Biden: 'US Has 'Obligation' To Be Involved In BOTH Ukraine AND Israel
Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
President Biden sat through a series of softball questions on 60 Minutes last night in which he assured America that the proxy war in Ukraine and in Israel was "no problem" for us because "we are America, for God's sake." Will Americans agree that billions more are needed to be poured into what is now a two-front war? Also today, Switzerland looks to return to Neutrality. Watch today's Liberty Report: Biden: 'US Has 'Obligation' To Be Involved In BOTH Ukraine AND Israel Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
0 Comments
Last Saturday, the world looked on as the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, launched Operation Al-Asqa Flood, the largest military incursion into the state of Israel since the 1973 October War, the 50th anniversary of which had occurred just one day beforehand. Though lauded by many as a legitimate military response to the Israeli occupation, many could also not help but wonder at how Israel, an entity possessing state of the art surveillance equipment and which receives annual funding from the United States to the tune of billions of dollars, could seemingly be ‘taken by surprise’ by militant Palestinian groups to such a devastating extent. Suspicions were further aroused when it emerged that Universal Paralello, the electronic music event held on the border of Gaza and which has been the focus of global media attention following the Palestinian incursion, had only changed its location two days beforehand following the falling through of a site in southern Israel near the Egyptian border. The idea that there were no serious insurance or security concerns over the holding of a music festival on the border of a location where violent clashes between the Al-Quds Brigades and Israeli Forces had taken place only last Summer, is simply unfathomable. Less than 48 hours following the commencement of Operation Al-Asqa Flood, the Associated Press also carried a report citing an unnamed Egyptian intelligence official who had claimed that Cairo had repeatedly warned Tel Aviv that an escalation was imminent, warnings that seemingly went unheeded. Two separate reports on Friday, one from the New York Times and one from CNN, both outlining warnings given by US intelligence officials to Israel in the days prior to the attacks that Hamas was preparing a large-scale operation, appear to corroborate the idea that Israel had foreknowledge of what was about to take place. The first question that comes to mind, is to what benefit it would it be to the Israelis to allow such a devastating attack to occur? Saving the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, currently mired in a corruption scandal, would be a theory that appears to not have any grounding, with opinion polls following Al-Asqa Flood appearing to indicate that the exact opposite will occur. Using the Al-Asqa operation as a pretext to carry out ethnic cleansing of Gaza appears to have strong evidence to back it up, with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announcing a complete siege of Gaza following the attacks, cutting off food, water and electricity supplies to the besieged strip, and describing enemy combatants as ‘human animals’; language and behaviour that couldn’t be described as anything less than genocidal. Indeed, such a scenario was envisaged by hardline Israeli Minister Orit Strock in March of this year, a move that Strock herself admitted would ‘involve many casualties’. Another theory put forward is that Al-Asqa Flood and the ensuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza will ultimately be used as the catalyst for a wider war with Israel’s arch-rival Iran, a long-time opponent of the Zionist state since the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw Ayatollah Khomeini come to power. Indeed, in a move which drew little attention amongst the media coverage of the current hostilities, Israeli airstrikes were launched against Damascus and Aleppo airports on Thursday; Syria being a key regional ally of Iran, with Tehran and Hezbollah coming to the Arab Republic’s aid in countering the US-led regime change operation launched against it more than a decade ago, in which Israel itself played a key role. Despite the extensive military capabilities of the Zionist state however, Israel would undoubtedly face a challenging situation in a direct military confrontation with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. With a distance of more than 1,000km between Israel and Iran, launching air strikes against the Islamic Republic, and having to travel through the hostile skies of Syria and Iraq to do so, would prove next to impossible without the assistance of the United States and its allies, which leads to a grim possibility – a deliberately provoked or staged attack on American forces, intended to galvanise US support for entry into what could quickly become a global conflict. Indeed, a historical precedent exists for such a scenario. Following the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, France was overwhelmed by Germany in the space of nine months, leaving Britain isolated and in a perilous situation. In the United States however, no popular support for entry into what was widely seen as a European civil war existed, especially coming only two decades after WWI. This would change radically however on the 7th of December 1941, when Imperial Japanese Forces, in response to a trade embargo imposed by the United States, launched a devastating attack on the US Naval base in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Washington would officially declare its entry into the conflict the following day. Strong evidence would later emerge that, similar to last Saturday’s ‘surprise’ attacks on the Israeli state, both British and US intelligence officials at the time were aware that an attack on the US Pacific Fleet was imminent. Now, with the provocative deployment of US and British Naval Destroyers to the Mediterranean amidst the current hostilities, the recent build-up of US Forces in the Persian Gulf, and Israel’s history of involvement in false flag operations intended to incite a US military response, from the USS Liberty to 9/11, it appears that the stage is now being set for a deliberately provoked or staged attack on US Forces in the region in order to draw Washington into a wider conflict with Iran, and the catastrophic consequences that will follow. Pearl Harbour: Gulf Edition – Coming Soon? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute Those who called Hamas’s attack on Israel “Israel’s 9/11” were more accurate than they realized. Just as the US reacted to 9/11 by fulfilling Osama bin Laden’s wish that the US would get bogged down in no-win wars, Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack fulfills Hamas’s likely goal of radicalizing more Palestinians. The result of Hamas’s attack will be to strengthen the most extreme elements on both sides of the conflict. Given the strong support for Israel among both major political parties it is not surprising that, following the attacks, many politicians rushed to microphones to proclaim their support for US assistance for Israel. President Biden announced the US would send military aid to Israel, while Congress is drafting legislation providing about two billion dollars in “emergency” military assistance to Israel. Even most of the growing number of representatives who oppose military aid to Ukraine will support spending “whatever it takes” to defend Israel. This is why the Biden administration and some in Congress want to combine aid for Israel and Ukraine into one legislative package. Spending billions more to support military action in the Middle East and Ukraine will benefit the military-industrial complex. However, it will harm most Americans by accelerating the growth of the government’s over 33 trillion dollars debt. As the debt increases, the Federal Reserve will push interest rates lower and monetize the debt. This will lead to increased price inflation, combined with economic stagnation and high unemployment — in other words, stagflation. Concerns over the government’s debt and the Federal Reserve’s enabling of that debt with easy money and low interest rates will lead to more challenges to the dollar’s world reserve currency status. Increased resentment over US hyper-interventionist foreign policy will also lead to changes to the dollar’s reserve currency status. Saudi Arabia could even stop using dollars for its international oil trade. The end of the petrodollar would be the final nail in the coffin of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The end of the dollar’s world reserve currency status would mean the US government could no longer run an empire abroad and an authoritarian welfare state at home. The question is not will the American empire end but when and how. It should end deliberately, with Congress starting the process of restoring limited constitutional government by ending all foreign aid and bringing our troops home. When Israel was criticized for bombing an Iraqi nuclear plant it feared would be used to produce weapons, I defended Israel’s right as a sovereign state to act in what it saw as its national security interest. I still hold that view. I believe Israel would benefit if the US ends all foreign aid, since much of it goes to Israel’s enemies. Foreign aid also gives the US an excuse to engage in other forms of meddling. Ending US interventionist foreign policy would allow the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to a just and lasting peace. Hamas’s Victory Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations. Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are. Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them. But when the Arabs strike back against the hatred that confronts them with their limited resources it is Israel that is described as the victim and the Palestinians who are dehumanized and portrayed as the “terrorists.” Media in the US and Europe were quick to label the Hamas offensive breaching the formidable Israeli border defenses as “Israel’s 9/11” or even “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” to establish the context that the Israelis have been on the receiving end of an “unprovoked” attack by a cruel and heartless enemy. Israel has responded to the attack with a heavy bombardment of Gaza that has destroyed infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, while also cutting off food supplies, water and electricity. It has demanded that residents of north Gaza, all 1.1 million of them, evacuate to make way for a possible ground offensive but there is nowhere to go as all the borders are closed, and the United Nations is calling it a demand with “devastating humanitarian consequences.” Journalist Peter Beinart has commented “This is a monstrous crime. It’s happening in plain view, with US support.” And the United States government is indeed typically on the same page as Israel. President Joe Biden, citing fabricated stories about dead Jewish babies, speaks of how Israel has a “duty” to defend itself, while the Palestinians somehow have no right to protect themselves at all, much less to rise up against their persecutors in a struggle for freedom. And Washington has also unhesitatingly chosen to directly involve itself in the conflict, completely on the side of the Jewish state, asserting repeatedly that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and telling the Israelis that “we have your back” while also dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the scene of the fighting as well as the 101st Airborne to Jordan and increasing the readiness of Marines stationed in Kuwait. The White House could have taken more aggressive steps to encourage a ceasefire and talks but has chosen instead to issue essentially toothless calls to let the trapped civilians escape while also backing a devastating Israeli military response. Israel is also hosting the worthless and brain dead Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who will be providing advice along the lines of his insightful comment that Hamas is “evil” and “worse than ISIS.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already in Jerusalem, announcing that the US is there to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unity government “as long as America exists” after first saying “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.” Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government makes clear that a key element in why he is there is because he is “a Jew.” Perhaps he should recuse himself from policy making involving Israel as being “a Jew” would not appear to be a United States national interest and is likely to produce irrational responses to developing situations. If all of this sounds a lot like Ukraine it should, except that in Ukraine the US and NATO are fighting against Russia, which is being demonized for occupying what is claimed Ukrainian territory, whereas in Palestine they are supporting the occupier of actual Palestinian territory, Israel. Funny thing that, and the word “hypocrisy” comes immediately to mind. As it turns out, however, I am somewhat on the same page as much of the media, agreeing that the Hamas incursion is something like 9/11, though I am sure that my take would not be found acceptable to the CNN Jake Tappers of this world. My thinking is that Israel knew in advance about 9/11 in the United States due to its extensive spying network and chose not to share the information because it was to their advantage not to do so. Indeed, a pleased Netanyahu even stated several years later that “9/11 was a good thing because it made the United States join us in our fight.” That the attacks killed 3,000 Americans did not bother the Israeli government as Israel has a long history of killing Americans when it can benefit from so doing, starting with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 which killed 34 sailors. So too in this case in Gaza Netanyahu may have decided to encourage an unexpected development, making