitly addressing the measures taken to avoid harm.Given that Illinois has already implemented universal mental health screening in some school districts, what were the outcomes for the children? After testing positive for a mental health condition, how many were further assessed, and how much time was spent on each child? How many ended up in psychotherapy or on medication? Usually, a pilot program tests the effectiveness of an intervention, and it is only adopted on a wide scale if it is shown to be effective and not harmful – where is that data?How many children a year does Illinois expect to inaccurately identify as having a mental health problem (e.g., how many false positives)? How many children will make it from 3rd to 12th grade without ever screening positive? What measures will address the known issue of false-positive results in universal screening? Do Illinois public schools have the time, money, and expertise to carefully assess each child who screens positive for multiple hours to ensure that they do not overdiagnose and overtreat Illinois children? If universal screening results in a surge of children who ultimately end up on psychiatric medication, how will the public know? Implementing this program without addressing these issues ignores the potential harm of universal screening. How will Illinois taxpayers know if this program is a success? What metrics will be tracked? The easy out is to focus on the implementation of the program, and if a high proportion of children are screened, call it a success, never mind the details or outcomes. But using the screening of children as a measure of success for a universal screening program is tautology; data must be collected that demonstrates that the program helps children measurably and does not harm them.There are good reasons to object to the new Illinois program based on general principles. If the issues above go unaddressed, or if sufficient resources are not provided to allow careful and precise identification of children in distress, it has the potential to be a disaster.
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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/beware-universal-mental-health-screening/
Gabbard: Deep state entrenched in US intel community
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. © Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla
RT
Malicious deep state actors have been working against the American people.
The US intelligence community has been infiltrated by deep state actors, busy with “inserting their own partisan political opinions and views” into intel products and effectively working against the American people, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has said.
The DNI chief, who has repeatedly pledged to root out rogue actors from the US intel community, made the remarks on Thursday while speaking to FOX Business, stating that the deep state has created entire “pockets” within America’s intelligence agencies.
“There were a lot of pockets where the Deep State actors were very entrenched and were politicizing their centers or their positions, either against the American people… [or] creating intelligence products and inserting their own partisan political opinions and views,” she told the network.
”These are dangerous people because they believe their views and opinions supersede the US constitution that they all swear an oath to uphold, to support and defend, and… those who are elected by the American people, specifically the president of the United States,” Gabbard added.
The intelligence community has grown extremely politicized over the years and steered away from its intended goals and original mandate, Gabbard added. “It’s very simple. The mandate the intelligence community has is to find the truth and to tell the truth,” she stressed, adding that only sufficient transparency could ensure “actual accountability” for the intel community and produce a “real change.”
Earlier this week, Gabbard stripped security clearances from 37 current and former intelligence officials, accusing them of manipulating and politicizing intelligence. The move has become “the first step to aggressively get after our core national security mission, root out those deep state actors,” according to Gabbard.
The list includes multiple prominent intel figures, including former NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research Brett Holmgren, and former principal deputy director of DNI Stephanie O’Sullivan.
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The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of The Maxwell Family
By Alan McLeod
With speculation mounting that Trump could pardon her, MintPress profiles the family of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. From her media baron father, who acted as a high-level spy for Israel, her sister, working to push Tel Aviv’s interests in Silicon Valley, her brothers, who founded a dubious but highly influential anti-Islamic extremism think tank, and nephews in influential roles at the State Department and White House, the Maxwell clan have wide-ranging ties to U.S. and Israeli state power. This is their story.
Releasing Ghislaine, Burying the Epstein FilesSpeculation is growing that Ghislaine Maxwell could soon be freed. Despite campaigning on the promise to release the Epstein Files, there are increasing signs that the Trump administration is considering pardoning the world’s most notorious convicted sex trafficker.
Last month, Trump (who contemplated the idea in his first term in office) repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon, stating to journalists that “I’m allowed to do it.” Just days later, Maxwell was transferred across states to a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas—a highly unusual practice. Neither women convicted of sex crimes nor those with more than 10 years remaining on their sentences are generally permitted to be transferred to such facilities. The move sparked equal measures of speculation and outrage.
The decision to relocate Maxwell came after somebody—potentially a source within her team itself—began leaking incriminating and embarrassing evidence linking Trump to Epstein. This included a birthday card Trump sent Epstein, featuring a hand-drawn nude woman, accompanied by the text: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
For years, Maxwell aided her partner Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and raping girls and young women, creating a giant sex crime ring in the process. Epstein’s associates included billionaires, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, including President Trump, whom he considered his “closest friend.”
