Just 3% of What the US Spends Destroying Countries Could End Starvation—On the Entire Planet

Just 3% of What the US Spends Destroying Countries Could End Starvation—On the Entire Planet

Matt Agorist

January 23, 2020

It was reported this week that the Pentagon made $35 trillion — with a ‘T’ — in accounting adjustments in 2019 alone. That number is larger than the entire U.S. economy and is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018. The figure also dwarfs the Congressional approved military budget of $738 billion. Naturally, no one cares and Pentagon officials dismiss this black hole of spending as accounting errors.

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants do add up to a number nearly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy,” said Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The report shows the Pentagon “employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem,” she said.

This problem is only getting worse too. As Bloomberg reported, the Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. Despite the shame of failing—twice—the accounting “errors” have grown.

Imagine running a company in which you accounted for spending like they do at the Pentagon. If you were the CFO, you’d be fired, if and only if the entire business didn’t already collapse. However, because these morons have an unlimited pool of tax revenue and Federal Reserve dollars from which to draw resources, they are allowed to continue down this unaccountable path toward unsustainable debt and spending.

In the meantime, Democrats and Republicans alike remain silent as questioning the military industrial complex is akin to a thought crime. The war machine must go on and continue to expand or else they’ll find themselves out of a job. The majority of Americans follow the same code of silence when it comes to military spending. Boobus Americanus sits back in his recliner as his grandchildren’s future is squandered by mass murderers dropping million dollar bombs on people living in tents on the other side of the planet — for ‘freedom’ — of course.

Despite audits and scrutiny from those paying attention, the Pentagon has only continued to lose money by the trillions since 9/11, and a report analyzing the budgets of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shows that the total is more than $21 trillion.

The report attributes the missing funds to a series of “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” made to the departments’ budgets. These adjustments are not tied to specific accounting transactions, but they are often included in account summaries to cover for balances between systems that cannot be reconciled.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, not only is it likely that the actual amount of money the DoD and HUD cannot account for is much higher than $21 trillion, due to the fact that researchers did not have access to complete data, but the practice of creating counterfeit adjustments appears to be standard procedure.

“Perhaps even more troubling than the total amount lost is the fact that fraudulent behavior from HUD and DOD seem to be the standard operating procedure. In fact, the accounting for these funds is so poor, that as Reuters notes, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) refers to the preparation of the Army’s year-end statements as ‘the grand plug’ — ‘plug’ is accounting jargon for the insertion of made-up numbers.

For every transaction, a so-called ‘journal voucher’ that provides serial numbers, transaction dates and the amount of the expenditure is supposed to be produced. The report specifies that the agency has done such a poor job in providing documentation of their transactions, that there is no way to actually know how $21 trillion has been spent.”

The problem is so bad, that these warmongers have ‘lost’ $58,386 per second since 9/11.

Those of us not blinded by the propaganda and false patriotism, see the inevitable results of such a propensity for supporting war. We see domestic infrastructure crumbling, a national debt increasing by record amounts each year, more conflict around the globe, and countless veterans suffering from PTSD. When will it all end? At this pace, it won’t end until the empire falls.

Luckily, there are people waging a campaign to prevent further war and subsequent deficit spending. They are paying to put up billboards showing just how much of your money the US steals to blow up brown people in foreign countries. The group is World Beyond War and their efforts are massive. For the last several years, they’ve been putting up powerful billboards all over the country. One of them can be seen below.

They back these numbers up with data on their website, pointing out that in 2008, the United Nations said that $30 billion per year could end hunger on earth, as reported in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. The Food and Agriculture Organization has not updated that figure since 2008, and has recently told us that such figures do not require much updating. In a separate report, most recently published in 2015, the same organization provides a figure of $265 billion as the cost per year for 15 years to permanently eliminate extreme poverty, which would eliminate starvation and malnutrition — a broader project than just preventing starvation one year at a time. The FAO’s spokesperson informed us in an email: “I think it would be incorrect to compare the two figures as the 265 billion has been calculated taking into consideration a number of initiatives including social protection cash transfers aimed at extracting people from extreme poverty and not just hunger.”

As of 2019, the annual Pentagon base budget, plus war budget, plus nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, plus Homeland Security and other military spending totaled well over $1 trillion — not counting what’s “lost.”

3% of $1 trillion = $30 billion.

So, 3% of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth.

22% of $1.2 trillion = $265 billion.

So, 22 percent of U.S. military spending for 15 years could permanently end extreme poverty globally.

With the globe spending roughly $2 trillion per year on militarism (roughly half of it by the United States), we can also say that 1.5% of GLOBAL military spending could end starvation on earth.

Are you ready to end all war yet? We are.

‘Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene’: House Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget

“For the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”
—Stephen Miles, Win Without War

Source

Common Dreams

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

Friday, July 26, 2019

“Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation’s ‘defense’ budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget ‘deal.'”

 

President Donald Trump arrives to speak after touring the Lima Army Tank Plant at Joint Systems Manufacturing in Lima, Ohio, March 20, 2019. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly “broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon,” 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years.

Just 16 Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no.

The final vote was 284-149. (See the full roll call.)

“For the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”
—Stephen Miles, Win Without War

The House passage of the budget deal, which President Donald Trump quickly applauded on Twitter as a victory for the military, comes after the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the measure in opposition to its out-of-control Pentagon outlays.

But most of the Progressive Caucus voted for the agreement on Thursday, pointing to increases in domestic spending.

“It’s not a perfect deal by any means,” Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement ahead of the vote. “This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years.”

Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, took issue with the latter claim in a series of tweets Thursday.

“You’re no doubt hearing a lot of crowing from Democrats about how the deal they struck with Trump gives more money to ‘non-defense’ spending than to ‘defense,'” Miles wrote. “Let’s be clear that by every measure, save the one they’re using, that’s simply not true.”

“Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 trillion over the next two years. The entire rest of gov’t, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That’s $178.6 billion more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov’t,” Miles wrote. “So, for the love of God, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon.”

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, wrote for Forbes this week that the budget deal “vastly overpays for the Pentagon.”

“At $738 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 and $740 billion for Fiscal Year 2021,” wrote Hartung, “the agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II.”

“The agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II.”
—William Hartung, Center for International Policy

“The proposed figures are higher than spending at the height of the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and substantially more than the high point of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s,” Hartung added. “And the Fiscal Year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021 numbers are only slightly less than spending in 2010, when the United States had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly nine times the number currently deployed.”

The sweeping 2020 budget agreement is expected to pass the Senate next week, and Trump has signaled he will sign the measure.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined the president in celebrating the increase in military spending, which is significantly more than the Pentagon requested.

The deal, McConnell said, “achieves the No. 1 goal of the Republican side of the aisle, providing for the common defense.”

As Common Dreams reported on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) came under fire from progressives for striking the budget agreement with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Specifically, critics highlighted the deal to suspend the debt ceiling until 2021, a move that could give Republicans power to cripple the next president’s agenda.

“If you really listen,” wrote Splinter‘s Paul Blest, “you can almost hear [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz yelling on the floor of the Senate that Congress shouldn’t raise the debt limit by one more dollar unless President Bernie Sanders promises to drop his demand for Medicare for All.”

War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex

Source

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.” But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending. Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors—Transdigm, for example—managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!” (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.)

It would be one thing if each defense contractor simply took its cut off the top, but instead there is an entire food chain of defense contractors, all of which are legally required, no less, to maximize profits for their shareholders. More than 28,000 companies are involved, but the actual first-tier defense contractors with which the Pentagon places 2/3 of all defense contracts are just the Big Six: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynmics, BAE Systems and Boeing. All the other companies are organized into a pyramid of subcontractors with five levels of hierarchy, and at each level they do their best to milk the tier above them.

The insistence on market-based methods and the requirement of maximizing profitability turns out to be incompatible with defense spending on a very basic level: defense spending is intermittent and cyclical, with long fallow intervals between major orders. This has forced even the Big Six to make cuts to their defense-directed departments in favor of expanding civilian production. Also, in spite of the huge size of the US defense budget, it is of finite size (there being just one planet to blow up), as is the global weapons market. Since, in a market economy, every company faces the choice of grow or get bought out, this has precipitated scores of mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly consolidated marketplace with a few major players in each space.

As a result, in most spaces, of which the report’s authors discuss 17, including the Navy, land forces, air force, electronics, nuclear weapons, space technology and so on, at least a third of the time the Pentagon has a choice of exactly one contractor for any given contract, causing quality and timeliness to suffer and driving up prices.

In a number of cases, in spite of its industrial and financial might, the Pentagon has encountered insoluble problems. Specifically, it turns out that the US has only one shipyard left that is capable of building nuclear aircraft carriers (at all, that is; the USS Gerald Ford is not exactly a success). That is Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport, Virginia. In theory, it could work on three ships in parallel, but two of the slips are permanently occupied by existing aircraft carriers that require maintenance. This is not a unique case: the number of shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines, destroyers and other types of vessels is also exactly one. Thus, in case of a protracted conflict with a serious adversary in which a significant portion of the US Navy has been sunk, ships will be impossible to replace within any reasonable amount of time.

America’s Military-Industrial Addiction

The situation is somewhat better with regard to aircraft manufacturing. The plants that exist can produce 40 planes a month and could produce 130 a month if pressed. On the other hand, the situation with tanks and artillery is absolutely dismal. According to this report, the US has completely lost the competency for building the new generation of tanks. It is no longer even a question of missing plant and equipment; in the US, a second generation of engineers who have never designed a tank is currently going into retirement. Their replacements have no one to learn from and only know about modern tanks from movies and video games. As far as artillery, there is just one remaining production line in the US that can produce barrels larger than 40mm; it is fully booked up and would be unable to ramp up production in case of war. The contractor is unwilling to expand production without the Pentagon guaranteeing at least 45% utilization, since that would be unprofitable.

The situation is similar for the entire list of areas; it is better for dual-use technologies that can be sourced from civilian companies and significantly worse for highly specialized ones. Unit cost for every type of military equipment goes up year after year while the volumes being acquired continuously trend lower—sometimes all the way to zero. Over the past 15 years the US hasn’t acquired a single new tank. They keep modernizing the old ones, but at a rate that’s no higher than 100 a year.

Because of all these tendencies and trends, the defense industry continues to lose not only qualified personnel but also the very ability to perform the work. INDPOL experts estimate that the deficit in machine tools has reached 27%. Over the past quarter-century the US has stopped manufacturing a wide variety of manufacturing equipment. Only half of these tools can be imported from allies or friendly nations; for the rest, there is just one source: China. They analyzed the supply chains for 600 of the most important types of weapons and found that a third of them have breaks in them while another third have completely broken down. In the Pentagon’s five-tier subcontractor pyramid, component manufacturers are almost always relegated to the bottommost tier, and the notices they issue when they terminate production or shut down completely tend to drown in the Pentagon’s bureaucratic swamp.

The end result of all this is that theoretically the Pentagon is still capable of doing small production runs of weapons to compensate for ongoing losses in localized, low-intensity conflicts during a general time of peace, but even today this is at the extreme end of its capabilities. In case of a serious conflict with any well-armed nation, all it will be able to rely on is the existing stockpile of ordnance and spare parts, which will be quickly depleted.

A similar situation prevails in the area of rare earth elements and other materials for producing electronics. At the moment, the accumulated stockpile of these supplies needed for producing missiles and space technology—most importantly, satellites—is sufficient for five years at the current rate of use.

The report specifically calls out the dire situation in the area of strategic nuclear weapons. Almost all the technology for communications, targeting, trajectory calculations and arming of the ICBM warheads was developed in the 1960s and 70s. To this day, data is loaded from 5-inch floppy diskettes, which were last mass-produced 15 years ago. There are no replacements for them and the people who designed them are busy pushing up daisies. The choice is between buying tiny production runs of all the consumables at an extravagant expense and developing from scratch the entire land-based strategic triad component at the cost of three annual Pentagon budgets.

There are lots of specific problems in each area described in the report, but the main one is loss of competence among technical and engineering staff caused by a low level of orders for replacements or for new product development. The situation is such that promising new theoretical developments coming out of research centers such as DARPA cannot be realized given the present set of technical competencies. For a number of key specializations there are fewer than three dozen trained, experienced specialists.

