In the days following the desperate evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan, the corporate press has launched an international propaganda campaign raising concerns for the “human rights” of residents of the Central Asian country.
For the last 20 years, the corporate media and imperialist powers of the world raised no objections as the United States killed over 100,000 people, set up black site torture chambers, carried out drone assassinations and robbed the country of its resources. The major imperialist powers joined the US in the invasion and occupation. The corporate press facilitated the commission of horrific crimes by promoting the war as a “just cause,” a necessary response to September 11, 2001. Those who exposed the real character of the war in Afghanistan—including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale—were locked up in prison.
But now, all of the tropes employed by the corporate media to “sell” to world public opinion the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, no matter how moth-eaten and worn out, are being revived.
This serves two purposes: to paper over the war crimes carried out by the US in the past and to prepare public opinion for an intensification of imperialist pressure on the war-ravaged population.
Reports of the suppression of a handful of small protests against the new government give few details about the nature of that “opposition,” including whether those engaged in the protests are acting at the instigation of the thousands of CIA agents and “contractors” left behind in Afghanistan by the US government.
The media campaign over repression, however, is entirely cynical and two-faced. Nothing done in Jalalabad or Kabul this week comes close to the mass slaughter carried out by the US on a weekly basis over the course of the last 20 years.
The media is not up in arms over Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose troops and police killed more than a thousand protesters at a single anti-government demonstration held after his 2013 military coup. El-Sisi, with tens of thousands imprisoned, thousands of them under death sentences, is now one of the pillars of US foreign policy in the Middle East.
The Democratic and Republican parties and the entire corporate media are replete with pious denunciations of the treatment of Afghan women. This same political establishment paid no attention as tens of thousands of Afghan women were killed by American soldiers in US drone strikes or through the devastating social collapse caused by the invasion and occupation.
But again, the media double standard is of staggering hypocrisy. In Saudi Arabia, the leading US ally among the Arab nations, women cannot drive, vote or appear in public except under escort of a male relative. Adultery is a crime punishable by death, although Shi’ites engaged in political opposition to the Sunni-based monarchy are the main victims of the mass beheadings that take place on a regular basis.
None of these barbaric practices has threatened the close collaboration of the Pentagon that makes possible the ongoing Saudi war in Yemen, which uses mass starvation as a major weapon, enforced by a naval blockade and air strikes guided by US satellite intelligence.
The media and military-political establishment also repeat concerns that Afghanistan will become a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda. We have heard this one before. This was, after all, the main pretext for the US invasion in October 2001, one month after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
It has long been known that Al Qaeda was first formed under Osama bin Laden’s leadership in the 1980s, as part of the US-backed guerrilla war by Islamic fundamentalists against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. But after the interval of ferocious hostility that included the 2001 terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda has returned to its roots as an instrument of US imperialism in both Libya and Syria.
In Libya, the commander of the NATO bombing campaign described his role as acting as “Al Qaeda’s air force,” since the Islamists were carrying out the ground war against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, both Al Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS received backing from US allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as direct support from the CIA.
Meanwhile, ISIS efforts to gain a foothold in Afghanistan have erupted in violent clashes with the Taliban and their allied militia, such as the Haqqani network. Those raising the supposed danger of renewed anti-US terrorism emanating from Afghanistan have not been able to identify any actual terrorists who would be empowered by the new regime in Kabul.
Biden made a significant concession to the pressure to reverse his policy when he declared, in the course of his interview with ABC News broadcast Thursday morning, that the August 31 deadline for the completion of US evacuation operations from the airport was flexible. “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay to get them all out,” he said.
This formulation is so elastic that it could well serve to justify a nearly indefinite extension of the US occupation of the Kabul airport and even renewed American military aggression against the country.
The more fundamental obstacle to a renewal of American aggression against Afghanistan, however, is not in that tortured country. It is the opposition within the United States itself. A poll conducted by the Associated Press during the final week of the collapse of the Afghan puppet regime found that nearly two-thirds of those interviewed thought the Afghanistan war not worth fighting.
The American people are adamantly opposed to further intervention in Afghanistan. That is one reason for the increasingly hysterical character of the media campaign for war. The US ruling elite senses this and through its media outlets expresses a fear that it is losing its political grip on the majority of the US population. The American people, and above all the American working class, are coming to their own conclusions about vital questions of war and peace and calling into question the social, economic and political structures of American capitalism.
A Biden donor and CEO of a firm that does millions in business with the Navy.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Carlos Del Toro, the newly confirmed Secretary of the Navy, issued a letter stating that the Navy's four missions would be the 4C’s of China, Culture, Climate, and COVID.
By “culture”, the Biden appointee who has been a long time Democrat fundraiser, hosting an event for Hillary Clinton, and donating to Biden and the DNC, meant political correctness.
Of the 4C's for the Navy, three were domestic Democrat policy priorities, and only one involved deterring a foreign enemy.