it like 9/11, that would enable him to escalate and “mow the grass” as the Israelis put it, in the remainder of Arab Palestine. And bear in mind that the actual incident that triggered the uprising was a rampage involving at least 800 Israeli settlers in and around the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, beating pilgrims and destroying Palestinian shops, all without any interference from the nearby Israeli security forces. The rioting was clearly allowed and even encouraged by the government. Drawing on my experience as a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis. Israel had an extensive electronic and physical wall backed by soldiers and weaponry that completely surrounded Gaza on the landward side, so effective that it was claimed that not even a mouse could get in. The Mediterranean side of Gaza was also tightly controlled by the Israeli Navy and boats to and from Gaza were completely blocked. Egypt tightly controlled the southern part of Gaza bordering on the Sinai. So Gaza was under 24/7 complete surveillance and control at all times. Israeli military intelligence also certainly had a network of recruited informants inside Gaza who would report on any training or movements, easy enough to do when you can approach people who are starving and make them an offer they cannot refuse just for providing information on what they see and hear. And then there was a warning from the Egyptian government to Israel ten days before the Hamas attack, with Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally calling Netanyahu and sharing intelligence suggesting that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” Other media accounts reveal how Hamas trained and practiced their maneuvers publicly. There were also assessments made by US intelligence, which were shared with Israel, suggesting that something was afoot. So, given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack but rather a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza, vowing that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” and then go on from there. And “from there” might well include Lebanon, Syria and Iran, possibly with the assistance of the United States to do the heavy lifting. Iran in particular is already being blamed by the usual suspects as a party involved in the Hamas attack, so far without any evidence whatsoever, which is typical of how these stories evolve. And Israel has moved far to the right politically to such an extent that it might appreciate a little ethnic cleansing to demonstrate its seriousness. Netanyahu and other senior government officials in his cabinet have recently been making passing references to a “developing security situation” in the country to justify the intensifying of the raids by the army against Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He has been exploiting his position to call in particular for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza, which is precisely what is happening. Gaza might be of particular interest to Ben-Gvir and others as it uniquely shelters an armed and organized resistance in the form of Hamas, which, oddly, was founded with the support of Israel to split the Palestinian political resistance with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. There is another issue relating to the recent fighting that one would like to know the answer to, namely how did Hamas get its weapons in the first place? Some were clearly manufactured from parts and scrap but others were sophisticated and, as Gaza is blockaded on all sides, smuggling them in becomes problematical. One argument is that they were supplied by Iran and others to be brought in by tunnels, but the tunnels on two sides would end up in Israel and on the third side in Egypt. The fourth side is the Mediterranean Sea. So how did they arrive? Is there a possible triple or even quadruple cross taking place with different parties lying to each other? And should there be concerns that after the American armada arrives off the coast of Gaza there just might be some kind of false flag incident engineered by Netanyahu that will involve Washington directly in the fighting? And there is what amounts to a related issue that should be of concern to everyone in the US and generically speaking the “Western world” where human rights are at least nominally respected. The message from almost all Western governments is that Israel has a carte blanche to do whatever it likes even when it involves war crimes to include mass forced displacement or genocide. In this case, the coordinated government-media response which is intended to protect Israel from any criticism almost immediately began circulating fabricated tales of atrocities while also delivering a hit on freedom of speech and association. President Biden, who should be trying to defuse the crisis, is instead adding fuel to the flames, saying of Hamas that “Pure, unadulterated evil has been unleashed on the earth!” In Florida the arch Zionist stooge Governor Ron Desantis met with Jewish leaders in a synagogue to announce draconian measures against Iran to include sanctions on companies that are in any way linked to that country. One might point out that those businesses have done nothing wrong and Desantis also called for “eradication of Hamas from the earth.” His intellectual depth was at the same time revealed when he said the US should not take in any Gazan refugees because they are “antisemites.” And in South Carolina, America’s favorite he/she Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a US attack on Iran as well as declaring the war against Hamas to be “a religious war” and urging the Israeli army to invade Gaza and do “Whatever the hell you have to do to” to “level the place.” And the Europeans are equally spineless in their deference to Israel. The Israeli president declared the that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and not long after that top European Union representatives met with him to offer their unqualified support. Meanwhile in France, the spineless and feckless government of Emmanuel Macron has sought to outlaw any gathering that expresses support for Palestinian rights. And in the UK, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman has proposed criminalizing any protest against Israeli actions or anything in support of Palestine to include banning any public display of the Palestinian national flag, which she regards as a “criminal offense toward the Jewish community in Britain.” She has also said that “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.” Berlin’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has also classified the use of the expression as a “criminal offense.” The manner in which most Western political elites are lining up unquestionably and even enthusiastically behind Israel and its craven leaders’ desire for bloody vengeance is truly shocking but comes as no surprise. Beyond the issue of Gaza itself, some in Israel are arguing that Netanyahu has personally benefitted from the unrest through the creation of the national unity