This situation is expected to continue to deteriorate, with the number of personnel employed in the defense sector declining 11-16% over the next decade, mainly due to a shortage of young candidates qualified to replace those who are retiring. A specific example: development work on the F-35 is nearing completion and there won’t be a need to develop a new jet fighter until 2035-2040; in the meantime, the personnel who were involved in its development will be idled and their level of competence will deteriorate.

Although at the moment the US still leads the world in defense spending ($610 billion of $1.7 trillion in 2017, which is roughly 36% of all the military spending on the planet) the US economy is no longer able to support the entire technology pyramid even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. On paper the US still looks like a leader in military technology, but the foundations of its military supremacy have eroded. Results of this are plainly visible:

• The US threatened North Korea with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.
• The US threatened Iran with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.
• The US lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and once the longest military conflict in US history is finally over the political situation there will return to status quo ante with the Taliban in charge and Islamic terrorist training camps back in operation.
• US proxies (Saudi Arabia, mostly) fighting in Yemen have produced a humanitarian disaster but have been unable to prevail militarily.
• US actions in Syria have led to a consolidation of power and territory by the Syrian government and newly dominant regional position for Russia, Iran and Turkey.
• The second-largest NATO power Turkey has purchased Russian S-400 air defense systems. The US alternative is the Patriot system, which is twice as expensive and doesn’t really work.

All of this points to the fact that the US is no longer much a military power at all. This is good news for at least the following four reasons.

First, the US is by far the most belligerent country on Earth, having invaded scores of nations and continuing to occupy many of them. The fact that it can’t fight any more means that opportunities for peace are bound to increase.

Second, once the news sinks in that the Pentagon is nothing more than a flush toilet for public funds its funding will be cut off and the population of the US might see the money that is currently fattening up war profiteers being spent on some roads and bridges, although it’s looking far more likely that it will all go into paying interest expense on federal debt (while supplies last).

Third, US politicians will lose the ability to keep the populace in a state of permanent anxiety about “national security.” In fact, the US has “natural security”—two oceans—and doesn’t need much national defense at all (provided it keeps to itself and doesn’t try to make trouble for others). The Canadians aren’t going to invade, and while the southern border does need some guarding, that can be taken care of at the state/county level by some good ol’ boys using weapons and ammo they already happen to have on hand. Once this $1.7 trillion “national defense” monkey is off their backs, ordinary American citizens will be able to work less, play more and feel less aggressive, anxious, depressed and paranoid.

Last but not least, it will be wonderful to see the war profiteers reduced to scraping under sofa cushions for loose change. All that the US military has been able to produce for a long time now is misery, the technical term for which is “humanitarian disaster.” Look at the aftermath of US military involvement in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and what do you see? You see misery—both for the locals and for US citizens who lost their family members, had their limbs blown off, or are now suffering from PTSD or brain injury. It would be only fair if that misery were to circle back to those who had profited from it.

*

The original source of this article is Club Orlov

Copyright © Cluborlov, Club Orlov, 2019

Social Psychopathy and Tyranny

Source

journal-neo.org

Author: Gordon Duff

06.07.2019

Something spoken of only in whispers is talk of a military coup in Washington. Few are aware of the factions in America’s military such as “Dominionists” who run the Air Force or did until former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman JCOS Marty Dempsey “eliminated them.”

You see, since the 1980s, religious extremism took root in America’s service academies and today’s most senior Pentagon brass is deeply infiltrated with members of an apocalypse cult that took root in America’s South during the 1930s, now thinly disguised as “Evangelical Christianity.”

Though most at the head of this movement are simply charlatans and deceivers, among their number are some who could accurately be described as psychopaths, a term that a number of medical professionals have applied to Donald Trump.

The issue of Trump is more complicated than many would have it, with power bases inside the US that few if any ever see manipulating Trump, playing on his fears and grandiosity. Trump well recognized that the CIA could not be trusted and turned to the conspiracy media, perhaps not recognizing that it too was under the control of intelligence agency factions, though not necessarily American in origin.

America has not been made “great” again, no parade can undo the blithering, the incompetence, the embarrassing idiocy and the generous dose of insanity that now is the American “brand.”

To succinctly describe the point, we turn to America’s most defining July 4th event, the year is 1863, the place is Gettysburg, a town in Pennsylvania, where a battle ensued that made the world we know today. Here, a fictional quote attributed to General Longstreet, one of General Lee’s corps commanders:

“Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.” 
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Let’s go back to the Bush 43 presidency and an incident pushed from the history books, now veiled in lies or simply censored out of existence. Lies are the norm in America, the USS Liberty, the Tonkin Gulf, the search for imaginary WMDs or the equally imaginary “underground terror cities” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said existed “in dozens” across Afghanistan.

Today, we think “Skripal” or “MH17.” No lie is too big. Thus, we are drawn to the summer of 2007 when an engineered try for Armageddon nearly succeeded.

On August 29, 2007, in an America at war with the world under neocon rule, an America deeply influenced by a Washington awash with Southern men, very religious and more than a bit mad, an incident now forgotten, occurred.

A B 52 aircraft, loaded with 6 AGM cruise missiles, each tipped with a 150-kiloton thermonuclear warhead, simply disappeared. It had taken off from Minot AFB in North Dakota, a base that also commanded much of America’s ICBM strike capability as well.

It was next spotted over Puerto Rico, heading for the Middle East, and sources tell us the eventual target was Iran.

The plane was intercepted by F15’s and turned back, landing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

Eventually, in response, all nuclear missile crews were replaced and all nuclear authority for the entire United States Air Force was removed and placed under the US Army. Those involved, some were “retired,” others demoted, transferred, some charged with crimes like fraud or sexual assault. Others died in accidents or killed themselves, or so we are told.

Under Donald Trump and John Bolton, a war within the military command structure is now underway as presidential orders to use nuclear weapons against Syria and Iran have been countermanded by the military. Reports that “Trump changed his mind” are false.

July 4, 2019, America celebrates its independence. Along America’s borders, as the public is seeing in the endless photographs hitting the media, families with small children are piled into cages, fed garbage, taunted and abused, not a few people but thousands. We call this tyranny. Those who allow this are evil.

Some time ago, however, those who do such things, medical professionals intended to cure or those of us trained in “profiling,” created a methodology for expression of paradigm, a tool of analysis of what we call the “spectrum of social psychopathy.

In the business of intelligence and forecasting, such tools were applied to leaders. Which ones are crazy? How can we force this or that leader to self-destruct, using the controlled press, false flag terrorism, sanctions or even covert administration of psychotropic drugs. The few interested in such things, often self-proclaimed watchdogs, know of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods, two names of hundreds of such endeavours.

At the heart of the problem is the nature of those who see themselves as leaders. Truth be told, no natural leader would choose American politics or even the military where “sucking up” and “selling out” is the only path to succeed. There have been exceptions, like George Patton or John Kennedy, but wait, weren’t they both murdered?

Natural leaders coach sports teams, some excel in commercial ventures. More likely, however, they will remain unseen and unknown. Perhaps there is no one worth leading and no place worth leading anyone to anymore.

This brings to mind the term Colonel David Hackworth used to describe America’s military leadership, “the perfumed princes of the Pentagon,” their chests bestrewn with medals and award for honors achieved at cocktail parties.

Crazy is as Crazy Does

As we have set things forth here, we then turn to behavioral analysis, the pseudoscience of predicting the future based on analysis of the unstable and incompetent and their actions when faced with chaos.

The toolsets used by such individuals, and I assure you there are detailed profiles out there, endless millions spent compiling them, blind rage, guesswork, blaming others, pathological deception and, as we see in Trump, likely early stage dementia.

Who are the “crazies?”

There are some notoriously sane leaders out there, Putin for one, Netanyahu for another. Many won’t like what they do or say but they aren’t insane.

Theresa May, Boris Johnson, certainly no overt signs of personality disorder but analysis of their historical reactions to issues yields a very different answer.

In the US, we find fertile ground, even Donald Trump cites Bolton and Pompeo as delusional.

With Bush 43 there were factors of substance abuse and a private life rumored to be very much at odds with his espoused values, this and extremely limited ability.

As for Trump, despite his endless efforts to prove himself unstable every time he speaks, his moments of clarity, his attacks on the press, the CIA and obvious inequities in the world’s economic system, are among the few accurate statements ever to come out of Washington.

Those who would have him turn to the “real leaders” instead of his son in law and daughter are themselves obviously insane.

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” Harry S Truman

Conclusion

Would the military overthrow Trump to prevent a war with Iran that all military experts around the world agree that America would lose? Who gains if America is pushed into obscurity, Russia, China or even Israel?

America’s fragile economy, ever accelerating levels of debt, declining standard of living, rising taxes, internal strife, this is not a nation capable of a ground conflict in the Middle East with a nation whose military is a thousand times stronger than Iraq was in 2003.

Yet there are even those in America who would see their own nation laid low, stripped bare. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded predator, in this case, a nation in collapse with a massive arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons.

These are the “mad” we speak of, they infect Washington like a virus and no institution remains that can stand against them, perhaps a “cult of sanity” in the military that none have seen or can prove exists?

To what extent do Putin and Netanyahu influence Trump? Neither are guided by love of America and little is known of their vision of a world with America “on the ropes.”

The fear many Americans have is that a powerful America may well not be such a good thing, that whatever “Americans” are, the control of America long ago fell under what is now termed the Deep State.

Past this is the real “wild card,” the madness that manifests itself each day wherever we turn.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

US gears up for World War III with largest defense contract in history

“At a projected total program cost of $1.5 trillion, this one weapons system alone would finance the US Department of Education for a quarter-century.”

Source

http://www.wsws.org

Andre Damon

13 June 2019

The Pentagon announced Monday the single largest arms purchase in its history, agreeing to buy nearly 500 F-35 fighter aircraft at a total cost of $34 billion.

This purchase is only a down payment on the Pentagon’s acquisition of the notoriously wasteful and failure-prone aircraft, whose design is based on two overarching priorities: fighting a war with a “great power” such as Russia and China and lining the pockets of Lockheed Martin and the horde of former congressmen and retired generals on its payroll.

The agreement covers the 12th, 13th and 14th batches of F-35s ordered by the Pentagon, which eventually plans to field thousands of the aircraft. Billed in 2001 as a program to save money, each plane eventually ended up costing four times the initial estimate.

A US Air Force F-22 aircraft [Credit: US Air Force]

At a projected total program cost of $1.5 trillion, this one weapons system alone would finance the US Department of Education for a quarter-century.

The F-35 has no greater advocate than President Donald Trump, who promotes it like one of his golfing properties. Trump turned a Wednesday afternoon joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda into a photo-op to promote the war plane. As an F-35 carried out a low-speed flyover of the White House, he praised Poland for its agreement to purchase 32 of the aircraft.

At speeches before military audiences, Trump routinely brags about the massive military budgets he has pushed through Congress, touting in particular the Pentagon’s vast spending on the F-35. Speaking at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony last month, the American president responded to resounding applause from the graduating officers by declaring, “You just like all those brand new, beautiful airplanes that we’re buying.”

Trump continued: “Last year… we secured $700 billion to support our war fighters, followed by another $716 billion—not million—billion. That’s with a ‘B.’”

Both of these Pentagon budgets, entailing the largest increases in defense spending since the end of the Cold War, were passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Eighty-nine percent of Senate Democrats voted to pass the most recent defense budget, whose explicit aim is to prepare the US military for “great power” conflict with Russia and China.

This year the White House is aiming even higher. Next Monday, the administration plans to submit a $750 billion Defense Department budget proposal, a figure $18 billion higher than the amount requested by the Pentagon.

A small army of defense industry executives, former generals serving as “consultants” and congressmen turned lobbyists for the military-industrial complex is salivating at the infusion of cash into a military notorious for paying $7,622 for coffee makers and $640 for toilet seats.

Even by the normal standards of US war profiteering, the F-35 program takes the cake for sheer corruption—so much so that the warmonger and military yes man John McCain called it a “poster child for acquisition malpractice,” a “scandal” and a “tragedy.”

According to the Project on Government Oversight, “By design, the [US military] services can’t independently perform many of the most basic functions needed to properly employ the most expensive weapon system in history.” It added that Lockheed Martin “keeps the government from even knowing the costs of any of the spare parts it has to buy from the company.”

