https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/19/us-may-help-ukraine-launch-an-offensive-on-crimea/
US May Help Ukraine Launch An Offensive On Crimea
In a new article titled “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” the New York Times reports that the Biden administration now believes Kyiv may need to launch an offensive on the territory that Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since 2014, “even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”
Citing unnamed US officials, The New York Times says “the Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily,” but that “Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.”
It’s hard to imagine a full-scale assault on geostrategically crucial territory long considered a part of the Russian homeland not causing a major escalation. And as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes, smaller attacks on Crimea have indeed seen significant escalations from Moscow, contrary to claims laid out in the NYT article:
The New York Times report quoted Dara Massicot, a researcher from the RAND Corporation, who claimed that “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.” But Massicot’s claim is false as Russia began launching missile strikes on vital Ukrainian infrastructure in response to the October truck bombing of the Crimean Bridge.
Before the bridge bombing, Russia didn’t launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure in Ukraine, but now such bombardments have become routine, and millions of Ukrainians are struggling to power and heat their homes.
It’s been widely accepted among foreign policy analysts that Crimea is among the reddest of all of Russia’s red lines in this standoff. Back in October, Responsible Statecraft’s Anatol Lieven discussed the difference in Russia’s perspective between Crimea and every other territory that Ukraine lays claim to in an assessment of the possibility of this conflict leading to nuclear war:
If Ukraine wins more victories and recovers the territories that Russia has occupied since February, Putin will in my view probably be forced to resign, but Russia would likely not use nuclear weapons. If however Ukraine goes on to try to reconquer Crimea, which the overwhelming majority of Russians regard as simply Russian territory, the chances of an escalation to nuclear war become extremely high.
Decamp writes that “The lessening concern about Putin resorting to nukes appears to be based only on the fact that he hasn’t used any up to this point.” But this is as logical as believing that it is safe and wise to jump even harder on the sleeping bear you’ve been jumping on just because the bear hasn’t woken up yet.
The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely, is just being a fucking idiot. It’s like Wile E Coyote jumping up and down on the land mine until it explodes because it didn’t explode when the Roadrunner ran over it.
Moscow considers Crimea to be Russian. A year after Russia’s 2014 annexation, western sources acknowledged that Crimeans feel the same way. But it’s actually immaterial whether you agree with Moscow or with the Crimeans over the issue of whether Crimea should be a hot red line which could spark an insanely dangerous escalation, because your opinions about this issue will not prevent a nuclear war. Your disagreements with the Kremlin about Crimea will not protect you from nuclear fallout, and they will not protect anyone else.
Nuclear warheads don’t care about your feelings.
Any assertion that Russia will not use nukes under such-and-such a circumstance must squarely address this question: “Are you willing to gamble the life of every terrestrial organism on that claim being true?” If you can’t answer this question, your claim isn’t serious or valid.
Are US officials willing to bet the life of every terrestrial organism that the course of action they’re considering won’t trigger a chain of events leading to the end of the world? This needs to be addressed fully, head-on, with all the weight it entails, because otherwise they’re just not weighing the risks responsibly.
And something tells me that they are not.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-hammer-about-fall/5805101
Ukraine: Is the Hammer About to Fall?
“Here’s something you must understand. We were not given any opportunity to act differently.” — Vladimir Putin
The plan to engage Russia militarily is a tacit admission that the United States can no longer maintain its global dominance through economic or political means alone. After exhaustive analysis and debate, western elites have settled on a course of action aimed at dividing the world into warring blocs in order to prosecute a war on Russia and China. The ultimate strategic objective of the current policy, is to tighten the grip of western elites on the levers of global power and to prevent the dissolution of the “rules-based international order.” But after 11 months of nonstop warfare in Ukraine, the US-backed western coalition finds itself in a worse position than when it began.
Aside from the fact that the economic sanctions have severely impacted Washington’s closest European allies, the West’s control of Ukraine has plunged the economy into a protracted slump, destroyed much of the country’s critical infrastructure and annihilated a sizable portion of the Ukrainian Army. More importantly, Ukrainian forces are now suffering unsustainable casualties on the battlefield which is laying the groundwork for the inevitable splintering of the state. Whatever the outcome of the conflict may be, one thing is certain: Ukraine will no longer exist as a viable, independent, contiguous state.