In 2021, two years after Epstein’s mysterious death in a Manhattan prison, Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking offenses and was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The news that Trump may soon free such an infamous criminal sent shockwaves through his base and drew charges of blatant corruption from the media. “Is there any reason to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell except to buy her silence?” ran the headline of one article in The Hill. Meanwhile, Tim Hogan, senior Democratic National Committee adviser, denounced what he claimed was a “government cover-up in real time.” “Donald Trump’s FBI, run by loyalist Kash Patel, redacted Trump’s name from the Epstein files—which have still not been released,” he said.
Robert Maxwell: Media Tycoon and Israeli OperativeWhile many of Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes have come to light, less well-known are her family’s myriad connections to both the U.S. and Israeli national security states. Chief among these are those of her father, disgraced media baron and early tech entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell.
A Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Maxwell fought for Britain against Germany. After World War II, he used his Czech connections to help funnel arms to the nascent State of Israel, weapons that helped them win the 1948 war and carry out the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians.
Maxwell’s biographers, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, write that he was first recruited by Israeli intelligence in the 1960s and began buying up Israeli tech corporations. Israel used these companies and their software to carry out spying and other clandestine operations around the globe.
Maxwell amassed a vast business empire of 350 companies, employing 16,000 people. He owned an array of newspapers, including The New York Daily News, Britain’s Daily Mirror, and Maariv of Israel, in addition to some of the world’s most influential book and scientific publishing houses.
With business power came political power. He was elected to the U.K. parliament in 1964 and counted U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev among his closest friends.
He used this influence to advance Israeli interests, selling Israeli intelligence-gathering software to Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries. This software included a secret Israeli backdoor that allowed the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, to tap into classified information gathered by governments and intelligence agencies around the world.
At the same time, it was expanding its espionage capabilities, Israel was developing a secret nuclear weapons program. This project was exposed by Israeli peace activist Mordechai Vanunu, who, in 1986, leaked evidence to the British press. Maxwell—one of Britain’s most powerful press barons—spied on Vanunu, passing photographs and other information to the Israeli Embassy—intelligence that led to Vanunu’s international abduction by Mossad, and his subsequent imprisonment.
His death was also surrounded by controversy, similar to Epstein’s. In 1991, his lifeless body was found in the ocean, in what authorities ruled a bizarre accident whereby the tycoon had fallen from his luxury yacht. To this day, his children are split on whether they think he was murdered.
The rumors that Maxwell had, for decades, been acting as an Israeli “superspy” were all but confirmed by the lavish state funeral he received in Jerusalem. His body was interred at the Mount of Olives, one of the holiest sites in Judaism, the spot from which Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven.
Virtually the entirety of elite Israeli society–both government and opposition–attended the event, including no fewer than six living heads of Israeli intelligence organizations. President Chaim Herzog himself performed the eulogy. Also speaking at the event was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated that “Robert Maxwell has done more for Israel than can today be said.”
In the United Kingdom, however, he is remembered less fondly. A man with a fearsome reputation, Maxwell ruled his media business with an iron fist, in a similar vein to Rupert Murdoch (another individual with extremely close links to Israel). After his death, it transpired that he had stolen more than $500 million from his employees’ pension fund to bail out other failing companies in his empire, leaving many of his workforce’s retirement plans in tatters. As the newspaper, The Scotsman, remarked ten years later in 2001:
If [Maxwell] was despised in life, he was hated in death when it emerged he had stolen 440 million [pounds] from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers. He was, officially, the biggest thief in British criminal history.”
Isabel Maxwell: Israel’s Woman in Silicon Valley
Even before it had been published, Isabel Maxwell– Robert’s daughter and Ghislaine’s older sister– managed to obtain a copy of Thomas and Dillon’s biography. She immediately flew to Israel, The Times of London reported, where she showed it to a “family friend” and deputy director of Mossad, David Kimche. These actions did little to beat the book’s central allegation that her father was indeed a high-level Israeli “superspy.”
Isabel has enjoyed a long and successful career in the tech industry. In 1992, along with her twin sister, Christine, she founded a company that developed one of the internet’s first search engines.
After the pension scandal, however, she and her siblings shifted their focus to rebuilding every facet of their father’s collapsed business empire. The sisters sold the search engine, netting enormous profits.
As Israeli outlet Haaretz noted, in 2001, Isabel decided to dedicate her life to advancing the Jewish State’s interests, vowing to “work only on things involving Israel” as she “believes in Israel.” Described by former MintPress journalist and investigative reporter Whitney Webb as “Israel’s back door into Silicon Valley,” she has transformed herself into a key ambassador for the country in the tech world.