government which has ended for the time being the huge demonstrations protesting his judicial reform proposals. If all of this comes together politically as it might in the next several weeks, we could be seeing the initial steps in what will develop into the complete ethnic cleansing of what was once Palestine, in line with Netanyahu’s assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” So all of the former Palestine is now a land to be defined by its Jewishness where Jews are in full control and are free to do whatever they want without any objection, referred to by the Israeli government as “an exclusive right to self-determination.” And it has all possibly been brought to fruition by the enablement provided by the current developments in Gaza. Reprinted with permission from Unz.com. Gaza Strikes Back Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s press conference on Thursday concluding his visit to Israel conveyed three things. One, the Biden Administration will be seen as backing Israel to the hilt by way of meeting its security needs but Washington will not be drawn into the forthcoming Gaza operations except to arrange exit routes in the south for hapless civilians fleeing the conflict zone. Two, Washington’s top priority at the moment is on engaging with the regional states who wield influence with Hamas to negotiate the hostage issue. Fourteen US citizens in Israel remain unaccounted for. (White House confirmed that the death toll in the fighting now includes at least 27 Americans.) Three, the US will coordinate with the regional states to prevent any escalation in the situation to widen the conflict on the part of Hezbollah. Although the US cannot and will not stop Israeli leadership on its tracks apropos the imminent Gaza operation, it remains unconvinced. Blinken was non-committal about any direct US military involvement, and the chances are slim as things stand. Most important, even as Blinken could hear the war drums, he also cast his eye on a future for Israel (and the region) where it will be at peace with itself, would integrate into the region and concentrate on creating economic prosperity — metaphorically put, beating its swords into plowshares in a Biblical Messianic intent. That is to say, despite the massive show of force off the waters of Israel, with the deployment of two aircraft carriers along with destroyers and other naval assets and fighter jets off the waters of Israel, the Biden Administration is profoundly uneasy about any escalation of the conflict into a wider war. If the US senses that this is a catastrophe that Israel allowed to happen, that remains a strictly private thought. Even as Blinken was heading for Tel Aviv, US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told reporters in Washington on Wednesday following a closed-door intelligence briefing that “We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen. I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.” Shortly after McCaul spoke to reporters in Washington, an anonymous Egyptian official confirmed to the Times of Israel that Cairo’s agents did warn their Israeli counterparts about a planned Hamas attack, but that this warning may not have made it to Netanyahu’s office. These disclosures would embarrass the Israeli government, as Saturday’s surprise attack can be viewed as a catastrophic failure for Israel’s intelligence services. In a brutally frank statement on Thursday, the Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces General Herzi Halevi admitted, “The IDF is responsible for the security of our nation and its citizens, and we failed to do so on Saturday morning. We will look into it, we will investigate, but now it is time for war.” This failure will impact the decision-making in Tel Aviv. Gen. Halevi described Hamas as “animals” and “merciless terrorists who have committed unimaginable acts” against men, women and children. He said that the IDF “understands the magnitude of this time, and the magnitude of the mission that lays on our shoulders.” “Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, decided on this horrible attack, and therefore he and the entire system under him are dead men,” the general added, vowing to “attack them and dismantle them and their organisation” and that “Gaza will not look the same” afterward. Make no mistake, the Israeli objective will be to use overwhelming force with its most advanced weapons, including powerful bunker-busting bombs, to inflict crippling losses on Hamas formations so that the movement cannot wage an armed struggle for many years. A ground operation is to be expected any day. It is improbable that Blinken would have even tried to dissuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from going ahead with a brutal operation. He told the media that the US would rather leave it to Israel to do what needed to be done. Meanwhile, the US deployment will not only aim to enhance surveillance, intercept communications, and prevent Hamas from acquiring more weapons, but also act as deterrent. That said, the US cannot afford to watch passively. Washington has no choice but to limit the expected fighting in the coming days and weeks in Gaza to ensure that it does not spread to other areas. Thus, the US force projection specifically serves as a deterrent to Hezbollah, which possesses a vast armoury of 150,000 missiles that can be launched at major cities in Israel, potentially leading to a broader war not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, drawing others into the conflict. Israel knocked out of service the airports in Damascus and Aleppo in Syria in missile strikes simultaneously on Thursday, presumably to prevent reinforcements reaching Lebanon. Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was due to travel to Syria and Lebanon in the weekend. Through the past four decades, the US and Iran have made a fine art of communicating with each other in dangerous times to set ground rules to avoid confrontation. This time around too, it is happening. Certainly, the speech by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday on the conflict situation, which was translated into Hebrew by the Iranians and disseminated in an unprecedented move, conveyed a subtle message in three parts to both Israel and the US, signalling essentially that Tehran does not intend to get involved in the conflict. (See my blog Iran warns Israel against its apocalyptic war.) In turn, the US has signalled that it has intelligence showing that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attacks on Israel. Equally, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s phone conversation with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday — their first ever conversation which Tehran initiated — harped on efforts to “halt the ongoing escalation.” The ‘known unknown’ scenario Yet, the big question is, how far the Biden Administration would be confident about the success of any Israeli military incursion into Gaza. During the press conference in Tel Aviv, Blinken underscored in a subtle way the importance of “lessons” learnt from past experiences. The point is, Israel will be involved in urban warfare in a densely populated area with a population of 2.1 million people. Gaza has an average of 5,500 people per sq. km, and there is bound to be heavy civilian casualties caused by Israel’s advanced American weaponry, which would lead to an international outcry, including in Europe, and lead to condemnation of not only Israel but the US as well. However, Israel is in defiant mood and Netanyahu needs at least some of the operation’s goals achieved before agreeing to a ceasefire. More importantly, Israel needs an exit strategy, if past experiences in Lebanon and Gaza gave any lessons. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule comes into play — ‘You break it, you own it.’ An extended occupation of Gaza will be an extremely dangerous outcome fraught with great risks, given the deep economic, religious, and social roots that Hamas enjoys. Suffice to say, the Israeli military will be hard-pressed to show “success” and head for the exit door. Besides, if other Palestinian groups and organisations in the West Bank make decisions that advance Hamas’s strategic goals, all bets are off, as Israeli military will face a two-front war. In fact, the conditions for a third intifada do exist in West Bank. And in such a scenario, the advantage goes to Hamas, which would position itself as potentially the appropriate and perhaps the sole alternative after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is now 87 years old. Again, in a worst case scenario, it cannot be ruled out that the Arab Israeli population may draw inspiration from Hamas, and if their violent eruption in 2021 is anything to go by, the long-term viability of the state of Israel will be put to test. Suffice to say, the best solution lies in a paradigm shift in the Israeli statecraft away from its primacy on coercion and brutal force. Blinken’s remarks suggested that the US hopes that when the dust settles down, with the helping hand of friendly Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Jordan, a turnaround to calm the situation and reach a ceasefire might be possible. Of course, the longer that takes, the greater the strain it will put on the US-Israeli ties and the harder it will become for the Biden Administration to maintain an equilibrium in what is already a troubled relationship with Netanyahu. Fundamentally, Israel needs to come terms with the new reality that they are no longer invincible or the dominant power in the West Asian region. Reprinted with permission from Indian Punchline. US in a Quandary Over Israel’s War on Gaza Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute It’s not a real war. The bloody carnage in Israel and Palestine that we now witness is a large prison uprising being crushed by Israel’s military might. M-16 lightweight rifles against Merkava tanks; home-made rockets (little more than flying pipe bombs) versus US-state of the art F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers; a few thousand Hamas fighters versus 600,000 or more Israeli soldiers and police backed by drones and heavy artillery. American-made bombs and rockets are now shattering what’s left of Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated places. Israel, which suffered over 1,200 dead innocent civilians from a Hamas-led attack on a music festival and waves of rocket barrages, vows Biblical revenge on the Palestinians. Interestingly, the US supplied warplanes, bombs and rockets pounding Palestinian fighters and civilians are being used in contravention of the US Arms Control Act which forbids use of American arms against civilian targets. Heedless of US law, the Biden administration is in full pro-war hysteria over Gaza. The next US elections are getting closer. The US state-guided media is also in full war mode, portraying events in Gaza as an attack on the United States. The war party in Washington is baying for war against Iran which, as far as we know now, had no primary role in the Gaza attacks. One will likely be found or manufactured by Israel’s right-wing militants and Fox News. I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years. I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the US Congress and media. Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948. Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders. The United States, Israel’s patron and financier, reveled in the move of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move seen by Bible Belt religious fundamentalists as a key step to the return of the Christian Messiah and Armageddon in which the rest of us, Jews included, are fated to be burned alive. The American Republicans, who have become a far-right theocratic party, cheered this good news. There was no joy in Gaza. This miserable, squalid human garbage dump is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948. Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders. Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore. Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt. Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation. Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation. Chemicals to treat water are banned. Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s US-supplied air force. Hospitals have almost no medicines. In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison. Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving. Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs. The intensive punishment of Gaza, a crime under international law, began after its people voted in a free election for the Hamas movement over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which is more or less run by Israel and the United States. Israel helped found Hamas in 1987 to split the PLO, but then sought, with the US, to destroy the organization, branding it ‘terrorist.’ Israel has extensively used US-supplied arms and money to fight Hamas in Gaza, a clear violation of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 that bars the use of American weapons against civilian populations. The question remains, where did all the Palestinians come from? Israel long claimed there were no such people, or a made-up nationality. This was a pretty rich claim coming from Israelis, many of whom hailed from Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe and who had assumed biblical identities and asserted a direct link to the Hebrews who had lived two thousand years earlier in the Levant. When Israel was created by the US and UN (with Soviet support) in 1948, from 750,000 to one million native Palestinians were driven from their ancestral home at gunpoint or panicked to flight by massacres and ethnic cleansing. Their villages were bulldozed. When Israel conquered and annexed the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, another 500,000 Palestinians were made refugees. Some 50,000-250,000 Syrians were driven by Israel from the strategic Golan Heights. Bedouins were driven from Israel’s Negev Desert. There are only two ways out of this bloody mess. Either drive millions of Palestinians into the desert in an act of genocide or create a long-delayed Palestinian state mandated by the United Nations but which has been long blocked by US vetoes and Israel resistance. Margolis is a Member of the RPI Academic Board. Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com. How Much Longer Will Palestinians be a Martyr People? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute It’s been said that a nation allowing its military to act unjustly abroad may get its comeuppance when that same military turns on it. Is America experiencing this? There’s evidence that the American wing of the scamdemic is primarily being lead from within the bowels of the DOD. Some of that evidence was discussed on the HighWire in June and July of 2023, in the segments listed below. •“The Woman Responsible for the US Covid Response” in HighWire Episode 324, posted on June 17, 2023 •“Biden Makes Temporary Pandemic Preparedness Office Permanent” in HighWire Episode 330, posted on July 27, 2023 If DOD is, in fact, in the driver’s seat of the effort to control Americans under the guise of infectious disease protection then, as discussed below, it was recently handed one hell of a tool that could be used toward that end. Responsibility for conducting the background investigations of federal employees has been transferred from OPM to DOD. On April 24, 2019, an executive order was issued which shifted primary responsibility for conducting background investigations for federal agencies from OPM to DOD. The transfer was complete on October 1, 2019. DOD has been handed a tool that, if misused, gives it great leverage over federal employees who may stand in the way of scamdemic-related tyranny. Federal employees, especially those in advisory and decision-making positions, can potentially thwart the stripping of Americans’ rights by insisting that their agencies comply with policy and law, including with the Constitution. This may take the form of refusing to feign agreement with a baseless interpretation of that policy and law which would allow for tyranny. Identifying those most likely to take this stance is not difficult (e.g., those with liberty-leaning social media posts). Federal employees are generally subject to background investigations upon hire. Some positions, but not all, require periodic updates to the investigations. Those undergoing the process are generally required to execute a form authorizing the release of their private information to the feds (authorization form). Generally, the grant of authorization remains in effect well beyond the date of the form’s execution, with effective periods varying depending upon the form (e.g., the sooner of five years from execution or the termination of employment, throughout the duration of the employment, etc.). Due to such lengthy effective periods, even those holding positions which don’t require investigation updates are potentially subject to having their personal information accessed well after executing a form. The information that can be accessed using an executed form is extremely broad, as one can see by perusing the form used for non-sensitive positions, the SF-85. DOD has been granted a degree of power over who the feds employ by being given near blanket responsibility for federal background investigations. It's easy to imagine how the background investigation power could be abused in order to bring about the purging of, and exclusion of, liberty supporters from federal employment. This could be accomplished by more aggressively scrutinizing the information of liberty supporters during background investigations; selectively divulging information found during background investigations depending on the subjects’ politics; and/or targeting liberty supporters for extra surveillance of their information after their initial background investigations are conducted, using their executed authorization forms. Said differently, if DOD personnel are, in fact, leading the American contingent of the scamdemic, then it’s reasonable to wonder whether DOD background investigators will target pro-liberty types for harsher treatment like IRS auditors reportedly did under the authority of Lois Lerner. DOD having background investigation power matters, even if it was already conducting illegal surveillance. Some may consider the grant of federal background investigation power to DOD to be of little significance due to a suspicion that DOD was already illegally accessing all Americans’ private information. They may ask, like a Clinton, “What difference does it make?” It makes a difference. For obvious reasons, it’s not feasible for federal employers to use information obtained through illegal surveillance as a basis for unsuitability findings or conduct unbecoming charges. Doing so would reveal the illegal surveillance. However, DOD having an authorization form executed during the background investigation process, legally allowing access to the private information of an applicant or employee, could provide cover for DOD to bring information already illegally obtained to the attention of the employing agency. Building control files of feds in key positions is especially easy for an agency in charge of background investigations. If DOD is, in fact, now primarily focused on stripping Americans’ rights rather than protecting them, then it could use its new, easier access to the personal information of federal employees in another way to achieve the former end. That access could be used to build control files on feds in key positions who are prone to supporting liberty. Catherine Austin Fitts explained the meaning of the term “control file” in her article posted on July 29, 2012 in the Solari Report entitled “Control Files” which states in part: A 'control file' is a private record that contains secret information or pictures that are the basis of threatening and blackmailing a person…Are political views already affecting suitability determinations for federal employment? This author isn’t arguing in favor of no background investigations being conducted in connection with federal employment. Surely, reasonable people would agree that it’s appropriate to conduct such investigations, to varying depths, depending on job duties. Americans wouldn’t want, for example, one of questionable veracity, who has reportedly boasted online about his “puppy role-play fetish” and taught “Kink 101” workshops to college students, to be hired for an important federal position with responsibility for nuclear and radioactive material. Oh wait, that already happened, under the purportedly arduous background investigation process already in place. Considering this, one wonders if leftists are already receiving greater leniency during the federal background investigation process than others. Conclusion The timing of the shift in federal background investigation responsibility to DOD, just shortly before the start of the scamdemic, is somewhat eyebrow-raising, and even more so when considered along with evidence indicating that DOD has been the driver of scamdemic-related policy. Once the next phase of the scamdemic gets going, the issue of whether America falls into a tyrannical abyss may partly hinge on whether enough federal employees step up to stop that from happening. The powers behind the scamdemic surely realize this. It takes childlike naiveté to believe that the federal background investigation power will not be abused if it is, in fact, held by the same players leading the effort to strip Americans’ of their rights under the pretext of infectious disease protection. The DOD Curious and Control File Concerned Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