"I have a bias for action," Del Toro wrote. But most of the action seems to be political.
That’s not surprising for Del Toro, a failed candidate who had signed on to an anti-second amendment letter and defended illegal aliens. As a member of the Board of Visitors for the University of Mary - Washington, he had led an attack on coal jobs over global warming.
The Biden administration took great care to note that Del Toro had been appointed to the Naval Academy Alumni Association’s Special Commission on Culture, Diversity, and Inclusion.
The Commission had been created in 2020 when a member of the Naval Academy Alumni’s Board of Trustees accidentally broadcast a private conversation on Facebook in which he criticised the racist hate group, Black Lives Matter, while using racial slurs.
Despite his apology and resignation, he was expelled from the alumni association.
“Silence on these matters is not an option,” the association had declared using CRT language.
The purge was another shot in a struggle within the service branch academy alumni association between patriotic alumni who want an end to critical race theory in the institution over those who support it and are determined to humiliate, silence, and destroy those who stand in their way.
Last year a midshipman had sued the Naval Academy over his expulsion for tweeting that Breonna Taylor, the girlfriend of a drug dealer, had gotten what was coming to her when she was shot after her boyfriend opened fire on police, and suggested that rioters should be shot.
While Naval Academy leadership targeted him, others who broadcast hatred for police and support of the Black Lives Matter race riots on social media were not disciplined in any way.
The lawsuit charged that Black Lives Matter and its radical tenets "have been embraced by the Naval Academy's senior leadership and have made their pernicious assault on the First Amendment manifest".
The Naval Academy’s superintendent, Vice Admiral Sean Buck, complained that "the manner in which he was publicly commenting on sensitive topics would be perceived as offensive and inflammatory." The midshipman’s parents alleged in a fundraiser for their son’s successful legal case that Buck “unconditionally embraces the structural and institutional racism tenets of the BLM and Anti-Racist movements and that those tenets will be drilled into the minds of every member of the Brigade of Midshipmen through mandatory training.”
Choosing a member of the Commission on Culture, Diversity, and Inclusion as Navy Secretary sends a pretty clear message in the culture war between free speech and critical race theory.
But Biden’s choice of Carlos Del Toro also opened up a whole other can of worms because the immigrant is not only a Biden donor, he’s the founder, owner, and CEO of SBG Technology Solutions, a defense industry contractor that has done plenty of business with the Navy.
Del Toro was introduced by Senator Mark Warner, another beneficiary of his donations, who called the fellow Virginia resident a "longtime friend". After a brief hearing in which Senate members failed to ask Del Toro any meaningful questions, and instead delivered short speeches disguised as questions, he was quickly confirmed. There was little interest in the propriety of having the owner of a defense industry company heading up the Department of the Navy.
SBG has apparently won Navy contracts including a multi-year contract worth between tens of millions to over one hundred million dollars. This year its site featured more boasts about winning contracts with the Navy. One site tracking government contracts estimates that 2021 was already SBG's best year with $44 million. That’s a sharp increase from previous years.
Del Toro’s successful business was likely aided by his past role as a Military Assistant to the Director of Defense Programs Analysis at DOD, and with the Naval Warfare Information Systems Command. Vic Blanco, SBG’s Director of Contracts, had been a commander at the Defense Contract Management Agency.
That sort of revolving door is not uncommon at defense contractors, but it’s nothing to celebrate when people keep gaming the system on both ends.
The details of SBG’s actual ownership is unclear. Del Toro has announced that he won’t be involved with the company, but his wife, Betty Del Toro, is also SBG’s Chief Financial Officer based on a BA from the University of Phoenix. There’s no clear sign that she will be stepping down or what changes SBG or Del Toro will be making to avoid any conflicts of interest.
The media was too busy gushing over Del Toro’s immigrant status and ethnicity to bother taking a look at his company because identity politics trumps journalism. While Del Toro would be the second Hispanic Secretary of the Navy, second doesn’t really count as much of a glass ceiling smashing moment. However being a minority likely helped Del Toro’s business. SBG is listed as a minority-owned business and a service disabled veteran owned small business.
The federal government is legally obligated to direct at least 3% of federal contract spending to SDVOSB's and 5% of a quarter of its contracts to minority businesses.
SBG conveniently qualifies on both counts. Whatever the details of its ownership, if that were to significantly change with Del Toro’s departure, SBG might no longer qualify for any advantages.
Curiously, we’ve never been told what the nature of Del Toro’s disability might be.
“We remain the preeminent force in the world because of leaders like Carlos," Lloyd Austin, Biden's Secretary of Defense claimed, calling him, "an immigrant who has dedicated his life to public service".
Considering that Del Toro took what he learned in the Navy and built a very successful business around it, that’s not exactly the noble act of public service that Austin, who has profited by his own military past, is making it out to be. Biden’s new Secretary of the Navy has done very well for himself while championing the leftist politics that have done very badly by America.