The hundreds of aircraft already delivered are plagued with failures that make them largely inoperable. As Defense News recently reported, “F-35B and F-35C pilots [are] compelled to observe limitations on airspeed to avoid damage to the F-35’s airframe or stealth coating,” while the aircraft remains prone to “cockpit pressure spikes” that cause “excruciating ear and sinus pain.”

But the graft, incompetence and corruption that mark the F-35 program should not distract from its fundamental purpose: to fight a “near-peer” competitor in the form of Russia or China.

Earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence, addressing the graduating class at West Point, predicted war in the Pacific, Europe and the Americas within the graduates’ lifetimes.

“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life,” he declared. “Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.

“And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win.”

These blood-curdling sentiments, far from being unique to the Trump administration, are broadly shared on a bipartisan basis. Speaking in Iowa on Tuesday, former naval intelligence officer-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said: “Our military capabilities exist for a reason… we stand ready to use force.” He added that the US must prepare for the “wars of the future.”

Even as Trump rips up fundamental constitutional protections, imprisoning immigrant children on military bases and ruling by executive fiat, the Democrats hail the value of an external enemy to enforce political unity at home, with Buttigieg declaring: “The new China challenge provides us with an opportunity to come together across the political divide.” This is essential, he suggests, since, “At least half the battle is at home.”

Some three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of a “unipolar moment” of US dominance, America’s efforts to preserve its global hegemony through military means have produced a debacle. In the lead article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria writes of “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” concluding that, “Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died.”

But every failure, setback and disaster has only led the United States to double down on its economic bullying and military aggression. After the debacles of the “war on terror,” including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the wars in Libya and Syria, Washington has set its sights on a conflict with Russia and China. The results of such wars will be a disaster on an incomparably greater scale than the bloodletting in the Middle East, threatening a nuclear Third World War.

The homicidal eruption of American militarism that began with the first Gulf War, coinciding with the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, will not simply peter out. Unless halted by the emergence of a mass socialist movement of the working class, it will only intensify.

 

The truth IS out there! Pentagon admits it conducted ‘UFO’ investigations

Source

http://www.rt.com

24 May, 2019

©  Global Look Press / CTK / Ludek Perina

The Pentagon has finally admitted it had “researched and investigated” UFOs – or UAPs, as it calls them – and may have even dropped hints about ongoing extraterrestrial operations.

Someone better call Fox Mulder, because after years of denial and cover-ups, the Department of Defense spokesperson Christopher Sherwood finally blew the lid on the secret agency tasked with “UFO” investigations.

Joeboy@JoeboiV

Replying to @FoxFriendsFirst

8:21 AM – May 23, 2019

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The existence of a secret government initiative, called the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) had already been revealed in 2017, but the Pentagon’s most recent statement marks the first time the government has admitted it was concerned with what could properly be considered “UFO phenomena.“
In an unprecedentedly candid admission, Sherwood told the New York Post the agency “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP].” Although he steered clear of the term UFO (“Unidentified Flying Object“), likely due to its pop-cultural baggage, those in the know understood what he REALLY meant.

Nick Pope

✔@nickpopemod

An important new admission by the Pentagon, confirming to @MiddleOfMayhem at @nypost that AATIP “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena”. So it’s not just next-generation aviation threats from aircraft, missiles & drones. https://nypost.com/2019/05/22/the-pentagon-finally-admits-it-investigates-ufos/ …

408

6:50 AM – May 22, 2019

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The Pentagon finally admits it investigates UFOs

The Pentagon has finally uttered the words it always avoided when discussing the possible existence of UFOs — “unidentified aerial phenomena” — and admits that it still investigates

nypost.com

199 people are talking about this

While the AATIP got the axe in 2012, Sherwood acknowledged – however cryptically – that the government does still have a department to handle alleged sightings of alien aircraft.

The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland.

John Greenewald Jr, who runs the “Black Vault” website dedicated to publishing declassified government documents about UFOs, called the admission “new and shocking,” saying authorities had always beat around the bush with its statements on the topic, until now.

Twitter was slightly less impressed with Sherwood’s ambiguity, with many users offering up their own evidence that alien ships are already among us.

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Jeff Smith@CPCUDA65

Replying to @nypost

LIARS! They have investigated UFOs for DECADES!
They are REAL… here is an image I TOOK! #QArmy #QAnon #QPost #Pain #TheStormIsHere #TrumpTrain #TheGreatAwakening #MAGA #DrainTheSwamp #TheStorm #Pain [WEareHERE] #Indictments @JusticeDems #BuildTheWall #EndTheFed #WWG1WGA

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Looks like there may be a need for President Donald Trump’s Space Force after all!

NOD@NOD008

Pentagon admits that they’re still investigating UFO’s
(Space Force working hard for us..)

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Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late.

Source: Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

http://www.globalresearch.ca

By Joe Setyon

Global Research, March 15, 2019

Reason 8 March 2019

Chalk it up to use-it-or-lose-it spending.

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.

Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.

Or as The Office‘s Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in “The Surplus”:

“Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar,” he explains. “So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they’re going to give you $9 because that’s what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand.”

It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.

Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That’s compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.

The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).

Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail.

Also, “agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods,” Open the Books notes, as well as “$412,008 on paint and artist’s brushes.”

A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.

The biggest recipients of the contracts were a trio of military companies: Lockheed Martin ($8.3 billion), Boeing ($5.3 billion), and Raytheon ($3.4 billion).

That $97 billion last September represents a 16 percent increase from the $83.7 billion federal agencies spent on contracts in September 2017. The figure was nearly $73.6 billion in 2016 and $69.6 billion in 2015.

In August, a bipartisan group of senators that included Kentucky Republican Rand Paul wrote letters to 13 federal agencies expressing their concerns about wasteful end-of-year spending. Their efforts appear to have failed.

 

Pentagon doesn’t really know how $2.1 BILLION was spent on F-35 parts – watchdog

The Pentagon has failed to properly manage and account for $2.1 billion worth of parts for F-35 fighter jets, a new report by a government watchdog reveals. Now, the military simply has to take the word of Lockheed Martin on that.

Source: Pentagon doesn’t really know how $2.1 BILLION was spent on F-35 parts – watchdog — RT USA News

RT USA News

15 Mar, 2019

FILE PHOTO. F-35 fighter jet seen at an assembly line. ©  Reuters / Lockheed Martin / Fred Clingerman

The Pentagon has failed to properly manage and account for $2.1 billion worth of parts for F-35 fighter jets, a new report by a government watchdog reveals. Now, the military simply has to take the word of Lockheed Martin on that.

The US military failed to account for 3.45 million pieces of government property – parts and equipment for F-35s, according to a new report issued by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of Inspector General. Pentagon officials have “failed to implement procedures, and failed to appoint and hold officials responsible, to account for and manage government property for more than 16 years.”

Lacking the paperwork and even people to hold responsible for the blunder, the Pentagon has no actual idea how much the aforementioned pile of parts cost, and has to simply trust the word of the main contractor – Lockheed Martin – and its subcontractors, according to the report. The corporation valued the parts at $2.1 billion.

The DoD does not know the actual value of the F 35 property and does not have an independent record to verify the contractor valued Government property of $2.1 billion for the F-35 Program.

While the sum itself is not that big – given the total acquisition cost of the F-35 program, exceeding $400 billion – such a lack of accountability can further damage the ill-fated fifth-generation fighter program, already been plagued by numerous technical issues.

Also on rt.com Bad aim & short life: New Pentagon report reveals MORE problems with trillion-dollar F-35 jet

“The lack of asset visibility restricts the DoD’s ability to conduct the necessary checks and balances that ensure the prime contractor is managing and spending F‑35 Program funds in the government’s best interest and could impact the DoD’s ability to meet its operational readiness goals for the F‑35 aircraft,” the report warns.

In order to somewhat improve the situation, the watchdog has recommended the obvious: appoint people to work with the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) and the contractor in order to “to verify the existence and completeness of all F-35 property and account for it on the appropriate financial statements.”

Russia Wipes US in War?

A recent US war-game report certainly made dramatic headlines claiming that in a conventional war with either Russia or China, American forces would get a whipping.

Source: Russia Wipes US in War? – Sputnik International

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

Marc 13, 2019

© AP Photo /

 

A recent US war-game report certainly made dramatic headlines claiming that in a conventional war with either Russia or China, American forces would get a whipping.

All the more remarkable was that the assessment came from the Rand Corporation, which is closely aligned with the Pentagon. It may seem therefore a rather rude admission by a Pentagon-funded think tank that US military forces would be so humiliated by would-be adversary Russia or China.

The Rand lead analyst put the scale of defeat for the American side rather colourfully. “The US would get its ass handed to it,” he is quoted as saying.

The simulated war scenario found that US military formations in every domain would be vanquished.

For a start, the war-gaming is highly unrealistic. It envisages a limited conventional war scenario. In real life, if the US was staring at a wholesale military defeat, we can be sure that the American rulers and their Pentagon chiefs would have no hesitation in hitting the nuclear buttons. In which case, the conventional war would go straight to the nuclear conflagration, and most likely presage the end of the planet as we know it.

But here’s another factor that raises scepticism about Rand’s apparently scathing defeatist report — the timing.

The Trump administration is coincidently proposing a new federal budget for 2020, and the Pentagon is seeking an even bigger slice of the fiscal pie than it usually devours.

Trump is planning to hike the annual military spending to $750 billion, up from the current allocation of $716 bn, which itself was a record increase on previous budgets. Those figures represent more than half of the total federal discretionary budget.

A big part of the extra funding for the Pentagon is in missile defence. Trump is earmarking $14 bn, while the Rand Corp is recommending $24 bn.

That’s what the scaremongering Rand report is all about. It’s an attempt to frighten the US public into acquiescing to yet another colossal injection of cash to the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex.

It seems significant that Rand’s war-gaming places emphasis on Russia and China’s new generation of hypersonic missiles as a threat to US security, requiring massive new funds to counteract through missile defence systems.

This is a risible repetition of an old ruse. Make the people fearful of some implacable, diabolical enemy, and the people will duly give the rulers and their military-industrial complex a blank cheque to syphon off billions of more dollars to private corporations and Wall Street investors.

Meanwhile, trillions of dollars are to be slashed from vital public services of healthcare and education in the Trump administration’s budget.

Rand Corp was established in 1948 at the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. One of its founders was General Curtis LeMay who was chief of US air force command. LeMay was notorious for his “strategic bombing” of Japan during the Second World War, masterminding the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

During the John F Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis and he was also an advocate of pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union.

The Rand Corp he set up was a major proponent of media stories warning of a “missile gap” and “bomber gap” with the Soviet Union. The notion instilled in public perception was that the US was being outpaced by Soviet weapons. Consequently, as intended, the Pentagon was deluged with taxpayer dollars to “correct” the purported security gaps.

It turned out years later that the so-called missile and bomber gaps were complete fiction, as even former President Lyndon Johnson candidly admitted. The reality was that the US actually always had quantitatively more firepower than the Soviet Union or China.

The Rand Corp served as a pump-primer for funds to its masters in the Pentagon through the hoary old technique of terrorizing its own people.

Today, nearly three decades after the Cold War supposedly ended, nothing much has changed. The American public is still manipulated like children by being told scary stories so that they hide under their blankets while the “adults” empty the coffers of their nation.

The absurdity of it all is that the US spends more money on military than the rest of the top 15 other nations — combined. The Pentagon’s annual budget is some three times that allocated by China and more than 10 times that spent by Russia.

Part of the explanation for this gross discrepancy is that Russian and Chinese military development is more efficient than American. They are achieving way more bang for their bucks. And no doubt in a hypothetical conventional war, Russia or China would give the Americans a formidable challenge.

But the point is this: if America is supposedly vulnerable to being wiped out by an adversary, as Rand makes out, after spending the exorbitant excesses it already does, then how is such an inept military supposed to get any better by spending even more billions?

Rather than spending more on such a losing military, the logical answer would be to liquidate it altogether and rebuild again.

However, the efficiency of US military defence is not the real issue and never has been. Rather, it’s all about finding excuses, pretences and charades in order to funnel unlimited amounts of public money into the Pentagon military-industrial complex.

The biggest national security threat for Americans is not Russia nor China. It is their own parasitic, insatiable and incompetent war machine that is so fundamental to American corporate capitalism.

The views and opinions expressed by the do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

NEO: US-funded “Disinformation Oversight” of Bio Weapons Prevention Programmes in Georgia

“What has been uncovered so far demonstrates that the question is NOT whether the US is in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty BUT to what degree.”