“Maxwell created a unique niche for herself in [tech] as a liaison between Israeli companies in the initial development stages and private angel investors in the U.S. At the same time, she helps U.S. companies interested in opening development centers in Israel,” wrote local business newspaper, Globes. “She lives intensively, including innumerable flights back and forth between Tel Aviv and San Francisco,” it added.
Israel is known to be the source of much of the world’s most controversial spyware and hacking tools, used by repressive governments the world over to surveil, harass, and even kill political opponents. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, used by the government of Saudi Arabia to track Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, before assassinating him in Türkiye.
Isabel built on her father’s political connections. “My father was most influential in my life. He was a very accomplished man and achieved many of his goals during his life. I learned very much from him and have made many of his ways my own,” she said. This included developing intimate ties to a myriad of Israeli leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates.
During the 2000s, she was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual, closed-door gathering of the West’s most senior political, security and intelligence officials, in addition to being a “technology pioneer” at the World Economic Forum.
She was also placed on the board of the Israeli government-funded Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation and the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, two organizations closely associated with those former Israeli prime ministers.
In 2001, she became the CEO of iCognito, taking the job, in her words, “because it [the company] is in Israel, and because of its technology.” The technology in question was aimed at keeping children safe online—highly ironic, given that her sister was actively trafficking and abusing minors throughout that period.
Isabel was a much more serious and accomplished individual than Ghislaine. As Haaretz noted:
While her younger sister, Ghislaine, makes the gossip columns after breakfasting with Bill Clinton or because of her ties with another close friend, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Isabel wants to show photos taken of herself with the grand mufti of Egypt, or with Bedouin in a tent, or of visits to a Gaza refugee camp.”
In 1997, Isabel was appointed president of the Israeli tech security firm, Commtouch. Thanks to her connections, Commtouch was able to secure investment from many of the most prominent players in Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, a close associate of both the Maxwell family and Jeffrey Epstein himself.
Christine Maxwell: Funded by Israel?Isabel’s twin sister, Christine, is no less accomplished. A veteran of the publishing and tech industries, she co-founded data analytics firm Chiliad. As CEO, she helped oversee the production of a massive “counterterrorism” database that the company sold to the FBI during the height of the War on Terror. The software helped the Bush administration crack down on Muslim Americans and tear down domestic civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act. Today, she is the leader and co-founder of another big data corporation, Techtonic Insight.
Like her sister and father, Christine has a close relationship with the State of Israel. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), where, her biography states,
She works to promote innovative academic research that leverages enabling technologies to empower proactive understanding and combatting the great dangers of contemporary antisemitism, and enhancing the ongoing relevance of the Holocaust for the 21st century and beyond.”
ISGAP’s board is a who’s who of Israeli national security state officials. This includes Natan Sharansky, former Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, the former Chief Censor for the IDF and Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy. Also on the board is Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
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Via https://www.mintpressnews.com/maxwell-family-epstein-mossad-cia/290379/
August 22, 2025
How Musk Monetized Government While Killing What Actually Works
Guest article by Merici Vinton, former DOGE worker
Elon Musk might be out of the Oval Office and Trump’s good graces, but he’s trying to sneak back into politics by starting a new political party. What’s clear following Musk’s brief reign over the federal government via DOGE is that he never cared about making things work for people. I know this because I was there. We shouldn’t expect any different, and nothing better, from his so-called America Party.
DOGE was a shiny new object for the wealthiest man in the world. Elon Musk bought, then exploited an opportunity to bring his friends and fellow internet trolls into the halls of the most powerful government in the world so they could feel and flex their own power. His project was never about making the lives of the American people better or easier, it was always about his own brand and self-interest. I’d expect the same from any future political endeavor.
As “Buddy in Chief” Musk used his position to meet with world leaders—not to advocate for American interests, but to open doors for his businesses. Americans were promised innovation and cutting billions in waste, goals that were blatantly undercut and unmet.
In his time in our nation’s capitol, he did deals to ensure his companies were protected from oversight, as spotted by the Economic Policy Institute:
Tesla faced a Department of Labor probe into racial and sexual harassment—until the agency responsible was dismantled.Neuralink was under investigation by the USDA’s inspector general, likely over botched animal experiments—until the watchdogs were firedStarlink was being examined for potential unauthorized access by Russia—until USAID itself was guttedTesla Autopilot was under DOT review—until the investigation was dropped and safety regulations were weakened.Musk didn’t modernize government. He monetized it.
The thing is, there are actually models to make government work better without ransacking it.
For example – Direct File. Direct File is a free, online, beloved tax filing service offered by the IRS. Direct File’s user satisfaction is 94%, has a Net Promoter Score that rivals Apple and Netflix, and increased trust in the IRS by 86% among its users. And in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, DOGE wants to kill it.