How does Washington deal with sagging Republican support for more money to Ukraine? Put Ukraine aid together with Israel aid! And slap a few billion for Taiwan while you're at it! It's only our money. Also today: US interventionism fueled the bloody mess in the Middle East. But for the neocons only more interventionism can solve it. Watch today's Liberty Report: Washington Uniparty Plans MASSIVE Giveaway To Ukraine, Israel, AND Taiwan! Click on the headline to read the full story from I had to take a short break from reading about what’s happening in Gaza. I saw one too many images of dead kids on Twitter and just had to lie down for a while. It was like running out of health in a video game. I was still trucking along, and then I saw this one particularly gruesome image on Twitter of a dead Palestinian child which I won’t even describe here and my nervous system was like, “Nope, that’s it, we’re done,” and I just felt all the energy go out of me and slumped over. And that was just me sitting in the comfort and safety of my own home. I can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be there, under siege with all energy and supplies cut off, while it gets harder and harder to get information to the outside world as military explosives rain down relentlessly. It’s so, so bad, and it’s going to get so much worse. Israel has already taken more lives than the 1,200 it lost in the Hamas attacks, with the official death toll from the Gaza bombings now having passed 1,200 as of this writing, on top of the 1,500 Hamas militants who were killed during the attack. But the killing is going to continue far beyond this point. One gets the sense that the IDF is barely even getting started. That’s why so much energy is getting poured into trying to make the Hamas attacks look as bad as possible — to make the gratuitous slaughter that’s about to come look reasonable. We’re seeing claims about decapitated Israeli babies being uncritically promoted as fact by the mass media and by US and Israeli officials, and then being walked back as it turns out those claims are unverified and dubiously sourced. We’re seeing claims about mass rapes being uncritically pushed by the mass media, only to see them retracted as unverified after the narrative has taken hold. The only reason the political/media class of the imperial core are falling all over themselves to promote these narratives without waiting for the evidence is to make Israel’s ongoing murder of civilians in Gaza look appropriate. It’s completely undisputed that Hamas killed a huge number of people on Saturday, and it’s completely undisputed that a huge number of those killed were noncombatants. This alone could be used to justify retaliatory military operations by Israel, but because those retaliations are going to dwarf the initial offense, Israel and its allies need to frame that initial offense in the most shocking and rage-inducing light possible. It was reported that the US and Israel were in discussions with Egypt to provide safe corridors for an evacuation of Gaza, which Moon of Alabama noted would have been ethnic cleansing if carried out. But it’s now being reported that Egypt has rejected those proposals, citing the need to protect “the right of Palestinians to hold on to their cause and their land”. So they’re trapped there. Two million people, half of whom are children, packed into a tiny strip of land which an Israeli security official says is going to be reduced to “a city of tents” with “no buildings”. And they have to somehow not get killed amid this onslaught while somehow managing to get enough to eat and drink in a besieged city with no power. We could be on the precipice of one of the darker entries in the annals of history. Something very eerie happened the other day. I posted the following on Twitter: “If I was an Israel supporter I’d be thinking very carefully about the things I’m posting online in the build-up to what could wind up being regarded as one of history’s worst genocidal massacres. The internet doesn’t forget. What you’re tweeting today could haunt you for life.” The post received hundreds of comments, many of them hostile and argumentative. But what really disturbed me is that going through them I couldn’t find a single one that disputed my claim that Israel may be on the verge of committing one of the worst genocidal massacres in world history. They were angered by my opposition to Israel, angered by my criticism of their social media activity, but apparently they had no objection to the whole massive genocidal massacre bit. That part they take as a given, and accept. Which may come as no surprise to you if you’ve been paying attention to the way Israel apologists are talking about this situation. The Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo recently posted a compilation of numerous pro-Israel demonstrators in New York City spouting genocidal vitriol calling for the extermination of all Palestinians and turning Gaza into a parking lot. It’s ugly to watch, but it’s also just Israel apologists saying the same things in person that they’ve been saying online all week. Stokely Carmichael said “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” These genocidal ideations wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Palestinians weren’t completely beholden to the whims of a deadly military force that is backed to the hilt by the most powerful empire that has ever existed. They can kill as many Palestinians as they’ve got a mind to, and there’s a lot of consent for this throughout the member states of the US-centralized empire. When announcing the total siege of Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” This is the dehumanizing language of extermination. This is not the sort of person you want pointing modern weapons of war at defenseless civilians in an open-air concentration camp. People are going insane, in the same way they went insane after 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there was this shrieking emotional intensity which saw critical thinking go out the window and saw people’s minds consumed with a rabid lust for Muslim blood. People have a serious case of 9/11 brain this week, and it’s more than a little scary. It is very fitting, then, that numerous political and media figures have been working to brand the attacks this past Saturday as “Israel’s 9/11”. After 9/11 everyone lost their minds and started believing a bunch of lies and consenting to power-serving