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https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/08/patrick-lawrence-sins-of-silence-or-silence-by-design/

Sins of Silence

The media's treatment of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is reminiscent of a time in the 60s when disaster could have been avoided with responsible reporting. 

In early April 1961, New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc filed a story from Miami in which he reported that the CIA was training Cuban exiles for an invasion of Castro’s new republic. Szulc was a well-seasoned correspondent by then, and in his file from Florida, he nailed it: The piece laid out all the details of the Bay of Pigs operation, down to the date of the planned landing on a remote Cuban beach.

The Times ran the piece on April 7, 1961, but not before Turner Catledge, the managing editor at the time, gutted Szulc’s detailed reporting, the date of the operation, and all mention of the CIA. The Times’s headline, “Anti-Castro Units Trained to Fight at Florida Bases,” was a classic case of the paper’s resort to the passive voice: No, the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record would not tell readers who was doing the training.

There had been by then numerous accounts of anti–Communist Cubans and their plans to invade the island, most of these from Guatemala, none indicating an American hand in these doings. Catledge’s cuts turned Szulc’s into another of them. America barely blinked when the piece was published.

Szulc reported that the operation would take place on April 18. He was off by a day: The CIA–directed invasion was on April 17. It was, of course, the calamity we now read about in the history books.

A short time later, President Kennedy gathered leading newspaper editors to the White House for a kind of post-mortem. He was by that time locked in a furious fight with the CIA and its director, the diabolic Allen Dulles. At one point Kennedy turned to Catledge with this: “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

I have thought a lot recently about the Tad Szulc piece and Kennedy’s reproach to Turner Catledge for removing its incisors. Keeping Americans in the dark as the Cold War proceeded was key to the national-security state’s ability to operate without concern for civilian oversight or political interference. This, the sin of silence, was among the press’s gravest transgressions of many during the Cold War decades, in my book. (And I have just finished one taking up this topic).

Now this same silence descends upon us once again. Here I will provide a 30–second intermission so readers can once more consider Kennedy’s remark to Turner Catledge: If the press had done its job a disaster could have been prevented.

On September 26, four explosions sabotaged the Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines running from ports in Russia to terminals along Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. President Vladimir Putin now makes oblique references to the use of nuclear weapons in response to the proxy war the U.S. and NATO wage against the Russian Federation by way of the Kyiv regime.

In how many ways are these developments frightening? Let us count them. In how many ways does our media’s silence enable them? Let us count these, too.

Alert readers will recall the long story of Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream II pipeline. This came to the surface as it neared completion during the Trump administration. The immediate intent, as many reports indicated at the time, was to deprive Russia of Europe’s large market for natural gas and secure this market for vastly more expensive American LNG. The larger objective was to disrupt the growing economic interdependence of Europe and Russia, so blocking the natural drift toward a unified Eurasian landmass with Europe as its westernmost flank.

On February 7, two and a half weeks before Russia launched its intervention in Ukraine, President Biden told a news conference at the White House, “If Russia invades, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream II.” An ABC News reporter asked in response, “But how will you do that, exactly, since the project is in Germany’s control?” Biden stumbled briefly before replying, “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

We cannot yet claim any certainty as to who is responsible for the four undersea explosions near Bornholm, a Danish island hard by Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. Let us not forget this. But we have a motive, a beneficiary, and a very considerable gathering of persuasive circumstantial evidence indicating that the operation, which required sophisticated undersea technology and involved devices with the explosive power of 1,100 pounds of dynamite, was the work of the U.S. in apparent collaboration with Denmark, if not also Germany.

Numerous reports detailing this evidence, all of them carried in independent media, indicate that the U.S. Navy was active in the area of the explosions shortly before they occurred. This fleet reportedly included the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which carries unmanned submarines capable of planting undersea explosives. Satellite tracking indicates the presence, shortly before the explosions, of U.S. military helicopters over the zones where the devices detonated.  Diana Johnstone, the distinguished Europeanist, published an excellent report in Consortium News, among the best I have read. In it she cites Jens Berger, a German journalist who publishes at Nachdenkseiten, “Analytic pages,” roughly:

 It seems completely impossible that a state actor could carry out a major naval operation in the middle of this densely monitored area without being noticed by the countless active and passive sensors of the littoral states; certainly not directly off the island of Bornholm, where Danes, Swedes, and Germans have a rendezvous in monitoring surface and undersea activities.

There is more of this stuff available to anyone who looks for it. I await, and I hope readers join me in this, solid confirmation of all of it.