Source link

With permission from

http://www.veteranstoday.com

By VT Senior Editors

October 10, 2018

By Henry Kamens for Veterans Today and New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

The Richard Lugar Lab is fast becoming a topic of household conversation in both Georgia and the Russian Federation, because increasing numbers of people care that it is not a public health facility, as claimed, but a threat to the population and humanity as we know it.

The Caucasus region is an ideal location for the United States to outsource its ‘grey zone’ research to. Many of the most ‘attractive’ viruses and bacteria for weaponisation occur naturally in this region, so they can be studied in their natural habitat. The region is also known for its thriving black market economy and trafficking, as the lack of democracy and a civil society makes it easier to hide things from the world.

But what is now concerning US officials is the attention Russia is paying to the topic of bio weapons and other related medical programmes. What has been uncovered so far demonstrates that the question is NOT whether the US is in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty BUT to what degree.

The US has long tried to deflect attention from these programmes. American journalist and Bureau Chief for Veterans Today in Georgia, Jeffrey Silverman, a long time resident of Georgia, is again the cross fire for his articles and series of recent TV interviews, having endured a long series of indignities, and downright illegal acts, at the hands of his own government and embassy.

But the new attacks on Silverman coincide with recent revelations in the Russian media. Igor Giorgadze, the former State Security Minister of Georgia, dropped a bombshell in mid September when he leaked documents containing information about “a laboratory located near Tbilisi named after US Senator Richard Lugar”, and how some experiments had turned deadly.

Various media groups describe such breaking stories as recurring disinformation, and further claim that there is no factual evidence that the US is building biological laboratories in the Caucasus region in order to use it as a testing site. The same media groups also denied that the US was losing the Vietnam War and declared the well documented CIA human rights abuses in places like Paraguay weren’t happening either.

But Giorgadze, a former Georgian State Security Minister, and Silverman beg to differ. They claim that such labs and related medical projects may have secretly conducted experiments on people, some of which have had fatal outcomes.

Right or Wrong Person to Ask?

Giorgadze has asked Donald Trump to launch an investigation into the experiments conducted by the laboratory. This really has some in Georgia concerned, as Trump is no fan of Big Pharma. He recently stated that the much touted flu shot is the greatest scam in medical history, created by Big Pharma to make money off vulnerable people and make them sick.

US-government funded media watchdogs and strong-arm agencies have fought back by using Homeland Security to harass Silverman when he travelled to and from the United States earlier this year, when he was finally allowed to make his first trip home in over 14 years. On both arrival and departure he was subjected to repeated body and bag searches, including seizures of his phone and personal documents, in direct violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Such frontal attacks on this journalist date back to when the first stories about the Lugar lab, and the nefarious research linked with it, broke in Georgia in 2013. As he has since backed up many of his allegations with actual documents, there has been a concerted effort to discredit him, not only in Georgia but in the international media.

Silverman continues to publish in the Georgian language media, and has described how the concentration camp patients of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele can be compared to the civilians residing close to the Lugar laboratory, as they [too] did not understand the threat they were under until they were placed in the medical experiment section death camps—when it was too late.

“I am warning those who live near the Lugar Laboratory that they are under a big risk. The locals who settled there were misled that this was an ordinary laboratory and nothing else. 

Georgy Iremidze, head of the Georgian based Patriot news agency, which is labelled pro Russian by the same detractors, adds to the debate:

“On paper, the lab is run by the Georgian government, or rather the Ministry of Health. But in reality, it is operated by the American government. The idea is that, if something goes wrong, the Georgian government will take the blame so that the American government can stay under the radar”.

A Lot for Nothing

The United States has provided a total of USD 350 million for the construction and technical equipping of the laboratory. In 2013 the laboratory was allegedly subordinated to the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health (NCDC), and from 2018 the Government of Georgia will assume responsibility for the full funding and operation of the Lugar center and laboratory network, or so we are told.

However it is only the US which has an interest in building such laboratories. Other countries would face sanctions from more powerful neighbours, who can build worse facilities of their own, for doing so. The US wants to flout the Biological Weapons Convention and then claim, if caught, that this is something only dubious, less-developed, “ignorant” countries do, as it usually does when questions are asked in places like Syria and Iraq.

The Lugar Laboratory is located not far from Tbilisi International Airport. This means that loading weaponised agents and moving viruses and bacteria around the world is expedited. It is conceivable that the United States may be trying to continue its losing battle in Syria by using biological and chemical weapons, as military planes, which are based at NATO airfields, have been landing at the airport with increasing regularity for no other apparent reason.

The same deadly and especially dangerous pathogens could also be targeted, as an aggressive act, against Turkey and the Russian Federation. The US has a history of doing this, and we might recall the Swine Flu outbreak in Russia 12 years ago.

Even unsuspecting humans could be weaponized and board civilian fights, just as was described in Station 11, a work of fiction, and how the Georgian flu killed over 95 percent of the world’s population. Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, “Station Eleven,” begins with a spectacular tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.

It is standard medical practice that nothing that is injected into the body should be used past its expiration date. But the US military, and other organisations like MARFOREUR, USAMRIID, ClinicalRM, WRAIR, and DTRA, are being accused of giving many such preparations to allied countries as “aid”. They have been widely used on the general population in Georgia, even children, without the victims’ full knowledge and informed consent.

When questions are asked, it funnels this aid not through medical bodies but TMC Global Professional Services. This company has overseas offices in nine countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and two offices in the US, in Virginia and New Mexico. Most of its work is as a US Government contractor on Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) programmes, with national laboratories and other DoD customers. For example, it manages an international project at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant site (ChNPP).

Too Many Roads Lead to Rome

The Myth Detector claims to have debunked “disinformation” spread around the Hepatitis C elimination programme on several occasions—but it fails to mention the nexus of this programme to TMC. Nor does it give, or investigate, the technical backgrounds of those doing the debunking, who just post pre-written statements provided by their Embassy contacts or PR staff working in the Lugar lab.

It is not difficult to expose those actually working in these military projects at the management level. Silverman was once hired by International Crisis Group, ICG, and the French government to look at the links of these researchers. He soon discovered how the Lugar and partner projects are connected to American, European and other scientific centres.

All the highly skilled professionals in the TMC office in Georgia left in 2010 to form a new organisation, Sigma. The most high profile of these was Richard Mah, who had worked at Los Alamos. You do not leave the golden handcuffs, and diamond pension, of a USD defence contractor to start a company from scratch unless you feel too compromised to stay with that contractor. But nobody is interviewing Mah, or the main TMC person in Georgia nowadays, Giorgi Begiashvili, before claiming “disinformation”.

Day Late and Fact Short

The US can get away with violations of treaty law because what it addresses has been superceded by new developments and changed beyond recognition. It has often been observed that when a certain narcotic is made illegal, another one comes along which is equally deadly but gets round the laws as written. Claims that any treaty violations are accidental are difficult to disprove because such violations are so widespread as to be unavoidable.

The US bio weapons legislation is codified in Section 817 of the Patriot Act. It effectively gives the US immunity from violating its own bioweapons laws, despite the fact that such a national law cannot override an international treaty that country is bound by. Specifically, it states that “the prohibitions contained in this section shall NOT apply to any duly authorised US governmental activity.”

Prior to enactment of the Patriot Act, federal law proscribed the use of biological agents or toxins as weapons, in 18 U.S.C. 175. This outlaws possession of a type or quantity of biological agents or toxins that cannot be justified for peaceful purposes. In short, what is being done for the purpose of military use, offensive, is now being justified under the guise of peaceful purposes.

Regardless of the ledger of truth and innocence, a public debate has begun which is cross cultural and beyond borders. As a result of it, some of what goes on behind closed doors, under the flimsy disguise of public health protection and non-proliferation of bio weapons and especially dangerous pathogens, is now out in the open.

One only needs to look more closely at what has been done in Georgia at various DOD funded labs and medical project. There is a long list to explore, including deaths from experimental TB antibiotics, a succession of dodgy programmes doctors refuse to talk about, and various experimental treatments on what is often an unsuspecting population.

If you do not wish to believe Silverman or the Russian media, enough can be gleaned from open sourced academic materials which clearly demonstrate that proper procedures for informed consent are not being implemented. These shine light on what appear to be “backhanders” paid by and to various funding agencies, the UN, the US State Department, Big Pharma and various partner organisations, including the Ministry of Health, various American universities and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia.

Information is now being shared with the Congressional Oversight Budget Office, about the apparent planting of false and misleading information. However, all this demonstrate is that US-funded disinformation oversight is in fact blatant disinformation itself, as anyone who has lived in a country on which the US has an “official narrative”, such as Georgia, has always known.

Not only are some of these new generation bacteria agents and especially dangerous pathogens so evolved that there is no antibiotic or other treatment that can save a patient. Often the cure is only available in the form of bacteriophage preparations, as also is being produced in Tbilisi Georgia on the first floor of Building B at Eliava Institute.

It comes as no coincidence that the US Department of Defense and other agencies have also poured money into improvement of infrastructure at the laboratories on the second and third floors, where the planned production area is housed. These laboratories are used to produce bacteriophage on short notice and will be used for phage concentrate production that is used in the final phage product

Founded in 1923, the Eliava Institute is a world known institution working in the field of Applied Microbiology, Virology and Infectious Immunology.

Bacteriophage research and application is its main direction.

Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
https://journal-neo.org/2018/10/09/us-funded-disinformation-oversight-of-bio-weapons-prevention-programmes-in-georgia/

Addendum:

Russia does not rule out ‘military measures’ against Georgia in new threats over Tbilisi biolab

The Lugar Center in Tbilisi. (NCDC.)

TBILISI, DFWatch–Russia launched new threats and accusation against Georgia on Thursday over a US-funded laboratory in Tbilisi, warning that even ‘military measures’ are not ruled out.

The move was ostensibly triggered by a former KGB general who served as Georgia’s security chief in the 1990s but fled the country after being accused of assassination attempt against then president Eduard Shevardnadze.

“We cannot just turn a blind eye, realizing that some things are happening there that directly affect the state of security on [our] southern frontiers. We will resort to diplomatic and military measures,” Vladimir Shamanov, Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma, was quoted by TASS as saying on Thursday. Shamanov was one of the key generals during the Chechen wars in the 1990s and was strongly criticized by human rights groups for alleged war crimes against civilians.

The same day, Chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops Major General Igor Kirillov stated the Ministry of Defense expected answers from the US and Georgia on why toxic agents and biological weapons are being stored at the Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center.

Earlier, on September 25 Vladimir Yermakov, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department, told reporters that Russia won’t let the Americans carry out biological experiments near its borders.
Russia suspects the US military are working on Georgian soil with biological materials and are using Georgians “guinea pigs”, he said.

Igor Giorgadze. (Sputnik Georgia.)

The barrage came after a press conference September 11 in Moscow where Igor Giorgadze, Georgia’s former security chief with close ties with the Kremlin, told reporters that he had evidence that the Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center near Tbilisi international airport has carried out dangerous experiments and called on US President Donald Trump to investigate the laboratory’s activity. Giorgadze claimed that US military and private contractors might be engaging in secret experiments on humans there.

The documents leaked to him from the lab where clear evidence of this, he claimed.

Both the Pentagon and Georgia angrily rejected the accusations.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations “an invention of the imaginative and false Russian disinformation campaign against the West” and “obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts.”

“The U.S. is not developing biological weapons in the Lugar Center,” Pahon said.

Similar speculations have appeared in Russian media from time to time since work began on the Lugar Center in 2004. However, the last wave of accusations involve high ranking officials from Moscow, which Tbilisi views as a potential pretext for a hostile move by Russia.

Amiran Gamkrelidze, the director of Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, called the accusations ‘drivel’. The NCDC effectively owns and operates the Lugar Lab, not the US. Since 2018, the center is fully funded by the Georgian government, he said.

The center’s work is transparent, Russian journalists and experts had had opportunities to visit it and even practice, he added.

Igor Giorgadze, who seems to have triggered the current wave of accusations, is in exile in Russia and is believed to reside in Moscow. He fled Georgia in 1995 after being accused of having organized an assassination attempt on President Eduard Shevardnadze on August 29.