Direct File is a model of both government efficiency and what happens when supremely talented technical leaders join government. The IRS effectively built a startup in government and that talent could have launched not just Direct File, but support modernizing the IRS – had they only been given a chance.
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Neo-Nazi units kill retreating Ukrainian soldiers, forcing them to switch sides
Drago Bosnic
August 22, 2025
Millions of regular Ukrainians now have a very simple choice – the political West and the Neo-Nazi junta that want all of them dead or Russia that’s going out of its way to save them, even in this NATO-orchestrated war. Ukrainian soldiers are increasingly making it clear what choice they’ve made. We can only hope the entire NATO-occupied country will follow suit.
The Kiev regime’s deep-rooted connection with Ukrainian WWII-era Nazi organizations is an axiom at this point. Denying this is simply pointless, as many of its soldiers unashamedly display Nazi insignia, while the state-sponsored promotion of the cult of Nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, Roman Shukhevych and others of their ilk is a clear proof that this isn’t some idiosyncratic or spontaneous reaction of an extremist minority, but a carefully orchestrated policy.
In the last decade, there has been a systematic whitewashing of Nazism, with an entire generation of children and young people raised to essentially adore the aforementioned figures. Many soldiers of the Kiev regime who have been fighting in the last several years were just kids at the time when NATO organized the Maidan coup that brought the Neo-Nazi junta to power and pushed Ukraine into the ongoing bloodbath.
These children (many in their 20s now) were radicalized into thinking that the ideology that quite literally sees them as “Untermenschen” is something “good” or even “desirable”. They were never told anything about Hitler’s Generalplan Ost and that they would’ve almost certainly never even been born had Nazi Germany succeeded in its genocidal intentions of global proportions.
Worse yet, they’ve been convinced that the Russians, their closest kin (historically, genetically, culturally, religiously, you name it), are their “mortal enemy”. Not to mention the fact that the only reason there are Ukrainians nowadays at all is precisely the victory won by tens of millions of Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union. This hard-fought triumph was paid in blood, with nearly 30 million people slaughtered in the most brutal ways imaginable, at least seven million of whom were from Ukraine.
Ironically, many of those now fighting under the banner of Bandera and his Nazi overlords are the descendants of people who actually fought in the Red Army, many of them for the entire duration of WWII. This includes the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky himself, whose grandfather Semyon Zelensky was a Red Army soldier, while his father and three brothers were killed by the Nazis. And yet, his grandson had no qualms about declaring Bandera a “Ukrainian hero”.
Thus, the live-action role-playing (or so-called “larping” for short) of Nazism by many Ukrainians is quite literally the ridicule of the sacrifice made by their ancestors and their closest kin in Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR. Still, one would think that the mindless emulation of that despicable ideology would be limited to mere formality. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Namely, the Neo-Nazi junta is determined to follow its ideological forefathers to the letter, at every step of the way. This doesn’t only include the raising of what can only be described as its own iteration of the infamous Volkssturm, a military force effectively composed of civilians pressed into service virtually overnight, but also the emulation of Nazi German military strategy, one that led to its defeat on the battlefield (unfortunately, only on the battlefield, it would seem).
This now includes killing forcibly conscripted Ukrainian soldiers fleeing from the advancing Russian military. Namely, the so-called “barrier detachment” (also known as anti-retreat forces) are units deployed in the rear or just behind the frontline and are used to prevent regular troops from retreating. Unsurprisingly, these units are manned by the staunchest and most radical Neo-Nazis who officially belong to the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU).
They not only force regular Ukrainian soldiers to face the Russian military head-on (regardless of the risk or battlefield circumstances), but also have orders to shoot them in case of a retreat. This has become so common that it’s now a “normal” occurrence. Realizing they’re mere cannon fodder sent to certain death, forcibly conscripted Ukrainians have grown tired of this “highly unflattering” role, so they’re now actually fighting back.
Military sources report that they now regularly cooperate with the Russian military to get rid of these Nazi “barrier detachments”. There’s recent footage proving this, with one video from early August showing an incident during which the radicals opened fire at Ukrainian soldiers evacuating a trench that was just stormed by Russian troops. The video ends with the aforementioned Nazi “barrier detachment” targeted and neutralized by a Russian FPV kamikaze drone.
Attacked on all sides, Ukrainian soldiers made the only logical choice – helping the Russian military pinpoint the location of the “barrier detachment”. And who could possibly blame them? These soldiers had no way to withdraw to a more defensible position, while only the Russian “enemy” offered them the possibility of survival.