I have read not one word in any of the corporate media even raising the possibility that the U.S. military or intelligence agencies or both may be behind the Baltic Sea operation. After decades reading and working for these media, I count their shocking neglect of this story as halfway to evidence in itself—silence by design. When Jeffrey Sachs, the economist and commentator, suggested in a Bloomberg interview Monday that the pipeline sabotage “was a U.S. action—perhaps U.S. and Poland,” his interviewers frantically cut him off, changing the subject to… the inflation outlook.

We are back in the zone of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power station. We read for weeks the Russians were shelling it even as their troops occupied it. Now we read that the Russians probably sabotaged a pipeline in which they invested, along with the Europeans, roughly $11 billion, and from which they expected to derive many more billions in foreign exchange earnings. Chances for a negotiated settlement were also sabotaged, as was the rising chorus of voices in Germany and elsewhere calling for Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II to be reopened and opened respectively.

The Ukraine conflict has just spread to Europe, as John Helmer, the longtime Moscow correspondent, asserted the other day. The Americans seem determined to stop at no risk or any amount of destruction as they press their campaign against Russia: There is no limit, we are now on notice, and the Europeans leadership seems to have no intention of imposing one. All frightening.

And just as frightening is the abhorrent silence of mainstream media as they shield these realities from the public’s view. Their cultivation of ignorance among their readers and viewers, wickedly effective as it is, seems to me yet more enabling of the dangerous conduct of our national security state than it was in Turner Catledge’s day.

Toto, let there be no doubt, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Among the more regrettable things said in the back-and-forth between Washington and Moscow in the matter of nuclear weapons was Putin’s remark in a speech September 30: “The U.S. set a precedent.” He delivered the line almost as a shrug during the ceremony marking the reintegration of four regions of Ukraine back into the Russian Federation. It left me momentarily speechless.

I was for a long time among those who dismissed the danger of either side resorting to nuclear weapons, my argument being no one in Washington or Moscow is that crazy. I stand self-corrected. There is what looks a lot like craziness everywhere.

As Maria Zakharova, the appealingly sharp-tongued spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, pointed out the other day, Washington and London alike have made repeated threats, veiled and unveiled, to sanction the use of nukes. As the Kyiv regime’s leading sponsors, they have stood by silently as Ukrainian forces shell the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. If this isn’t nuclear terrorism, Zakharova asks, what is? “Radiation doesn’t care where it comes from.”

We now read—the new theme of late—that, no, Moscow will not turn to its nuclear arsenal after all because the costs would outweigh the benefits. This thinking derives from game theorists at the Pentagon and in the intelligence apparatus who “game out” the Kremlin’s alternatives. The mainstream dailies love to cite these people.

I never thought I would quote Madeleine Albright in any circumstance, but there is a special place in hell for game theorists so far as I am concerned. They cannot measure the first damn thing about the complexities of human motivation.

In effect, the big media organizations are going silent on the very real danger—as real as it has been in 60 years—of nuclear annihilation as this now faces us. Why would this be?

My answer is not too complicated. We are being slowly acclimated to the proximity of nuclear peril so that Washington can pursue its wanton aggression against “Vladimir Putin’s Russia”—I have always loved this phrase, as if it is a separate country somewhere—without causing alarm or disruptive dissent.

Once again, the media’s dreadful success in administering this calmative to the general population is nearly beyond belief.It is strange, or maybe not at all, how often comparisons with the Kennedy administration’s predicaments on the Cuban question prove useful to our understanding of what is going on around us. Glenn Greenwald went straight to this point in an appearance on Tucker Carlson recently:

    There’s almost a sense that has been purposely cultivated to believe that the use of nuclear weapons really isn’t a realistic possibility… But we came very close on at least two or three occasions,… including in the Cuban missile crisis, because the U.S. felt that the Russian presence over the border in Cuba was so threatening we were going to have a nuclear war over it. That’s how Russia sees what is happening in Ukraine right across their border. It is madness to assume that what is for Russia an existential war, if they actually start losing it or NATO starts escalating,… that the chances of Vladimir Putin using nuclear weapons is zero. This is a dangerous illusion that I think a lot of people are operating with.

An illusion born of silence, I would merely add. An eerie, enervating silence as frightening as all else that besets a world tumbling into dangerous disorder.     

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-10-06/europe-us-role-pipeline-blasts/

Can Europe afford to turn a blind eye to evidence of a US role in pipeline blasts?

If Washington was involved, it would mark a dangerous new stage not only in the Ukraine war but in Europe’s acceptance of vassal status

The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.

The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.

Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.
Media taboo

This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.

There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.

Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.

Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.
Meddling in Ukraine

US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”

Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”

Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.