From his exile in Moscow, Giorgadze, a former KGB general, has railed against Georgian authorities and their western orientation, which earned him a status as a bogeyman in the domestic politics of his country of origin, a symbol for the ‘Russian hand’ of hidden control.

He founded an ‘anti-Soros’ organization with a clear aim to overthrow the government of then president Mikheil Saakashvili, 13 members of whom were arrested in 2006, charged with sedition.

Igor Giorgadze, who is viewed in Georgia as an extremely controversial person in the country’s modern history, has sued DFWatch for an article in which he was referred to as ‘public enemy number one’.

Tbilisi City Court held its first hearing in the lawsuit in June, but is was postponed indefinitely.

Finian Cunningham: US ‘Super Spy’ Program May Explain Mysterious Diplomat Brain Injuries

“…It seems strange that the mysterious brain injuries are only reported by US diplomats. No other country has reported similar incidents among their diplomatic staff.”

Source link

With permission

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian CUNNINGHAM

July 16, 2018

US ‘Super Spy’ Program May Explain Mysterious Diplomat Brain Injuries

Over the past two years there have been increasing reports of supposed “sonic injuries” among US diplomats. First in Cuba and more recently in China. Controversial implications are that the US officials may have been maliciously targeted by a “sonic weapon” in host countries. However, a more likely explanation is that the alleged victims are the result of US attempts to create “super spies”.

The number of American diplomats reportedly suffering from suspected “sonic injuries” is increasing, with 11 officials evacuated earlier this month from China. Initially, the mysterious incident was reported at just one US consular location in the city of Guangzhou. Now the suspicion of brain injuries has spread to American diplomats stationed in Beijing and Shanghai.

Some 250 US diplomats in China are reportedly undergoing neurological medical tests to ascertain if they have succumbed to the same kind of brain trauma diagnosed in other colleagues. A study of 21 diplomats evacuated from Cuba found last year that they had incurred brain injuries, but, it was diagnosed, not from physical impact to their heads.

Typically, the symptoms reported include cognitive impairment, visual impairment, hearing of strange sounds, dizziness and sleeplessness.

US doctors have so far been confounded by what may have caused the apparent injuries. Last week, the State Department said that ongoing investigations had not established a causal link to the cited medical problems among diplomats.

However, previously President Donald Trump had explicitly blamed Cuba for being responsible for the reported injuries to diplomatic staff. Trump’s accusation has no evidential foundation. The Cuban government denied having any involvement in presumed sonic attacks on American envoys. It has offered to assist any US investigation. Nevertheless, the evacuation of US staff from Cuba and Trump’s accusations have set back the recent detente in relations between the two Cold War foes which former President Obama had embarked on.

With regard to China, the US has been more circumspect in dealing with the reported cases of apparent sonic injuries, refraining from accusing Beijing of malicious activity. China has previously dismissed any suspicion of sonic attacks as “inconceivable”. Beijing has also hit out the US State Department issuing “health warnings” to its staff in China because such notifications convey an implication of wrongdoing by the host country.

In the context of Trump’s escalating trade war with China, there is the danger that reported cases of injury among diplomats could be politicized by Washington, thus adding to the already acrimonious relations.

Some factors so far missing from the subject need to be addressed. First, it seems strange that the mysterious brain injuries are only reported by US diplomats. No other country has reported similar incidents among their diplomatic staff.

Secondly, the American brain-injury cases have happened in two countries which could be deemed as politically sensitive. Why have similar cases not been reported among staff based in territories belonging to allied nations?

Thirdly, when US staff are described as “diplomats”, as they invariably are in Western media reporting, we should perhaps be more precise than this innocuous-sounding terminology. If we think of the personnel as “spies” then a more skeptical inference comes into play. Especially, given the sensitive nature of the two countries involved. If the concerned US staff were indeed serving as spies that raises the question about what sort of training and preparation programs they were subjected to ahead of their assignments.

The speculation that Cuban and Chinese state agents could have used some kind of sonic weapon to attack US diplomats is more in the realm of science-fiction fantasy. Both countries deny any such activity. There is no such weapon known to exist. Also, the US doctors who examined the diplomats evacuated from Cuba could not find any casual explanation. The absence of an external source for the injuries appears to be the official US position too, according to the State Department last week.

Significantly, the US doctors studying the Cuban cases said that all the individuals may have undergone a common experience related to their brain injuries.

Rather than speculating about a foreign agency being responsible for the injuries among American diplomats, or rather spies, perhaps the focus should be put on their own side. Were these individuals subjected to some form of hi-tech training run by the Pentagon or the CIA?

It is known that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is investigating brain stimulation devices to greatly enhance learning ability in subjects.

DARPA, as recently as last year, reported the successful use of trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) devices to boost the cognitive skills among experimental monkeys. It was claimed that subjects given treatment from such devices strapped to the head would later display a significant increase in learning and intelligence compared with control individuals receiving no treatment. DARPA reported a 40 per cent increase in learning ability among macaque monkeys subjected to the brain stimulation device.

One of the lead doctors in the program is quoted as saying: “In this experiment, we targeted the prefrontal cortex [of the brain] with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages.”

The researcher goes on to explain: “That is the region [of the brain] that controls many executive functions, including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval. It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects.”

Please note the parting caveat from the Pentagon-contracted scientist, viz., “stimulating has widespread effects”.

On the positive side, the Pentagon is evidently searching for a way to boost intelligence and learning in humans. This is by no means a new pursuit. For decades, American military intelligence agencies, as well as Hollywood science fiction, have been in thrall to the idea of harnessing the human brain and exploiting ever-higher levels of intelligence. The CIA is known to have run various drug programs and hypnosis – the notorious MK-ULTRA – as early as the 1950s and 60s. The holy grail was to find “super spies” and “super assassins”.

So, the history of the Pentagon and the CIA conducting systematic experiments in order to produce high-performance in humans is well documented.

We also know from recent Pentagon research that it is indeed using electronic brain stimulation devices to greatly enhance the cognitive performance among monkeys. It is therefore conceivable that the Pentagon has conducted unpublished research experiments on human subjects as well.

On the negative side, the sought-after higher intelligence may very well come with unforeseen injurious side-effects. Note again the Pentagon researcher above saying that stimulating the prefrontal cortex of the brain could have “wide-ranging effects”. These effects, in addition to increased intelligence and learning skills, could include deleterious consequences. Especially because the target area of the brain is crucial for the control of “executive functions”.

It is not disclosed by the Pentagon if its brain devices had any injurious impact on the experimental monkeys.

We also do not know the precise work assignments of the affected “diplomats” in Cuba and China. Were there any routine secretarial staff among the reported casualties, or were they all “field staff”, that is, most likely involved in sensitive spying tasks?

It seems unlikely that the Pentagon or affected staff would ever go public in declaring that they were subjected to some form of brain-stimulation device. In any case, the staff could be easily silenced through warnings over career prospects and future earnings or health insurance cover. It may be more convenient for the Pentagon to foment the suspicion of “sonic attack” by foreign agents. That scapegoating could have serious impact on international tensions, especially between the US and China over its trade war and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, despite the unknowns, from what we do know already, it seems a plausible posit that the recent upsurge in brain injuries among US diplomatic staff may have been caused not by “sonic attacks” in their host countries, but by their own superiors at the Pentagon or CIA conducting some form of clandestine program to create “super spies”.

What Could Go Wrong? U.S. Army Planning to Deploy Autonomous Killer Robots on Battlefield by 2028

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thefreethoughtproject.com

By Jay Syrmopoulos

June 11, 2018

U.S. officials are openly discussing the military’s vision for implementing autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles in the next decade.

 

Washington, D.C. – United States Army Secretary Mark Esper recently revealed that the military has a strategic vision of utilizing autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles on the battlefield by 2028.“I think robotics has the potential of fundamentally changing the character of warfare. And I think whoever gets there first will have a unique advantage on the modern battlefield,” Esper said during a Brookings Institute event.

“My ambition is by 2028, to begin fielding autonomous and certainly semi-autonomous vehicles that can fight on the battlefield,” he added. “Fight, sustain us, provide those things we need and we’ll continue to evolve from there.”

In a preview of the U.S. Army’s strategic vision, released on June 6, Esper said the integration of these forces would become a critical strategic component, quoting from the document:

“The Army of 2028 will be able to deploy, fight, and win decisively against any adversary, anytime, and anywhere … through the employment of modern manned and unmanned ground combat systems aircraft, sustainment systems and weapons.”

When Esper was reportedly asked about concerns regarding autonomous robots being a threat to humanity, he replied in jest, “Well, we’re not doing a T-3000 yet,” referencing the Terminator movie series about self-aware AI threatening the existence of humanity.

Of course, while he jokes about the threat of autonomous killer robots, polymath inventor Elon Musk clearly takes the potential of such a threat much more seriously, as evidenced by his comments at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival on March 11, in which he said that “AI is far more dangerous than nukes.”

“I’m very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” Musk told the SXSW crowd. “Narrow AI is not a species-level risk. It will result in dislocation… lost jobs… better weaponry and that sort of thing. It is not a fundamental, species-level risk, but digital super-intelligence is.”

“I think the danger of AI is much bigger than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. Nobody would suggest we allow the world to just build nuclear warheads if they want, that would be insane. And mark my words: AI is far more dangerous than nukes,” Musk added.

As The Free Thought Project reported last month, the Pentagon reportedly plans to spend more than $1 billion over the next few years developing advanced robots for military applications that are expected to complement soldiers on the battlefield, and potentially even replace some of them.

While the development of this tech by the Army sounds like a movement toward better weaponry, and not a digital super-intelligence, as discussed by Musk—the creation of fully autonomous unmanned weapons systems clearly has implications given the potential future development of some type of “digital super-intelligence.”

Esper attempted to allay fears by noting that the Army’s unmanned vehicle program would be akin to the Air Force’s use of Predator drones and clarified that the idea would be to protect soldiers by removing them from direct combat. In turn, he said, this would enhance tactical ability and mobility, thus paving the way for cheaper tanks due to not having a crew inside in need of protection.

However, due to the complexity of the modern battlefield, a human element would remain part of the process.

“In my vision, at least, there will be a soldier in the loop. There needs to be. The battlefield is too complex as is,” Esper said.

The nuance in Esper’s statement seemingly leaves lots of ambiguity when he says, “In my vision, at least…” which by default likely implies other competing visions that almost certainly include the use of autonomous systems that don’t have a “solider in the loop.”

During his SXSW commentary, Musk noted that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are far outpacing regulation of the burgeoning technology, thus creating a dangerous paradigm. He explained that while he is usually against governmental regulation and oversight, the potentially catastrophic implications for humanity create a need for regulation.

“I’m not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight,” Musk said. “There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely.”

While some experts in the field have attempted to dismiss the threat posed to humanity by the development of AI, Musk said these “experts” are victims of their own delusions of intellectual superiority over machines, calling their thought process “fundamentally flawed.”

“The biggest issue I have with AI experts… is that they think they’re smarter than they are. This tends to plague smart people,” Musk said. “They’re defining themselves by their intelligence… and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be smarter than them, so they discount the idea. And that’s fundamentally flawed.”

The billionaire inventor pointed to Google’s AlphaGo, an AI-powered software that can play the ancient Chinese board game Go as evidence of exponential learning capacity of machines. Although it was reputedly the world’s most demanding strategy game, in early 2017, the AlphaGo AI clinched a decisive victory over the top Go player in the world.

While current semi-autonomous systems keep humans marginally in the loop, the advent of fully autonomous systems that operate without any human input creates serious ethical implications in terms of the morality of using killer robots to slaughter human combatants on the battlefield.

Although Esper’s stated preference for keeping soldiers in the loop is noble, the larger U.S. war machine will undoubtedly find some type of efficiency in eliminating the human component altogether to make killing on the battlefield even more “efficient.”

We are clearly on an extremely slippery slope when it comes to killer robots and AI. Intellectual giants like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking have continually attempted to sound the civilizational alarm regarding the extreme dangers inherent to AI.

As an article in the Guardian on Monday pointed out, killer robots are only a threat if we are stupid enough to create them. Now, the only question is: Will anyone heed all these warnings?

Pentagon Spends $1 Billion To Acquire More War Robots

Source link

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/22/2018

According to a new report from Bloomberg, the Pentagon is spending approximately $1 billion over the next several years for a variety of robots designed to complement combat troops on the modern battlefield.