One of the biggest surprises of the current war, is simply the lack of preparedness on part of the US. One would assume that if the foreign policy mandarins decided to “lock horns” with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower, they would have done the necessary planning and preparation to ensure success. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. US policymakers seem surprised by the fact that the economic sanctions backfired and actually strengthened Russia’s economic situation. They also failed to anticipate that the vast majority of countries would not only ignore the sanctions but proactively explore options for “ditching the dollar” in their business transactions and in the sale of critical resources.
We see the same incompetence in the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine. How do we explain the fact that the NATO nations have been frantically scraping the bottom of the barrel to find weapons for Ukraine? Did our leaders really start a war with Russia not knowing whether they had sufficient supplies of weapons and ammo to fight the enemy? That appears to be the case.
And were our leaders so sure that the conflict would be a low-intensity insurgency that they never planned for a full-blown, combined-arms, ground war? Once again, this appears to be true.
These aren’t trivial mistakes. The level of incompetence in the planning of this war is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. It appears that all the preparation was focused on provoking a Russian invasion, not on the developments that would happen soon afterwards. What’s clear, is that the Pentagon never “gamed out” the actual war itself or the conflict as it is presently unfolding. Otherwise, how does one explain these glaring errors in judgement:
- They never thought the sanctions would backfire
- They never thought they’d run out of weapons and ammo
- They never thought Russia’s oil receipts would skyrocket
- They never thought that the majority of countries would maintain normal relations with Russia
- They never figured they’d actually need a coherent military strategy for fighting a ground war in eastern Europe.
Is there anything they got right?
Not that we can see.
Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with ex-Brigade General Erich Vad who served as Angela Merkel’s policy advisor from 2006 to 2013:
Question– You too have been attacked for calling for negotiations.
Brigade General Erich Vad–Yes, as did the Inspector General of the German Armed Forces, General Eberhard Zorn, who, like me, warned against overestimating the Ukrainians’ regionally limited offensives in the summer months. Military experts – who know what’s going on among the secret services, what it’s like on the ground and what war really means – are largely excluded from the discourse. They don’t fit in with media opinion-forming. We are largely experiencing a media synchronization that I have never experienced in the Federal Republic…
Military operations must always be coupled with attempts to bring about political solutions. The one-dimensionality of current foreign policy is hard to bear. She is very heavily focused on weapons. The main task of foreign policy is and remains diplomacy, reconciliation of interests, understanding and conflict management. I miss that here. I’m glad that we finally have a foreign minister in Germany, but it’s not enough to just use war rhetoric and walk around in Kyiv or Donbass with a helmet and flak jacket. This is too little….
Brigade General Erich Vad–Then the question arises again as to what should happen with the deliveries of the tanks at all. To take over the Crimea or the Donbass, the martens and leopards are not enough. In eastern Ukraine, in the Bakhmut area, the Russians are clearly advancing. They will probably have completely conquered the Donbass before long. One only has to consider the numerical superiority of the Russians over Ukraine. Russia can mobilize up to two million reservists. The West can send 100 martens and 100 leopards there, they don’t change anything in the overall military situation. And the all-important question is how to end such a conflict with a warlike nuclear power – mind you, the most powerful nuclear power in the world! – wants to survive without going into a third world war….
You can continue to wear down the Russians, which means hundreds of thousands of deaths, but on both sides. And it means further destruction of Ukraine. What is left of this country? It will be leveled to the ground. Ultimately, that is no longer an option for Ukraine either. The key to solving the conflict does not lie in Kyiv, nor does it lie in Berlin, Brussels or Paris, it lies in Washington and Moscow…. A broader front for peace must be built in Washington…. Otherwise we wake up one morning and we’re in the middle of World War III.” (“Erich Vad: “What are the War Aims”, Emma)
Let’s summarize:
- The media is “overestimating the (effect of) Ukrainians’ regionally limited offensives”. In short, the Ukrainians are losing the war.