Any remotely sane person would make the same choice. The Kremlin understands this very well, which is why it has established channels of communication with regular Ukrainian troops and is still offering them the possibility of avoiding the grim fate of nearly two million of their compatriots. In addition, the Russian military is directly targeting these Nazi “barrier detachments”. For instance, on August 8, Russian airstrikes destroyed two such units of the NGU’s 17th Poltava Brigade near the settlements of Orestopol and Alekseyevka in the Dnepropetrovsk oblast (region).
This was made possible because regular Ukrainian soldiers from the 31st Mechanized Brigade revealed the exact location of these two Nazi “barrier detachments” to the Russian military. Such occurrences have become quite common. Just days later, on August 14, the 60th Mechanized Brigade reported the whereabouts of the command post coordinating the operations of these Nazi units deployed near the settlement of Drobyshevo in northern DNR.
Once again, the Russian military responded with an airstrike, neutralizing the command post and, thus, saving the lives of Ukrainian soldiers who would otherwise be sent to certain death. However, the Kiev regime is doubling down on this insane policy and is now expanding these “barrier detachments” with personnel from the police and intelligence services. This brutal approach is not giving any results, but the Neo-Nazi junta still insists on it.
The only logical conclusion is that its NATO overlords want to use the Kiev regime forces as a tool of genocide against Ukrainians. The horrendous losses can undoubtedly be explained (at least in part) precisely due to such tactics. Much unlike the Russian military, which seeks to preserve its troops, the political West sees regular Ukrainians as former Russians who can freely be used as cannon fodder.
As the Neo-Nazi junta is nothing more than a NATO proxy, it has no qualms about sending regular soldiers to certain (and pointless) death. Millions of regular Ukrainians now have a very simple choice – the political West that wants all of them dead or Russia that’s going out of its way to save them, even in this NATO-orchestrated war. Ukrainian soldiers are increasingly making it clear what choice they’ve made. We can only hope the entire NATO-occupied country will follow suit.
[…]
US Military Budget Tops $1 Trillion
“In America—At This Restaurant Only One Person Is Served.” [Source: lambiek.net]By Jeremy Kuzmarov
U.S. President Donald Trump has signed off on the first-ever trillion-dollar military budget.
When the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its budget request for fiscal year 2026 in May, it included a base defense request of $892.6 billion, plus a $119.3 billion allocation of additional resources from the Republican-controlled Congress’s budget reconciliation bill.
On July 4, Trump signed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” which, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, solidified the $1 trillion defense budget.
The act also cuts funding for Medicaid and food stamps, and mandates tax cuts for Corporate America and the wealthy, thus adding $3.4 trillion to the national debt, according to a Congressional study.[1]
Subsidizing “an emerging military and nuclear technology wish list,” the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” allocates $12.8 billion for Trump’s Golden Dome initiative, a promised missile defense shield modeled after Reagan’s ill-conceived Strategic Defense Initiative (ie. Star Wars).
$29 billion is further allocated to enhance Pentagon resources for domestic shipbuilding, $1 billion to secure the southern border, and tens of billions for autonomous weapons, and an expansion of nuclear-weapon modernization and space capabilities.
Additionally, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” allocates $12 billion to the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command, $2 billion for the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund to improve the U.S. stockpile of critical minerals, $500 million for high-altitude surveillance balloons, and a $1.2 billion increase in funding for cruise missiles, among other things.
A new study issued by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, written by William Hartung and Stephen Semler, Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020-2024, found that the U.S. government invested more than twice as much money in five weapons companies in that period as in diplomacy and international assistance.
The five companies that received $771 billion between 2020 and 2024 were: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion).
[Source: mordorintelligence.com]The above companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and Ukraine, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. U.S. military aid to Israel was more than $18 billion in just the first year following October 7 2023; military aid to Ukraine has totaled $65 billion since 2022.
A surge in foreign-funded arms sales to European allies, paid for by the recipient nations—more than $170 billion in 2023 and 2024 alone—has provided additional revenue to arms contractors over and above the funds they receive directly from the Pentagon.
Annual U.S. military spending has grown significantly this century amidst the backdrop of the Global War on Terror and new Cold War.
The Pentagon’s discretionary budget—the annual funding approved by Congress and the large majority of its overall budget—rose from $507 billion in 2000 to $843 billion in 2025 (in constant 2025 dollars), a 66% increase. Additional supplemental funding that has raised the military budget to the $1 trillion mark pushes the increase to 99%.
According to Profits of War, the shape of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” is shifting as military technology companies are being awarded an increasing share of the Pentagon’s budget and gaining in political power.
Companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril have been tapped for multi-billion-dollar contract awards from the Pentagon for communications, surveillance, targeting, unpiloted vehicles, anti-drone defenses, and hypersonic weapons, and should be pushed into the top ranks of Pentagon contractors in the near future.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM are additionally splitting $10 billion for the Pentagon’s cloud-computing program.
Silicon Valley tech companies are transforming the nature of war through their development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and robotic weaponry that reduces the human imprint and political costs of waging war.
The outsized influence of Big Tech companies is apparent in the appointment of SpaceX founder Elon Musk as de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Vice President J. D. Vance’s close ties to Palantir founder Peter Thiel.
Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment firm which has a history of investing in the gun and military industries, and Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been appointed Under Secretary of the Army.
Profits of War notes that the ongoing influence of the arms industry over Congress operates through tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and the employment of 950 lobbyists, as of 2024.
Further, military contractors shape military policy and lobby to increase military spending by funding think tanks and serving on government commissions.
While President Joe Biden touted the arms industry and its workers as the “arsenal of democracy,” a significant share of U.S. arms transfers, according to Profits of War, go to undemocratic regimes or nations at war.
Since 2019, U.S. arms were possessed by one or more parties to 28 conflicts, and 31 U.S. arms clients were deemed “not free” by Freedom House.
In 2022, the Biden administration approved arms sales to 57% of the world’s autocracies, based on data from the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and the Varieties of Democracy project.
Under a new version of the “revolving door,” ex-military officers and senior Pentagon officials are increasingly taking up jobs with venture capital firms that invest in Silicon Valley arms-industry startups.
An investigation by Eric Lipton of The New York Times found that at least 50 former Pentagon officials went to work for military-related venture capital or private equity firms in the five years from 2019 to 2023.
Profits of War paints a damning picture of an ascendant fascism in the U.S., whose governing structure is thoroughly dominated by war profiteers and their agents.
The report concludes that there needs to be “greater congressional and public scrutiny of emerging weapons contractors” and that “the role of Silicon Valley startups and the venture capital firms that support them needs to be better understood and debated” as “the U.S. crafts a new foreign policy strategy that avoids unnecessary wars.”
[…]
Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/08/21/u-s-military-budget-tops-1-trillion/
FBI raids John Bolton’s home in national security probe
FILE PHOTO: John Bolton. © Anna Moneymaker / Getty ImagesRT
Sources claim the operation is part of a high-profile investigation involving classified documentsThe FBI has raided the home and office of John Bolton, the renowned foreign policy hawk and a former national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, multiple outlets reported on Friday. The New York Post, which first broke the news, said the searches are part of a high-profile probe into the handling of classified documents.
Bolton, notorious for his advocacy of regime change as a US foreign policy tool, served under Trump for 18 months during his first term before being fired in September 2019. Trump later called him a “nutjob,” “loser,” and “very dumb person,” and described hiring him as one of his “biggest mistakes.”
Trump has said that he knew nothing about the raids and only learned of them from television news.
Reports say FBI agents searched Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, and his Washington, DC, office early on Friday. Footage circulating online showed agents in what appears to be his front yard and outside his office, loading items into vehicles. Bolton was reportedly seen in his office lobby speaking with two individuals wearing FBI vests.
The investigation reportedly centers on whether Bolton still possesses classified documents from his time in office, particularly those linked to his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. The US Justice Department (DOJ) under Trump tried to block the book’s publication, claiming it contained classified material. A federal judge eventually allowed its release, and the Biden DOJ dropped both the criminal and civil cases in June 2021.
Bolton has not been detained and has not yet been charged, according to reports, and neither his spokesperson nor the White House reportedly have commented.
While the DOJ has not issued an official statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X early on Friday: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” She was responding to FBI Director Kash Patel’s cryptic message: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino also reposted Patel’s comment, adding, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.” Patel previously listed Bolton as part of the US “Deep State” in his 2023 book.
Bolton has frequently clashed with Trump over foreign policy. On his first day back in office this year, Trump revoked the security clearances of over 40 ex-intelligence officials, including Bolton, and stripped him of his security detail.
[…]
America’s Divide: US Battle Over Abortion
America’s Divide: The US Battle Over Abortion
RT (2022)
Film Review
https://odysee.com/@RTDocumentary:4/Abortion_America%E2s-Divide
This is the first of two RT documentaries about the abortion debate. Filmed just prior to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, it highlights states’ increasingly restrictive abortion laws, as well as profiling aggressive campaigns on both sides of the issue.
It starts with the Texas 2021 Heartbeat Act. This bans abortion after six weeks pregnancy and allows no exceptions for rape or incest. The new Texas law triggered massive protests in Washington DC and many other US cities.