In addition to scouting and explosives disposal, these new war robots will reportedly be able to perform more complex tasks, including surveillance missions, detection of chemical or nuclear agents, and even have the ability to transport soldiers’ rucksacks.

“Within five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation,” said Bryan McVeigh, the Army’s project manager for force protection. He applauded the efforts of the Pentagon to field more than 800 robots over the past 18 months.

“We’re going from talking about robots to actually building and fielding programs,” he said. “This is an exciting time to be working on robots with the Army,” McVeigh added.

Bloomberg says the Pentagon has classified its robot platforms into light, medium and heavy categories.

Last month, the Army awarded a $429.1 million contract to two Massachusetts robotic defense companies, Endeavor Robotics and QinetiQ North America, for miniature size war robots weighing less than 25 pounds. Not too long ago, Endeavor Robotics was awarded two other contracts worth roughly $34 million from the Marine Corps for medium size robots.

Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System. (Source: QinetiQ) 

In 4Q17, the Army awarded Endeavor a $158.5 million contract for 1,200 medium size war robots, called the Man-Transportable Robotic System (MTRS), Increment II, weighing around 165 pounds. Bloomberg said the MTRS is designed to detect “explosives as well as chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear threats,” with a deployment date set for the second half of 2019.

Endeavor Robotics Product Overview. (Source: Endeavor Robotics)

“It’s a recognition that ground robots can do a lot more, and there’s a lot of capabilities that can and should be exploited,” said Sean Bielat, Endeavor’s chief executive officer. He points out “the dull, the dirty and the dangerous” infantry tasks are being supplemented by war robots.

The introduction of war robots onto the modern battlefield is undoubtedly intended to streamline tasks in combat situations for infantry troops, but the primary objective is to increase the survivability rate of America’s bravest warriors.

“The Army’s current approach is to field more inter-operable robots with a common chassis, allowing different sensors and payloads to be attached, along with standardized controllers for various platforms,” McVeigh explained to Bloomberg.

While Trump signed the record-setting defense spending bill earlier this year, Bloomberg says the addition of robots on the battlefield is geared towards affordability. “If we want to change payloads, then we can spend our money on changing the payloads and not having to change the whole system,” McVeigh said.

The Army will have a ramp-up period to field the use of its newer, more advanced robots; indications point to more than 2,500 of the medium and small robots will enter the modern battlefield in the next several years.

Line-up of QinetiQ robots. (Source: QinetiQ) 

“Just strapping a conventional weapon onto a robot doesn’t necessarily give you that much” for ground troops, said Bielat, the Endeavor Robotics CEO. “There is occasional interest in weaponizing robots, but it’s not particularly strong interest. What is envisioned in these discussions is always man-in-the-loop, definitely not autonomous use of weapons.”

There are significant concerns about the rapid development and deployment of advanced robotic technologies on the battlefield, especially the use of autonomous weapon systems.

Last year, a group of the world’s leading AI researchers and humanitarian organizations warned about lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots, that select and kill targets without human control. About two dozen countries have called for the ban on fully autonomous weapons, though the U.S. failed to join.

Killer robots are closer than you think

“It seems inevitable that technology is taking us to a point where countries will face the question of whether to delegate lethal decision-making to machines,” said Paul Scharre, a senior fellow and director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security.

Last August, Tesla’s Elon Musk and over 100 experts sent a letter to the United Nations demanding the organization ban lethal autonomous weapons.

“Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,” the letter warned. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

Peter W. Singer, a leading strategist on 21st-century warfare, chatted with Business Insider about the “the killer robots debate,” and said, “it sounds like science fiction, but it is a very real debate right now in international relations. There have been multiple UN meetings on this.”

As Singer put it, advanced robotic technologies have opened countless discussions about legal and ethical questions for which “we’re really not all that ready.”

“This really comes down to, who is responsible if something goes bad?” Singer said, explaining that this applies to everything from war robots to autonomous vehicles.

“We’re entering a new frontier of war and technology and it’s not quite clear if the laws are ready.”

It seems like the new frontier of war and technology is ushering in a “Terminator”-style dystopic evolution of warfare. It is inevitable that this new generation of weaponry could quickly make its way out of the military and into the hands of terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, with the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at defense companies to manufacture war robots, we ask one simple question: what could go wrong?

The Pentagon and Hollywood’s successful and deadly propaganda alliance

RT.com

12 Mar, 2018

© U.S. Army

The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine.

The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known… Hollywood.

Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner ‘Wings’ in 1927, the US military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows. Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Captain Philips,’ and even blockbuster franchises like ‘Transformers’ and Marvel, DC and X-Men superhero movies have agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of US military hardware over the years.

  U.S. Dept of Defense‏Verified account @DeptofDefense

It’s #Oscars90 Sunday and did you know the #DoD works with #Hollywood to ensure the #military is correctly portrayed in films? Find out how these partnerships work: https://go.usa.gov/xneSX . Be sure to follow our #Oscars coverage over on @DoDOutreach! #cooljobs #KnowYourMil

4:50 PM – 4 Mar 2018

In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD), producers must sign contracts that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.

Capt. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation: “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”

Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear. “If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”

In other words, the Department of Defense is using taxpayer money to pick favorites. The DOD has no interest in nuance, truth or – God forbid – artistic expression; only in insidious jingoism that manipulates public opinion to their favor. This is chilling when you consider that the DOD is able to use its financial leverage to quash dissenting films it deems insufficiently pro-military or pro-American in any way.

The danger of the DOD-Hollywood alliance is that Hollywood is incredibly skilled at making entertaining, pro-war propaganda. The DOD isn’t getting involved in films like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘X-Men,’ ‘Transformers’ or ‘Jurassic Park III’ for fun. They are doing so because it’s an effective way to psychologically program Americans, particularly young Americans, not just to adore the military, but to worship militarism. This ingrained love of militarism has devastating real-world effects.

Lawrence Suid, author of ‘Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film’told Al Jazeera, “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why. And when I was getting my film degrees, it suddenly occurred to me that the people in the US had never seen the US lose a war, and when President Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”

 As Suid points out, generations of Americans had been raised watching John Wayne valiantly storm the beaches of Normandy in films like ‘The Longest Day,’ and thus were primed to be easily manipulated into supporting any US military adventure because they were conditioned to believe that the US is always the benevolent hero and inoculated against doubt.

This indoctrinated adoration of a belligerent militarism, conjured by Hollywood blockbusters, also resulted in Americans being willfully misled into supporting a farce like the 2003 Iraq War. The psychological conditioning for Iraq War support was built upon hugely successful films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, and ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that emphasized altruistic American militarism. Spielberg and Bruckheimer are two Hollywood heavyweights considered by the DoD to be their most reliable collaborators.

Another example of the success of the DoD propaganda program was the pulse-pounding agitprop of the Tom Cruise blockbuster ‘Top Gun’ (1986). The movie, produced by Bruckheimer, was a turning point in the DoD-Hollywood relationship, as it came amid a string of artistically successful, DoD-opposed, ‘anti-war’ films, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ which gave voice to America’s post-Vietnam crisis of confidence. ‘Top Gun’ was the visual representation of Reagan’s flag-waving optimism, and was the Cold War cinematic antidote to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.

‘Top Gun,’ which could not have been made without massive assistance from the DoD, was a slick, two-hour recruiting commercial that coincided with a major leap in public approval ratings for the military. With a nadir of 50 percent in 1980, by the time the Gulf War started in 1991, public support for the military had spiked to 85 percent.

Since Top Gun, the DoD propaganda machine has resulted in a  current public approval for the military of 72 percent, with Congress at 12 percent, the media at 24 percent, and even Churches at only 40 percent. The military is far and away the most popular institution in American life. Other institutions would no doubt have better approval ratings if they too could manage and control their image in the public sphere.

Read more

US State Dept pledges $40mn of military funds for ‘information wars’

It isn’t just the DoD that uses the formidable Hollywood propaganda apparatus to its own end… the CIA does as well, working with films to enhance its reputation and distort history.

For example, as the ‘War on Terror’ raged, the CIA deftly used ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ (2007) as a disinformation vehicle to revise their sordid history with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to portray themselves as heroic and not nefarious.

The CIA also surreptitiously aided the film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), and used it as a propaganda tool to alter history and convince Americans that torture works.

The case for torture presented in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was originally made from 2001 to 2010 on the hit TV show ‘24,’ which had support from the CIA as well. That pro-CIA and pro-torture narrative continued in 2011 with the Emmy-winning show ‘Homeland,’ created by the same producers as ‘24,’ Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.

A huge CIA-Hollywood success story was Best Picture winner ‘Argo’ (2012), which ironically is the story of the CIA teaming up with Hollywood. The CIA collaborated with the makers of ‘Argo’ in order to pervert the historical record and elevate their image.

The fact that this propaganda devil’s bargain between the DoD/CIA and Hollywood takes place in the self-declared Greatest Democracy on Earth™ is an irony seemingly lost on those in power who benefit from it, and also among those targeted to be indoctrinated by it, entertainment consumers, who are for the most part entirely oblivious to it.

If America is the Greatest Democracy in the World™, why are its military and intelligence agencies so intent on covertly misleading its citizens, stifling artistic dissent, and obfuscating the truth? The answer is obvious… because in order to convince Americans that their country is The Greatest Democracy on Earth™, they must be misled, artistic dissent must be stifled and the truth must be obfuscated.

In the wake of the American defeat in the Vietnam war, cinema flourished by introspectively investigating the deeper uncomfortable truths of that fiasco in Oscar-nominated films like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ all made without assistance from the DoD.

The stultifying bureaucracy of America’s jingoistic military agitprop machine is now becoming more successful at suffocating artistic endeavors in their crib. With filmmaking becoming ever more corporatized, it is an uphill battle for directors to maintain their artistic integrity in the face of cost-cutting budgetary concerns from studios.

Read more

Hollywood uses ‘American Sniper’ to destroy history & create myth

In contrast to post-Vietnam cinema, after the unmitigated disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, there has been no cinematic renaissance, only a steady diet of mendaciously patriotic, DoD-approved, pro-war drivel like ‘American Sniper’ and ‘Lone Survivor.’ Best Picture winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008), shot with no assistance from the DoD, was the lone exception that successfully dared to portray some of the ugly truths of America’s Mesopotamian misadventure.

President Eisenhower once warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

Eisenhower’s prescient warning should have extended to the military industrial entertainment complex of the DoD/CIA-Hollywood alliance, which has succeeded in turning Americans into a group of uniformly incurious and militaristic zealots.

America is now stuck in a perpetual pro-war propaganda cycle, where the DoD/CIA and Hollywood conspire to indoctrinate Americans to be warmongers and, in turn, Americans now demand more militarism from their entertainment and government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The DoD/CIA-Hollywood propaganda alliance guarantees Americans will blindly support more future failed wars and will be willing accomplices in the deaths of millions more people across the globe.

Michael McCaffrey, for RT

Michael McCaffrey is a freelance writer, film critic and cultural commentator. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he runs his acting coaching and media consulting business. mpmacting.com/blog/

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

What Next? US Bans All Russian Nukes?

” Said Cavell: “The US is a capitalist society. It is the preeminent imperialist power in the world today. As such, those who rule the US perceive that maintaining a class-divided society to be of paramount concern. Internationally, this translates into maintaining at least a two-tiered international system where the US is master and the rest of the world are its servants.  This will not change until capitalism is overthrown or destroys itself.”

© Sputnik/ Aleksei Danichev

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

07.02.2018

Provocatively and recklessly, the American Pentagon has recently accused Russia of threatening European allies with nuclear weapons. On the basis of this deplorable accusation, the US is embarking on a $1 trillion upgrade of its nuclear arsenal.

The American nuclear revamp not only puts it in potential violation of disarmament agreements; the move is also destabilizing nuclear forces and increases the risk of catastrophic global war.

If ever Washington’s reckless power politics were in doubt, this is surely the touchstone issue.

© AFP 2018/ Petras Malukas

Russia Able to React Swiftly to US Nuclear Arms’ Deployment in E Europe – Lawmaker

As with so many other allegations leveled by Washington against Russia – from election hacking to Olympic sports doping – the claim that Moscow is engaging in nuclear threats is far from evidenced. Indeed, one could say, it’s in the realm of fantasy.But the insane claim is then used to justify Washington’s own reprehensible behavior.