- The Russians are winning the war. (“The Russians are clearly advancing. They will probably have completely conquered the Donbass before long.”)
- Weapons alone will not change the outcome of the war. (“the martens and leopards are not enough.”)
- There is no evidence that the west has clearly defined strategic objectives. (“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism…Military operations must always be coupled with attempts to bring about political solutions.”)
This is not just an indictment of the way the war is being conducted, but of the strategic objectives which remain murky and poorly-defined. NATO is being led around by the nose by Washington, but Washington has no idea what it wants to achieve. “Weakening Russia” is not a coherent military strategy. It is, in fact, an aspirational phantasm nurtured by hawkish neocons playing armchair generals. But that is why we are in the predicament we are today, because the policy is in the hands of deranged fantasists. Does anyone seriously believe that the Ukrainian army will recover the territories in east Ukraine that have been annexed by Russia?
No, no serious person believes that. And, yet, the illusion that the “plucky Ukrainians are winning” persists, even while the casualties mount, the carnage increases and millions of Ukrainians flee the country. It’s beyond belief.
At the United Nations—China’s critique of Washington’s “rules-based international order”, which is designed to circumvent international law through violent unilateralism
Remember the Powell Doctrine? “The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:
- Is a vital national security interest threatened?
- Do we have a clear attainable objective?
- Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
- Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
- Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
- Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
- Is the action supported by the American people?
- Do we have genuine broad international support?
The former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell developed his Doctrine to avoid any future Vietnams. And while the Biden administration has not yet committed US combat troops to Ukraine, we think it’s only a matter of time. After all, the media is already beating the war drums while demonizing all-things Russia. That is traditionally how they prepare the public for war. (“Russophobia … is all about dehumanizing one’s opponents to make killing more acceptable (and destroying) all the mental restraints that keep men from barbarism.” Gilbert Doctorow)
Meanwhile, the US continues to pump Ukraine full of weapons while the Pentagon has begun training Ukrainian servicemen in Germany and Oklahoma. It looks like the decision has already been made to embroil the US in another conflict for which there is no vital national security interest and no clear path to victory. In other words, the Powell Doctrine has been shrugged off and replaced with another lunatic neocon plan aimed at dragging Russia into a bloody “Afghanistan-type” quagmire that will drain its resources and prevent it from blocking US expansion into Central Asia.
And how is the neocon plan working so far?
Here’s what Colonel Douglas MacGregor said in a recent interview:
“There are now 540,000 Russian troops stationed around the outskirts of Ukraine preparing to launch a major offensive that I think will probably end the war in Ukraine.540,000 Russian troops, 1,000 rocket artillery systems, 5000 armored fighting vehicles including at least 1,5000 tanks, hundreds and hundreds of tactical ballistic missiles. Ukraine is now going to experience war on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.”
And if that wasn’t bleak enough, here’s more from a recent video with Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou:
Alex Christoforou–“There is just a general panic that is gripping the Ukrainian military, NATO and the west. … The Russians have been masterful in concealing their fighting forces …so you have 500,000 thousand military (combat troops) waiting in the wings which leaves Ukraine wondering, “What do we do? We’re bogged down in this Bakhmut-Soledar area when these 500,000 Russian troops could be planning to hit us from any direction and we have no idea where the attack is going to come from?