The filmmakers interview several pro and anti-abortion advocates, including a woman who sought abortion after being raped at 13. They also highlight a significant increase in illegal abortions in states that restrict access to abortion.
For some reason, the anti-abortion campaigners seem mainly concerned about late term abortions. The latter, comprising 1-2% of abortions, nearly always occur to save the mother’s life.
The documentary also points out that the Republican party has made restricting access to abortion one of their major planks to win votes from evangelical Christians. My mother, a life long Republican, always supported abortion because it reduced the number of unwanted children on the welfare rolls, as well the number of intellectually impaired children born to women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies who were incapable of restricting their use of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs.
Likewise the Democrats have increasingly made Roe v Wade a campaign issue as they abandon traditional policies beneficial to the working class. A favorite ploy has been to guilt-trip populist activists who vote for third party candidates, blaming them for the success of Republican presidents who add conservative judges to the Supreme Court.
Democratic support for abortion has always been extremely feeble: witness their refusal to enshrine abortion rights in legislation instead of relying on a revocable Supreme Court finding. Since 1977 and the passage of the Hyde Amendment (which Democratic presidents like Clinton, Obama and Biden refused to overturn), only well-to-do women have enjoyed a right to abortion. The Hyde Amendment bans states from using Medicaid funding to pay for abortions.
August 21, 2025
Trump’s Plan to Invade Venezuela and Abduct “Narcoterrorist” Maduro
By Kurt NimmoThe Trump administration, through its attorney general Pam Bondi, announced on August 7 it has doubled a reward—from $25 million to $50 million—for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. According to the administration, Maduro is in cahoots with drug cartels, specifically Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).
Bondi accused Maduro of heading up one of the world’s most notorious drug trafficking operations. She said his alleged involvement in the drug trade is a threat to the national security of the United States. Trump’s AG said Maduro utilizes “foreign terrorist and criminal organizations,” including the Tren de Aragua gang, the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, in addition to Cartel of the Suns, to traffic cocaine in the United States.
“He is one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security. Therefore, we’ve doubled his reward to $50 million,” Bondi said in a video posted on X.
While there is little compelling evidence of Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade, it is known that the Venezuelan National Guard and military began to buy, store, transfer and distribute cocaine in the mid-2000s. Prior to direct involvement, the Venezuelan military extorted narcos in the transfer of drug shipments.
“According to InSight Crime, a theory as to what may have motivated this move is that Colombian narcos began to pay the military in drugs rather than cash. This forced the Venezuelans to seek markets of their own,” writes intelligence analyst Javier Sutil Toledano.
Venezuela might not have become involved in the drug trade if not for the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia security program signed with the United States. Billed as an anti-narcotics effort, the real purpose of the plan was to eradicate guerrilla movements aligned against corporate petroleum and mining activities. Colombia Plan maintained a close relationship with death squads and organized paramilitary forces, notes Noam Chomsky.
Plan Colombia’s war on guerrilla movements forced FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to move operations to the border with Venezuela and corrupt officials became involved in the drug trade. The narrative claims FARC is a major distributor of cocaine. This is, however, an exaggeration.
“In standard US terminology, the FARC forces are ‘narcoguerrillas,’ a useful concept as a cover for counterinsurgency,” writes Chomsky. “It is agreed—and FARC leaders say—that they rely for funding on coca production, which they tax, as they tax other businesses.”
Klaus Nyholm, at the time head of the UN Drug Control Program, believes “the guerrillas are something different from the traffickers,” while Andean drug specialist Ricardo Vargas argues the guerrillas were “primarily focused on taxation of illicit crops,” not trafficking. Moreover, FARC called for “a development plan for the peasants” that would “allow eradication of coca on the basis of alternative crops.” Vargas added that Colombian peasants grow cocoa plants “because of the crisis in the agricultural sector of Latin American countries, escalated by the general economic crisis in the region,” a crisis exacerbated by neoliberal trade policies.
In 2013, it was reported that FARC, while in the process of demobilization, was taken over piecemeal by the Gaitanistas (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, aka Clan del Golfo), described as a rightwing Colombian neo-paramilitary group and the largest drug cartel in Colombia. It is believed the group is comprised of either reservists or retired professional soldiers. Colombian General Leonardo Alfonso Barrero Gordillo worked with Clan del Golfo and its paramilitary groups, according to human rights organizations.
“Although Maduro was not among the early Venezuelan officials tied to narco-trafficking during the previous Hugo Chávez presidency, a federal indictment filed in New York shows his rise through the ranks of the Cartel of the Suns,” claims the Miami Herald.