It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.
‘Thank you, USA’

One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.

But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.

And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.

That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.

Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.
Demand for fealty

If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.

In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.

That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.

By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.
Pitiless aggression

For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.

The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

    NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
    Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
    The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
    And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/10/06/promoting-doomsday/

Promoting Doomsday

Former Trump regime national security advisor, John Bolton’s callous contempt for peace, equity, justice and the rule of law reflects the deranged menace he represents.

As Bush/Cheney regime under secretary for arms control and international security, he pushed for preemptive war on Iraq to eliminate its nonexistent WMDs.

In 2017, he said the only way to address Pyongyang’s nuclear program is “to end (its) regime” by striking first, adding:

“Anybody who thinks that more diplomacy with North Korea, more sanctions, whether against North Korea or an effort to apply sanctions against China, is just giving North Korea more time to increase its nuclear arsenal.”

“We have fooled around with North Korea for 25 years, and fooling around some more is just going to make matters worse.”

Pathologically hostile to nonbelligerent, nonthreatening Iran, he said the following before being appointed Trump’s national security advisor:

DJT “can and should free American from (the) execrable (JCPOA nuclear deal) at the earliest opportunity (sic)”— defying reality by falsely calling Iran and the landmark deal “a threat to US national security (sic).”

He lied claiming that the Islamic Republic “intend(s) to develop deliverable nuclear weapons (sic),” calling for regime change.

Weeks before Trump appointed him national security advisor in April 2018, National Iranian American Council head, Trita Parsi, tweeted the following:

“(L)et this be very clear.”

“The appointment of Bolton is essentially a (Trump regime) declaration of war (on) Iran.”

“With Pompeo and Bolton, Trump is assembling a WAR CABINET.”

In March 2015, the Iranophobic NYT published a Bolton call for war on the Islamic Republic in an op-ed, titled:

“To Stop Iran’s (nonexistent) Bomb, Bomb Iran”

Turning reality on its head, he falsely claimed that “Iran’s (nonexistent) steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident (sic).”

“The inconvenient truth (sic) is that only military action (sic) can” halt Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons development.

Trump’s anti-Iran campaign should be its “highest diplomatic priority, commanding all necessary time, attention, and resources (sic).”

Bolton also called for regime change in Cuba, Venezuela and other nations free from US hegemonic control.

He never met a sovereign independent nation he didn’t want transformed into a US vassal state — by color revolution brute force, aggression and other dirty tricks.

Days earlier, 19fortyfive.com posted his Russophobic op-ed, titled:

“Putin Must Go (sic): Now Is The Time For Regime Change In Russia (sic),” saying:

“There is no longterm prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia (sic).”

“Russians are already discussing it, quietly (sic), for obvious reasons (sic).”

“For (hegemon USA) and others pretending that the issue is not before will do far more harm than good (sic).”

“Opposition to Putin is rising (sic).”

He threatened “nuclear” war (sic) and “sabotaged Nord Stream (gas) pipelines” to Germany (sic).

“(W)e must alter today’s calculus (sic).”

“Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer (sic).”

“Defining the ‘change’ is critical, because it must involve far more than simply replacing Putin (sic).” 

“Among his inner circle, several potential successors would be worse (sic).”

“The problem is not one man, but the collective leadership (sic).”

It “must go (sic).”

Is Bolton calling for war on Russia in less than so many words if unable to remove Putin and others around him by made-in-the-USA coup d’etat?

“This is no time to be shy (in pursuing regime change),” he roared.

Bolton — and countless others in Washington — exhibit pathologically dissocial personality disorder.

Their traits include “coldheartedness, (a) callous unconcern for the feelings of others,” a lack of remorse, shame or guilt, irresponsibility, an extremely high threshold for disgust, impulsiveness, emotional shallowness, “pathological lying, (a) “grandiose sense of self-worth,” an incapacity for love, a “parasitic lifestyle,” among other abnormalities, according to criminal psychology expert, Robert Hare.

Their brains don’t work like normal people.

They “con others for personal profit…pleasure,” and power over others they seek to dominate.

Their infestation of Washington on both sides of the aisle is symptomatic of gangster state rule.

With undemocratic Dems empowered by election-rigging — nominally headed by a know-nothing, mumbling/bumbling Biden impersonator at war on Russia by use of expendable Ukrainian cannon fodder foot soldiers — is hegemon USA nuclear war on the Russian Federation inevitable ahead?

Will what’s unthinkable be just a matter of time — unjustifiably justified by invented pretexts?

Are the lives, well-being and futures of everyone at risk by pathological US drive for hegemony rage against all nations free from its control?