Alexander Mercouris–“You are exactly right. The Russians have completely gained the strategic initiative. They’re keeping everyone guessing, and to increase the sense of panic in Kiev even more, a Russian general Sulukov has just visited the Russian grouping in Belarus which is growing in size all the time… Does that mean the Russians are planning to advance south from Belarus? We don’t actually know…. But there is this enormous buildup taking place on every front on an order of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen before. Not just hundreds of thousands of troops deployed, but hundreds of tanks…infantry fighting vehicles, ammunition, artillery pieces…and it’s building up on an enormous scale ….and the fighting in Donbass in the last couple of weeks has been the work of two bodies that are not part of the regular Russian army (The Wagner Group and the Donbas Militia) The main force of the Russian army which has been building up in extraordinary numbers, has not yet been committed to the battle to any great extent. So, I think everybody is expecting that some big blow is coming. No one knows for sure where it will happen. I don’t know (but) the Russians have managed again to keep it all extraordinarily secret. … No one knows what they are going to do, but what we can see is these vast numbers of forces gathering around Ukraine where they Ukrainians are obviously panicking (because it looks like something is going to hit on a huge scale (but) I don’t know where it will come from.” (“Russia’s next move, keeps collective west guessing”, Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris, You Tube, 15:25 minute)
Bottom line: While Washington and its NATO allies do not have a coherent strategy for winning the war in Ukraine, it’s clear, the Russians do. In the four months since Putin ordered his partial mobilization, 300,000 additional reservists have joined their units on the battlefield or along Ukraine’s northern perimeter. The stage is now set for a conventional ground war the likes of which no one in Washington ever anticipated. We expect that the outcome of this conflict will reshape Europe’s outdated security architecture and force a realignment that will mark the end of the unipolar era.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/every-facet-government-censorship-business/5804929
Every Facet of Government Is in the Censorship Business
Between the documentation obtained through a recent lawsuit against the White House and the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, it’s become quite clear that every facet of the U.S. government, including its intelligence agencies, are involved in illegal and unconstitutional censorship.
In the video above, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviews independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who has spent weeks sifting through the released Twitter files and reported on the contents.
FBI Has Gone Off the Rails
Importantly, we now have proof that the FBI has been acting as the key instigator and implementer of the government’s illegal censorship of Americans’ political and medical views. The agency has also, on a regular basis and for unknown purposes, asked Twitter to reveal the location of specific Twitter users, such as actor Billy Baldwin.
What’s more, internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos, emails and documents show the DHS has worked on expanding its influence over tech platforms for years, so, government censorship is not something that came about in response to the COVID crisis. Nor is the censorship limited to COVID or public health information in general.
Evidence shows the FBI has actively interfered in multiple elections — all while inventing the narrative that foreign nations were doing the interfering.1 As noted by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., these kinds of activities are “the biggest threat to our constitutional democracy today.”2
As just one example, we now know the FBI plotted to quench the Hunter Biden laptop story well before the first report about it was published. In collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen Institute, the FBI held a tabletop exercise to practice the shaping of the media’s coverage of a potential “hack and dump” operation involving Hunter Biden material.3,4 As reported by the New York Post:5
There’s also evidence showing the FBI has been shielding Hunter Biden and working with social media to censor bad press about him as far back as 2018.6 That job was probably made easier by the fact that reportedly former FBI agents work at both Twitter and Facebook.
For example, Jim Baker spent three decades with the FBI before becoming Twitter’s head lawyer,7and Facebook employs no less than 115 “former” employees of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies, most of whom now work in Facebook’s content moderation department.8
Twitter Paid to Censor Americans and Promote US Propaganda
Disturbingly, we now also have evidence showing that while Twitter insisted it was cracking down on covert government propaganda accounts, they only tracked down and banned foreign government-affiliated propaganda while working hand in hand with the U.S. Department of Defense to aid U.S. intelligence agencies in their efforts to influence foreign governments using fake news, computerized deepfake videos and bots.9 As reported by The Intercept:10
“Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used overt identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around two years or more. Some remain active …
In 2017 a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts ‘we use to amplify certain messages.’ The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one and ‘whitelist’ abilities for the others.”
Whitelisted accounts have a “validated” status similar to that of the blue check mark, which ensures they are promoted in searches. These accounts also don’t get shadow-banned or limited by other means. Adding insult to injury, the FBI has been using taxpayer dollars to pay Twitter for their censorship and propaganda services — more than $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone.11
Congressional Members Involved in Censoring Americans
The FBI has not acted alone, however. Far from it. The Twitter files reveal members of Congress have a direct line to Twitter and have had accounts suspended on their behalf and content removed at their whim. As reported by MSN:12
“… Taibbi … reported that Twitter ‘received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned.’ An example he shared was one sent in November 2020 by [Rep. Adam] Schiff’s office, who contacted Twitter hoping the tech giant would take action regarding ‘alleged harassment from QAnon conspiracists’ against Schiff’s staff, including aide Sean Misko.