In the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) published last week, US Defense Secretary James Mattis states in the document’s preface that “Russia’s seizure of Crimea and nuclear threats against our allies, mark Moscow’s decided return to Great Power competition.”

Mattis goes on to make other claims against Russia, including that it is in breach of arms controls treaties to reduce nuclear stockpiles. He also alleges that Moscow is using “non-strategic nuclear systems to provide a coercive advantage in crises and at lower levels of conflict,” and that Moscow is “lowering the threshold for first-use of nuclear weapons.”

At the same time, it was reported this week, even by US media, that Russia has fully complied with meeting its reduction targets for nuclear weapons prescribed by the 2010 New START accord. 

In any case, the Pentagon’s anti-Russia accusations continue unabated. In particular, Washington claims that Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by developing short-range land-launched cruise missiles. Moscow has denied any violation. Again, Washington does not present evidence to verify its claims.

CC0

Trust on Nuclear, Other Issues Between US, Russia Continues to Wane – UN Chief

Presumably, what Washington is referring to is the installation by Russia of Iskander ballistic missiles in its exclave territory of Kaliningrad adjacent to the Baltic states and Poland. This is also what the Pentagon appears to be referring to when it accuses Russia of “threatening our allies”.Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite – a notorious Russophobe and ardent NATO cheerleader – recently said that the Russian Iskanders in Kaliningrad (range 500km) were threatening “half of Europe”.

But hold on a moment. Kaliningrad is Russian soil. As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out, it is Russia’s sovereign right to position any of its forces anywhere on its own territory. 

NATO’s warped logic has also been applied in the case of Russian military holding exercises on its Western flank. Last year, when Russia held its Zapad defense drills there were hysterical claims from NATO and the Western media that Moscow was about to invade the Baltic region. 

Meanwhile, it goes without a hint of irony, that NATO has increasingly built up its forces and military maneuvers along Russia’s Western borders over the past decade and more. Yet, Washington and its allies get away – thanks to Western media servility – with the double-think that such force build-up on Russia’s borders is “defensive”; while any counter-move by Russia from within its territory is distorted as “outrageous” and “offensive”.

Getting back to the issue of nuclear weapons and allegations of Russia’s threat, the stark conclusion from Washington’s warped logic is that Moscow is not allowed to have any nuclear weapons.

© AP Photo/ Manish Swarup

Russia: India’s Nuclear Supplier Group Status Can’t be Linked to Pakistan’s

Evidently, the US-led NATO military alliance is permitted to station warplanes, warships, troops and tanks on Russia’s borders, including anti-missile systems – all in violation of past agreements. But if Russia positions defensive systems on its own territory then it is behaving provocatively, illicitly, and threateningly. Which then on the basis of this absurd claim allows Washington to expand its nuclear forces against Russia – as the Pentagon is proposing to do in its latest Nuclear Posture Review.Specifically, Washington is committing to a “more flexible use” of nuclear weapons, and the development of new submarine-launched cruise missiles, as well as so-called “low-yield” ballistic warheads.

Such a move will potentially bring the US into severe breach of non-proliferation and arms control treaties. That is, the very malign behavior that Washington is provocatively accusing Moscow of. 

Truly, Washington’s logic is an amalgam of Orwellian and Dr Strangelove. 

Furthermore, an extremely sinister change in the American nuclear doctrine is its call for explicitly using “nuclear deterrence” in a scenario of conventional military conflict or, what it dubiously deems to be “new forms of aggression” by adversaries. 

© Sputnik/ Alexander Vilf

The Backbone of Russia’s ‘Nuclear Triad’: Strategic Missile Forces

This is a highly dangerous move by the Pentagon to lower the trigger for deploying nuclear weapons – and on the basis of its faulty, politicized perception about what constitutes “aggression.”For example, the US has repeatedly accused Russia of “hybrid warfare” with regard to the conflict in Ukraine. Russia is accused of instigating that conflict, when in reality, it was Washington and Europe’s meddling in the internal affairs of that country, resulting in a neo-Nazi coup in Kiev in February 2014. 

The United States has continually accused Russia of engaging in “asymmetric warfare” from “cyberattacks” and “election interference”. Such claims have never been substantiated, let alone verified – yet they have been raised to the alarmist level of allegedly constituting a “national security threat”. 

The anti-Russia political climate being whipped up by Washington – from “Russiagate” to cyberattacks, from sports doping to nuclear aggression – has reached the level of hysterical insanity where Russia by merely having a military defense system is now being traduced as somehow behaving criminally and offensively. 

However, parlaying this perverse logic, the US is moving to increase its nuclear threats against Russia – in contravention of international agreements and any objective reasoning. 

© Sputnik/ Pavel Lisitsyn

Russian Scientists Develop Software for Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Technology

Even US media outlets like the Washington Post and US-based scientists warned this week that the new nuclear posture was a disturbing drift towards catastrophic war. American history professor Colin Cavell, commenting for this column, said that the hegemonic mentality of the US ruling class is such that no other powers are tolerated to have weapons, even if for self-defense purposes.

Said Cavell: “The US is a capitalist society. It is the preeminent imperialist power in the world today. As such, those who rule the US perceive that maintaining a class-divided society to be of paramount concern. Internationally, this translates into maintaining at least a two-tiered international system where the US is master and the rest of the world are its servants.  This will not change until capitalism is overthrown or destroys itself.”

This attitude of US rulers is ultimately tyrannical in their relations to the rest of the world. Ironically, American vice president Mike Pence this week accused North Korea of being “the most tyrannical and oppressive regime on the planet.”

With regard to Russia, the logic of the US is this: You are not allowed to have nuclear weapons, nor even a viable conventional defense system. We, on the other hand, are allowed to threaten you with increasing menace of nuclear annihilation until you do as we demand.

In short, supreme arrogance. But an arrogance that will bring its own downfall. 

The views and opinions expressed by Finian Cunningham are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik. 

The toll of U.S. airstrikes on Iraqi civilians should make everyone angry

“I wondered whether a Trump voter from Texas or Arkansas would be concerned about politeness if a foreign power had blasted his home to pieces and killed his family, based on the same sort of lousy intelligence it used to justify invading.”

Source link

 CBC News

By Neil Macdonald

Nov 21, 2017

Data from the New York Times shows that every fifth American airstrike in Iraq kills a civilian

The U.S. invaded and shattered a country on a false pretext 14 years ago, causing violent death on a biblical scale that continues to this day. (Erik De Castro/Reuters)

 

There are all sorts of definitions of good journalism, but my personal measuring stick is anger.

The best of it should make you angry: outraged, sickened, gut-punch angry.

You will, or should, feel all those things and more when reading and listening to “The Uncounted,” the investigative masterpiece published last week in the New York Times, the newspaper President Donald Trump derides as “failing.”

Actually, in a sense, the Times did fail. It failed to accept the American military’s sophisticated public relations deception about conducting “the most precise air campaign in military history.”

It failed to accept a top general’s assurance that reports of civilian deaths are grossly inflated.

And most importantly, it failed to assign a cheaper value to the lives of people in a country the U.S. invaded and shattered on a false pretext 14 years ago, causing violent death on a biblical scale that continues to this day.

Full license under Trump

The authors of the Times story, over an 18-month period ending last June, visited the sites of 150 bomb strikes in Iraq, and collected detailed data on 103 of them. The Times says its data clearly shows that every fifth American airstrike in Iraq kills a civilian, a rate about 31 times higher than that acknowledged by the Pentagon.

The revelations didn’t surprise Larry Korb, a Washington academic who once served as an assistant secretary of defence under Ronald Reagan. Trump, Korb told me, has given the military what it longed for but was denied under the Obama administration: full licence to carry out airstrikes in any manner it sees fit.

Naturally, conservative hawks and pro-Trump news outlets have basically ignored the Times account. Trump has not commented on it, and if he ever does, it will likely be in a tweet about unpatriotic fake news.

Trump has not commented on the New York Times report. (Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)

But the piece goes far beyond data. It presents us with bloodied, devastated human beings, most particularly Basim Razzo, who poses a dignified challenge to the cherished American-exceptionalism notion that the U.S. military is the most moral force in the world.

Razzo is from one of Mosul’s more prominent families, was educated as an engineer at an American university and speaks excellent English. He is a particular sort of Arab man I’ve met many times: soft-spoken, mildly fatalistic, almost painfully polite. And progressive: when his daughter Tuqa tried to hide the makeup she’d applied to her face, he told her not to, that she was beautiful.

He and his family lived in a large, upscale home outside Mosul, right beside a similar house occupied by his brother Mohanned and his family. Together, they endured the ISIS occupation of the city, getting by as best they could.

 Then, on the night of Sept. 20, 2015, the American military, with its storied precision, sent bombs into both the Razza homes, killing Basim’s wife Mayada and Tuqa, and, next door, his brother and nephew.

The Pentagon then, obscenely, posted video of the bombing on YouTube, with the caption “COALITION AIRSTRIKE DESTROYS A DAESH VBIED FACILITY NEAR MOSUL.”

“VBIED” is a military acronym for “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.” The Pentagon was basically bragging that Basim and his brother’s homes had housed ISIS car-bomb factories, and that it had destroyed them, in a blow for freedom and security.

Eventually, the Pentagon would admit that was all nonsense, but only after the failing New York Times failed to buy the official explanation, and lent its influence to Basim Razza’s desperate search for redress.

Until that happened, Razza had been brushed off by American authorities. To him, it was not just pursuit of justice, but an urgent matter of personal safety. In Iraq, he told the Times, once you’ve been precision-bombed by the Americans, Iraqi soldiers consider you ISIS, which can lead to all sorts more ugliness. Basim and his brother’s wife, who also survived the bombing, wanted to remain alive.

Eventually, with the Times’s assistance, Basim Razza wound up in a room with Capt. Jaclyn Feeney, a military lawyer. What followed, recorded and broadcast on the Times podcast the Daily, might even be staggering to the type of American conservative who regards all Muslims as the enemy.

The lawyer explains the airstrike was a mistake. She tells him the United States is willing to offer a “condolence payment.” Not a compensation payment, mind you, or any admission of anything, but merely a payment to convey her government’s condolences.

Congress has voted millions to be used as condolence payments, but the Times reports not a single person in Iraq or Syria has actually received a payment.

Razza did indeed want compensation. He’d calculated the cost of rebuilding his and his brother’s house at $500,000 US, $22,000 for their destroyed cars, and $13,000 for the medical treatment he’d received in Turkey after a hellish trip through ISIS-occupied northern Iraq. He also wanted a written acknowledgement that neither he nor his brother had been ISIS bombmakers. He was not asking that he be compensated for pain and suffering, as Americans usually do when making a claim.

The lawyer offers $15,000. Razza tells her the amount is an insult. She basically says take it or leave it.

“I wanted to laugh, but I did not want to be impolite,” he told the Times.

It was such an Arab remark; manners above all.

There might someday be an official acknowledgment that he was not ISIS, he was told, but that would involve declassifying certain information, which takes much time. He could formally appeal for compensation, but not until ISIS is officially defeated.

Unissued condolence payments

Listening to the ritual humiliation of Basim Razza, swallowing the anger that such excellent journalism provokes, I wondered whether a Trump voter from Texas or Arkansas would be concerned about politeness if a foreign power had blasted his home to pieces and killed his family, based on the same sort of lousy intelligence it used to justify invading.

As it turns out, Congress has voted millions to be used as condolence payments, but the Times reports not a single person in Iraq or Syria has received a payment since the bombing campaign against ISIS began three years ago. A U.S. spokesman basically told the newspaper the military has other things to worry about.

But the government did worry about Basim’s cousin, who was working and residing in Little Rock. An FBI agent visited him to enquire whether the killing of his relatives had made him, “in his heart of hearts sympathize with the bad guys.”

The cousin assured them he didn’t.

Angry yet?

Erdogan: Turkey will ‘no longer’ cave in to pressure from the West

The world is turning against the USA and its hypocrisy and lies.

Source: Erdogan: Turkey will ‘no longer’ cave in to pressure from the West — RT News

RT News

26 Jul, 2017

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan © Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

Western states should not expect Turkey to blindly follow their instructions anymore, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said ahead of talks between Turkish and EU officials. He also supported the deal on S-400 missile defense systems with Russia.

Erdogan made a speech against western and, in particular, EU countries that he believes are treating Turkey unfairly, while addressing his party’s lawmakers in Ankara on Tuesday.