The news outlet mentions an indictment that claims Maduro and the cartel aimed “to flood the United States with cocaine and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.”
CIA Runs Cocaine to Fund Black OpsThe Trump administration is less interested in the “harmful and addictive effects” of cocaine on Americans than the ongoing US effort to overthrow the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and destroy the Bolivarian Revolution initially led by the late former President Hugo Chávez. If Trump and crew were sincerely interested in stopping the importation of cocaine, they would turn their attention to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Joël van der Reijden, an independent Dutch researcher, believes CIA involvement in the drug trade is one of the most important covered up conspiracies of all time. The CIA inherited the drug business from Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), a now defunct French intelligence agency. The operation was “upscaled” with heroin in Vietnam and later a similar template was used in South America with cocaine. It is said US intelligence was involved in drug trafficking with Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia) before the establishment of the CIA in 1947. The Southeast Asian “Golden Triangle” of heroin production and distribution included early CIA notables, including Frank Wisner, Paul Helliwell, Claire Chennault, William Pawley, and Tommy Corcoran.
In the 1980s, the CIA oversaw Nicaraguan Contra arms and cocaine trafficking. The operation was revealed when American commercial airline pilot Barry Seal was investigated for working with the Medellin Cartel in Colombia. Seal had a relationship with the CIA.
“Barry Seal was a veteran of both the drug trade and the intelligence business,” write Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn. “Seal’s first contact with the CIA came in the 1960s while he served as a pilot for the US Army’s Special Forces division. He left the army in 1965 to become, at the age of twenty-six, a pilot for TransWorld Airlines, and it’s apparent that Seal continued his relationship with the Agency during his employment with the airline.”
According to van der Reijden,
“It is virtually certain that both [George H.W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton, the latter as governor of Arkansas, were shielding Seal’s operations from law enforcement… the [CIA director] Casey-Bush-North alliance destroyed the DEA’s operation aimed at bringing down the entire Medellin Cartel when they decided to leak the Contra sting operation of their asset Barry Seal to the media,” thus allowing Reagan to accuse the Sandinista government of drug trafficking and force Congress to end the ban on US military aid to the Contras.”
CIA cocaine distribution in the United States was exposed in the 1990s by journalist Gary Webb in a three-part series published by the Mercury News. The newspaper series documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s was siphoned to the Contras, the CIA mercenary army attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government.
Additionally, in 1993 the Justice Department investigated “allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials,” The New York Times reported.
Panama Invasion Redux?“CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. In 1949, two of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated generals, Li Wen Huan and Tuan Shi Wen, marched their Third and Fifth Route armies, with families and livestock, across the mountains to northern Burma. Once installed, the peasant soldiers began cultivating the crop they knew best, the opium poppy.”
In December, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Panama City. The invasion was codenamed Operation Just Cause, and the supposed just cause was the arrest of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a long time CIA asset, on drug trafficking charges. Noriega received protection from DEA investigations due to his “special relationship with the CIA” (see Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs, and the Press, 1998). He was instrumental the effort to launder drug money while also receiving financial support from drug dealers. According to Gary Webb (Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, 1999), Noriega was involved in the CIA effort to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
After Noriega was exposed in The New York Times as a participant in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan tried to have the Panamanian leader step down, but he refused to do so. The notorious Elliot Abrams and the Pentagon agitated for an invasion of Panama. Reagan declined, afraid it would hurt the upcoming Bush presidential campaign. However, after his successor assumed office, the plan to get rid of the exposed CIA asset Manuel Noriega became more urgent, especially after the press called George H.W. Bush a “wimp” for not going after Noriega. The new president was berated after he called for hunting down major drug dealers and then not acting on Noriega.
27,684 US troops and over 300 aircraft invaded on December 20. Explosions and fire ripped through the heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood in downtown Panama City.
“El Chorrillo was invaded, destroyed, burned, and desecrated on that fateful day,” writes Argelis Wesley. “Thousands fled barefoot and terrified, many watched as their homes collapsed under the flames and disappeared in the chaos. Others witnessed point-blank executions and the violation of fundamental rights. Some chose to leave the place they had called home since birth.”
She writes that years later,
“We still do not know how many people died or how many bodies were buried in mass graves. Nor do we fully understand how this brutal incident affected the mental health and well-being of El Chorrillo’s generations, from children to adults.”
On January 3, 1990, Noriega surrendered to US forces. He was convicted of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was subsequently extradited to France, and then back to Panama, where he died during surgery to remove a brain tumor.
[…]
Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-plan-invade-venezuela-abduct-narcoterrorist-maduro/5898569
The Most Revolutionary Act
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