‘Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content,’ the request to Twitter read. ‘Suspend the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry, which have repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies.'”
Other government leaders have been less clandestine in their censoring operations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, wrote an open letter to Amazon demanding they ban my book, “The Truth About COVID-19.”
Similarly, two state attorneys general, Letitia James and William Tong, publicly threatened social media companies with legal ramifications if they refused to censor the “Misinformation Dozen.” President Joe Biden also publicly called on social media platforms to ban my accounts. But it gets worse.
Government Has Been Weaponized Against the People
Discovery documents from a lawsuit against the White House13 filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) show at least 6714,15 federal employees across more than a dozen agencies are engaged in these kinds of illegal censorship activities. This includes officials from:
Consultants from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold16 were also hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media in this intentional effort to violate our Constitutional right to free speech.
A Look Inside the White House Censorship Machine
In a January 8, 2023, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty reviewed a series of emails between White House digital media director Rob Flaherty and a Facebook executive, illustrating how the White House pressured the company to censor and remove vaccine content even though Facebook itself characterized the material as “often-true content:”17
“Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty … and social-media executives prove the companies put COVID censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House — not voluntarily.”
Flaherty also demanded Facebook limit the spread of viral content on WhatsApp, a private messaging app with broad reach among “immigrant communities and communities of color.” In the end, Facebook acquiesced to all of Flaherty’s demands to prevent the spread of vaccine hesitancy and control political speech. As noted by Younes and Kheriaty:18
“President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy … publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden [about] his ‘message to platforms like Facebook.’
He replied, ‘They’re killing people.’ Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.”
White House Pressured Google and YouTube to Do Its Bidding
Flaherty also had Google in his crosshairs, and accused YouTube of “‘funneling’ people into vaccine hesitancy,” adding that this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the White House.”
“These emails establish a clear pattern,” Younes and Kheriaty write. “Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor COVID-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government approved COVID narratives.
Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line — for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need COVID vaccines …
The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.
Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.
The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about COVID-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific ‘consensus’ on critically important issues around COVID-19.”
Weaponization of Government Select Committee Impaneled
Taken together, the revelations from the Twitter files and this lawsuit clearly demonstrate that most, if not all, aspects of the U.S. government have been secretly weaponized to undermine and circumvent the Constitutional rights of the people.
As noted by Taibbi in his Fox News interview:
“This is not a partisan story. It’s a story about the architecture of the intelligence community and law enforcement getting its hands on speech, and on the ability of people to communicate with one another through platforms like Twitter and Facebook. And they’re doing this in a very profound way — it’s much more serious than what I thought at the beginning …”
While the danger we’re in as a nation is far more dire than anyone suspected, there is some good news. A new select committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, has been launched to investigate the weaponization of government, the politicization of the FBI and the DOJ’s investigation into and harassment of parents who spoke out against COVID mandates, critical race theory and the sexualization of their children at school board meetings. As reported by The Post Millennial:19
“This investigative panel will demand emails and correspondence between the Biden administration and big tech companies, and follows the massive revelations that came to light through the recent release of the Twitter files. Newly minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy … was asked to form the committee as part of the negotiations that brought him to power …
The probe into communications between tech giants and President Biden’s aides will look for government pressure that could have resulted in censorship or harassment of conservatives — or squelching of debate on polarizing policies, including the CDC on COVID …”
While it’s likely that government personnel and agencies will try to ignore the committee’s requests for information, the committee does have subpoena power, and hopefully will not be too timid to use it.
Unfortunately, since the GOP does not control the Senate, it’s
unlikely they’ll be able to pass any new laws based on the committee’s
findings. That said, legislation to penalize government censorship has
already been introduced, and you can help push it forward by asking your
representatives to support it....
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