agendas that went on to do orders of magnitude more damage than the initial traumatic event did, and we’re seeing that same infernal trajectory unfolding again today with Israel. Comparisons to 9/11 should make everyone more critical and resistant to warmongering agendas, not less. The most consequential thing about September 11 2001 was not what happened on that day but what happened in the days that followed, with the “war on terror” causing millions of deaths and displacing tens of millions of people — vastly eclipsing the 3,000 dead from the 9/11 attacks themselves. That’s what people should think about when these 9/11 comparisons emerge. Not “Oh well we need to consent to a bunch of military agendas and kill a bunch of people then,” but “We need to be extremely skeptical about everything we’re being told, and begin pushing for peace as aggressively as we possibly can.” Reprinted with permission from Caitlin's Newsletter. Subscribe and support here. People Have A Serious Case Of 9/11 Brain Right Now, And It's Scary Click on the headline to read the full story from When President George W. Bush formulated the concept of an American Devil’s Island in Cuba, he did so heedless of the damage to the Constitution his experiment in torture and confinement without end would bring about. Bush made the case that torture and confinement at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay would allow the government to do its job. He boasted that the Constitution shouldn’t restrain him, federal laws wouldn’t apply, and federal judges couldn’t interfere. He was, of course, wrong on all counts. The Supreme Court ruled on six Gitmo cases; and the government lost five. In the case in which the government prevailed, the court ruled that the detainee filed his complaint in the wrong city. The five cases that the government lost established that federal courts do have jurisdiction over the place where the government goes for more than just a fleeting moment. The court knew that British kings would often have prisoners whom they wished to torture or detain without trial brought to foreign colonies for those purposes. The Framers of the Constitution abhorred that practice and wrote the Constitution so it wouldn’t happen here. As a result of the five Supreme Court rulings, the basic rights that all persons have who are confined anywhere by the government must be recognized and honored at Gitmo. This is so because the detainees are persons and their rights are natural to humanity. It is also because those rights are spelled out in the Constitution, without distinction between good persons or bad persons, Americans or foreigners, persons in the U.S. or outside of it. Stated differently, all human beings confined by the government have the right to due process, no matter where they are confined. This means they must be given notice of the charges against them, they have a right to remain silent, to the services of a lawyer, to confront the evidence against them, to call witnesses in their own behalf and to challenge the government’s evidence. They have the right to a speedy trial with a professional judge and a neutral jury. And they have the right to appeal. I offer this brief background in order to address the legal and constitutional debacle that Gitmo has become. In 21 years, at $100 million a year, only two trials have led to convictions by juries and seven have led to guilty pleas. Of those nine convictions (a guilty plea is a conviction), four have been overturned on appeal and two appeals are pending. Thirty detainees remain at Gitmo, 16 of whom have been cleared for release. The principal remaining defendant is the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Initially, the government claimed that Osama bin Laden was the 9/11 mastermind. But after it decided to kill bin Laden without any charges or due process, the government changed its mind and decided that KSM -- as the government calls him -- was the mastermind. KSM was tortured at a CIA black site in Poland for three years. Thereafter, he was brought to Gitmo and interrogated without torture by FBI agents. They failed to give him his Miranda warnings about his right to remain silent, the consequences of waiving that right and the right to a loyal attorney at no cost to him. Nevertheless, KSM asked for a lawyer and the agents simply ignored him. During the interrogation, KSM made some admissions about the 9/11 plot, but he did so fearful that he would soon be tortured again. This meant nothing to the FBI agents or the prosecutors in the case. But it is quite meaningful to federal judges. All evidence obtained under torture, or influenced by realistic fears of torture, or tainted in any way by torture, is inadmissible in any American court. Moreover, no statement from a defendant who has not been Mirandized may be used against him in court without an express written waiver. The lead FBI agent who failed to Mirandize KSM and who ignored his request for an attorney is a 33-year veteran of the FBI who testified that he knew the Miranda procedures well and he knew that the failure to abide them could render KSM’s statements totally inadmissible. But he thought the warnings did not apply at Gitmo, even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the Miranda warnings do apply and KSM’s FBI interrogation was in 2007. This is not brain surgery. It is criminal procedure 101. Meanwhile, Abu Zubaydah, a Gitmo detainee arrested in Pakistan in 2002, is awaiting his release. After a year of CIA torture in Thailand, he was moved to Gitmo in 2003 and has been there since. He has not been charged with any crime or offense, and the government admits it has no evidence of wrongdoing on his part -- not just insufficient evidence, but no evidence. However, he is known as the “forever prisoner” since the government claims he is too dangerous to release. The concept of a forever prisoner -- uncharged, untried and unfree -- is unprecedented, unknown and unheard of in the history of American law. Basic due process demands that he be charged and tried speedily or released. Both KSM and Zubaydah were awaiting rulings from the fourth judge in their cases when that judge announced his retirement. Now a fifth judge will be assigned to both cases. His first job will be to read the files amassed by his four judicial predecessors -- all 450,000 pages. You can’t make this up. The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau once remarked that “military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” But this is tragedy, not comedy. The defendants are human beings who have the same rights as anyone in America. If rights are lost because of government ineptitude or politics or willful blindness, they are not rights, but government giveaways. And then our rules-based system of rights and laws becomes a humanitarian and a constitutional fiasco. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com. COPYRIGHT 2023 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM Guantanamo: A Constitutional Debacle Click on the headline to read the full story from |
Ron Paul
|