“The West wants Turkey to bring about their demands no questions asked… I am sorry to say that Turkey no longer exists,” the Turkish president said, as cited by AP, while his foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu was preparing to meet with the EU top foreign officials in Brussels.

Relations between Turkey and the EU have been on the rocks since the Turkish authorities launched a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent in wake of the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016.

A brewing diplomatic row between Germany and Turkey worsened in March after several German states refused to host rallies in support of the Turkey’s constitutional referendum that eventually granted the Turkish president more powers in April. The refusal infuriated the Turkish leader, who likened it to the policies of Nazi times. Most recently, the war of words between Ankara and Berlin reignited after Erdogan was denied permission to stage a rally on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg.

The arrest of 10 human rights activists, including the head of Turkey’s branch of Amnesty International and German and Swedish citizens on July 5 in a hotel on the Sea of Marmara, soured strained relations even further, with human rights advocates calling on EU leaders to raise the issue with their Turkish counterparts during the talks.

During his speech, Erdogan lashed out at his critics, referring to the detained activists as “agents” and warning European countries against meddling in Turkish internal affairs.

“You’re going to prevent Turkey’s president and ministers from speaking in your country, but your agents are going to swarm in, come to hotels here and break my country up into pieces?” he said, as cited by Bloomberg, vowing retaliation to the countries that infringe upon Turkey’s sovereignty and refuse to do business on equal terms.

Following the meeting in Brussels, Johannes Hahn, European Commissioner in charge of European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, reminded Turkey of the obligation to respect human rights and core democracy values, including the freedom of the press, calling them “basic imperative requirements for any progress toward the European Union.”

Responding to the criticism, Cavusoglu labeled reporters currently on trial in Turkey as “pseudo-journalists who help terrorist activities,” arguing that their actions, as well as that of the arrested soldiers and politicians, contributed to the coup.

“They need to also face the sentences that are necessary,” he said, as cited by Reuters.

‘Nothing to worry about’ – Erdogan on S-400 deal

In an apparent reference to concerns of the US military over a looming purchase by Turkey of Russia’s advanced S-400 anti-missile defense systems, Erdogan reiterated he was looking forward to the deliveries.

“God willing, we’ll see them [missile systems] in our country soon,” the Turkish leader said, as cited by Bloomberg.

Read more

Turkey ready to splash out $2.5bn for Russia’s S-400 air defense system – report

He noted that Ankara at first attempted to secure the deal on similar conditions with Washington, but it was never agreed.

“If we can’t get what we want from America, we have to look elsewhere,” he said.

Erdogan has already responded to remarks by Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, who said Saturday that the reports of the S-400 purchase are “incorrect” and “would be a concern, were they to do that.”

READ MORE: Turkey purchasing Russian S-400 air defense systems would concern Washington – Pentagon

“Why would it be worrying? Every country needs to take certain measures for its own security,” the Turkish president told journalists at Ankara airport on Monday, as cited by Anadolu news agency.

Russian and Turkish officials have been negotiating the purchase since November 2016 and have repeatedly confirmed that the deal is practically secured save for some financial aspects. Earlier this month, reports emerged that $2.5 billion was agreed as the sum of the contract.

America’s Invasion of Syria

Go home stupid Yankees! You smell, you lie, you’re fat from the blood of your victims and the world hates you. Go home and fix your own country.

Source: America’s Invasion of Syria

With permission from

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Eric ZUESSE

July 19, 2017

 

The US government has invaded and occupies Syria, supporting the ‘rebels’ (tens of thousands of imported foreign jihadists there) against the nation’s secular government, and the only two US Senators who are at all disturbed that the US has violated both US law and international law by having our soldiers and weapons in Syria are the two libertarians, Rand Paul and Mike Lee. Even they — the Senate’s two libertarians — don’t care about America’s violation of international law by America’s invasion and occupation of Syria; even they care only about our government’s violation of the US Constitution. Even they accept America’s right to violate international law (which wasn’t even an issue in that vote).

The other 98 US Senators don’t object, at all, to the US government’s invasion into, and occupation of, Syria; they don’t object to this government’s violation of international law, and they (the other 98) also don’t care about its violation of the US Constitution.

If any progressive had been in the US Senate, that person would have objected to both violations; but, in the Senate’s votes on these matters, neither Bernie Sanders, nor Elizabeth Warren, nor Sherrod Brown (the three supposed ‘progressives’), has joined with Paul and with Lee, even on the objections to the violation of the US Constitution, much less extended such objections to include this government’s violation of international law. That’s how lawless our government actually is.

This is therefore entirely a bipartisan issue: the outlaw nature of the US government is almost 100% acceptable to the US Senate as regards this government’s violation of the US Constitution, and is 100% acceptable to the US Senate as regards this government’s violation of international law. And things have been that way both when the President was the Democrat Obama, and when the President is the Republican Trump. In this way (as in so many others), it is really the same regime: whichever Party is in power, it is the regime of America’s oligarchs; that’s to say, of the US aristocracy (the controlling US stockholders in US-based international corporations, who demand this — they demand these invasions: Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. — they are virtually all neoconservatives).

Not only is the invasion and occupation illegal, but it is aggressive. The basic charge against the Nazis at the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunals in 1945 was aggressive invasion, or invading a country that had not invaded one’s own country; and certainly the US and its recent Presidents would be in the prosecution-dock there today, if international law were being applied — which is unfortunately not done.

Moreover, in Syria, not only has the US invaded and occupied the country, but the US government demands the overthrow and replacement of that sovereign nation’s government — regime-change in Syria. Indeed, the main objection that the U.N. Secretary General has raised against the US position is that only an internationally monitored democratic Presidential election should determine whom the next President of Syria should be, but the US government has rejected that, and supported instead armed overthrow and imposed rule of the country.

The US ‘news’media pay little attention to this matter; and, to the extent that they do pay attention to it, none call-out this renegade government, the US; they instead claim such vagaries as that the US does not «have clear authority under international law to attack Syria», even when they do discuss this matter; and, in that statement, which appeared in the New York Times on April 7th right after Trump had bombed Syria, facts are acknowledged which make quite clear that the use of the qualifier ‘clear’ there is actually profoundly misleading: The US simply has no authority under international law to be in Syria. Here is the way that the NYT’s Charlie Savage summarized the situation:

The United Nations Charter, a treaty the United States has ratified, recognizes two justifications for using force on another country’s soil without its consent: the permission of the Security Council or a self-defense claim. In the case of Syria, the United Nations did not approve the strike, and the Defense Department justified it as «intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again», which is not self-defense.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, in a briefing with reporters, invoked Syria’s violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and a related Security Council resolution from 2013, saying, «The use of prohibited chemical weapons, which violates a number of international norms and violates existing agreements, called for this type of a response, which is a kinetic military response».

However, while the resolution said the Security Council would impose «measures» if anyone used chemical weapons in Syria in the future, it did not directly authorize force. The chemical weapons treaty does not provide an enforcement mechanism authorizing other parties to attack violators as punishment.

It is amazing that he can hold his job and yet report such devastating and incontrovertible proof of the outlaw nature of the US government, in terms of international law. All major US ‘news’media are mouthpieces for the US government whenever the issue is international relations (they were such mouthpieces regarding Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and much more, which is why the US public accepts this US government), and Mr. Savage was there saying something which violated that iron rule. He has reason to be personally worried, to have written the there, about that.

This NYT article enabled him to publish that stunning fact, in answering only the falsely qualified question which had been posed there, of «Did Trump have clear authority under international law to attack Syria?» and Mr. Savage might have gotten into really hot water if he had instead been answering the question posed as, «Did Trump have authority under international law to attack Syria?» Only thinking readers (perhaps that’s 1% of the Times’s audience) would recognize the subtle deception of their readership to believe that the US President might have such authority, but that it is merely not ‘clear’. Such deception is the way to lobotomize the public (99% of it, perhaps) into accepting their own fundamentally lawless government whenever it invades — as Americans supported, for example, the invasions of Iraq, and of Libya, and now of Syria.

Mr. Savage also dealt with the question (and here also will be the opening of his answer to it):

Did Trump have domestic legal authority to attack Syria?

The answer is murky because of a split between the apparent intent of the Constitution and how the country has been governed in practice. Most legal scholars agree that the founders wanted Congress to decide whether to go to war, except when the country is under an attack. But presidents of both parties have a long history of carrying out military operations without authorization from Congress, especially since the end of World War II.

His use there of ‘murky’ is similar to the prior question’s having introduced the deceptive (not to say unnecessary) term ‘clear’: The routine violation of the US Constitution here isn’t murky, any more than the international illegality of America’s unprovoked invasions isn’t clear. But, perhaps that’s the way people such as Charlie Savage can keep their jobs, by playing along with the myth.

It is the myth that enables this gangster-government (who are both international and US gangsters) to remain in control over the US

That government is now seeking from Congress the authorization for US military forces to continue occupying Syria even after ISIS becomes eradicated there.

On July 13^th, Al-Monitor headlined and opened:

Pentagon wants to build new US facilities in Iraq, Syria

The Donald Trump administration is pushing Congress for the authority to build new «temporary» facilities in Iraq and Syria as part of the US-led campaign against the Islamic State.

Summary

The Trump administration has asked Congress for the authority to build new «small-scale», «temporary facilities» to help defeat the Islamic State. …

The term «temporary» is not defined.

What had happened is that the White House, on July 11^th, posted this:

H.R. 2810 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018

July 11, 2017
(House Rules)

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

H.R. 2810 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018
(Rep. Thornberry, R-TX, and Rep. Smith, D-WA) …

…Extension and Modification of Authority to Provide Assistance to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria: The Administration appreciates the increased funding authority included in section 1222, but notes its concern that the provision does not contain additional requested authority for small-scale construction of temporary facilities that are necessary to meet operational needs and force protection requirements in both Iraq and Syria. As the campaign to defeat ISIS transitions beyond the liberation of Mosul [in Iraq] and Raqqa [in Syria], operational commanders will need the requested authority to build temporary intermediate staging facilities, ammunition supply points, and tactical assembly areas that have adequate force protection. These facilities, supply points, and assembly areas will enable the pursuit of ISIS into the Euphrates River Valley and help improve the security of Iraq’s borders. Current authorities, limited only to repair and renovation of existing Iraqi facilities [because the US government still hasn’t officially announced its invasion of Syria], severely limit the coalition’s maneuverability and its ability to respond quickly to changing operational conditions.

Extension and Modification of Authority to Support Operations and Activities of the Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq [because Congress authorized only the invasion of Iraw]: The Administration appreciates the continuation of existing authority, but is disappointed by the lack of authority in section 1223 to expand the list of eligible recipients to include the «military and other security forces of or associated with the Government of Iraq with a national security mission». The expanded authority would help address capability gaps, professionalization efforts, and defense institution building across the breadth of the Government of Iraq’s (GoI’s) national security institutions.

Trump wants Congress to add funding «for small-scale construction of temporary facilities that are necessary to meet operational needs and force protection requirements in both Iraq and Syria» — and this very much includes continuation of America’s military occupation of Syria, even though only Iraq had allowed the US forces in, but the US is in Syria only illegally (only as an invading force).

George W. Bush after 9/11 requested and got from Congress unlimited authorization for war against Al Qaeda, but now the US regime says that this was unlimited authorization also for war against ISIS — and, now, if ISIS becomes defeated, then still the unlimited war against Syria will continue and be unlimited, and will continue to grow even more without limit until perhaps all non-military expenses of the US government (other than repayment of America’s national debt) will be stripped-out.

With any crook, give him an inch, and he will demand a mile. Why don’t these ‘representatives of the people’ start, finally, to serve the people, instead of to serve the donors who allowed them to be there? Is it because those donors won’t allow it?

Trump is now requesting funds to be added for continuation of a US invasion and occupation that America’s political mega-donor-class have craved since at least 1949 and finally got under Obama; and, Trump wants to continue it. He, too, turns out to be a neocon (like Obama, and Bush, and Clinton).

Here is the one member of the US House and Senate who is trying to defeat him and them: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. She will certainly need good bodyguards. The CIA-founded Daily Kos website was trying to smear her even as early as 2012, and that site’s followers took the bait and the reader-comments were very hostile toward her, but she still won Hawaii’s House seat, despite the smears etc.