In 2009, Carlos Del Toro had appeared at Obama’s town hall and asked him about making it easier for businesses like his to get government contracts.
“The more Carloses there are who are out there scratching and striving to get some business, ultimately the better deal we'll get as taxpayers," Obama had gushed.
Now that Del Toro is the Secretary of the Navy, taxpayers should ask how good that deal is.
Robert Spencer Video: Endless Wars Beginning Again
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/robert-spencer-video-endless-wars-beginning-again-frontpagemagcom/
Is the Biden Administration planning to commit the U.S. military on a large scale in Syria?
Tue Mar 23, 2021
Frontpagemag.com
[Please help us continue to bring you these vital perspectives on the news – perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Donate to the Freedom Center HERE.]
This video is brought to you by a Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration on a new exclusive webinar series, Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century. Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. And make sure to ask your own questions of our experts.
Hosted by Anni Cyrus, producer of The Glazov Gang and Founder of Live Up To Freedom.
This new webinar features Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Robert discusses: Endless Wars Beginning Again, confronting the question: Is the Biden Administration planning to commit the U.S. military on a large scale in Syria?
Don’t miss it!
And make sure to watch our last three webinars with Dr. Charles Negy, Barry Nussbaum and Bill Warner:
1. Dr. Charles Negy: Defending Against Cancel Culture.
2. Barry Nussbaum: Biden's Catastrophic Policy Reversal on Iran.
3. Bill Warner: A Civil Rights Movement for ExMuslims.
Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram: @JamieGlazov, Parler: @JamieGlazov and Twitter: @JamieGlazov.
Joe Biden’s cabinet: A rainbow coalition of imperialist reaction
The corporate media and Democratic Party are celebrating Joe Biden’s incoming cabinet as “the most diverse in US history,” proclaiming that the appointment of women, African Americans and Latinos to key cabinet positions is a sign of tremendous social progress.
In reality, Biden’s rainbow coalition of imperialist reaction encapsulates and exposes the right-wing essence of identity politics.
Nowhere is the excitement more palpable than in the editorial offices of the New York Times, a leading proponent of racial and gender politics, which gushed that the president-elect has “signaled his intention to draw from a diverse cross section of America in building his cabinet.”
The Times writes: “Unlike President Trump’s cabinet, which is more white and male than any in nearly 40 years, Mr. Biden’s list of likely top advisers promises to reflect 21st-century sensibilities.” It cites statements by Biden aides claiming the incoming cabinet “will look like America.”
Whatever the skin color of the cabinet members, the Biden administration will not think like America. The population is demanding massive social change to address the deadly pandemic and unprecedented levels of inequality and social desperation.
Though over seven in 10 Americans favor universal health care, there will be no constituency within the cabinet for such a policy. The same goes for the more than six in 10 Americans who support tuition-free college and student debt forgiveness. They will be “represented” by a cabinet consisting of equity fund partners of various races and genders.
While eight in 10 people now favor diverting money from police departments to support social programs following this summer’s nationwide, multi-racial demonstrations against police violence, Biden has pledged to increase funding for the police.
And for the over 75 percent of Americans who want troops removed from Afghanistan and Iraq and who support cutting defense spending, the multi-racial Biden cabinet will give them the exact opposite.
The nominees are not pioneers of their race or gender, they are social criminals:
Avril Haines, a former CIA deputy director, will be the first woman director of national intelligence. Haines was an architect of the Obama administration’s drone assassination program, which killed thousands of impoverished Africans, Arabs and Central Asians, with no attention to the victims’ gender.
Alejandro Mayorkas will be the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. This will be little comfort for the hundreds of thousands of Latino (and other) immigrants he will deport in the coming months and years, or to the immigrant children he jailed in cages when he was deputy DHS secretary from 2013 to 2016.
Janet Yellen will be the first woman treasury secretary, after having helped implement the quantitative easing policy that transferred tens of billions of dollars to the banks on a monthly basis during the Bush and Obama administrations, while providing no support for millions of foreclosure victims.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, an African American, will be ambassador to the United Nations. Thomas-Greenfield worked in the State Department to help American oil and mining corporations extract resources from the world’s most impoverished countries.
Though not formally a member of the cabinet, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris—the first woman and first African American in that position—made her career as a “black woman prosecutor” by trampling on the lives of the mostly impoverished people she incarcerated.
Then there are the white men, whose own records are no more and no less criminal than those of their female and minority counterparts.
Antony Blinken is the nominee for secretary of state, having helped orchestrate the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. He was a partner at a private equity firm and co-founded WestExec Advisors, which works with Israeli intelligence and helped develop Google’s censorship tools. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, supporter of intervention in Syria and the 2013 coup in Egypt that established the murderous al-Sisi dictatorship, will be “climate czar.”
As for those on the shortlists for other cabinet positions, the Times holds its breath for the prospect of Tammy Duckworth becoming the first handicapped, Thai woman to serve as defense secretary. Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg could be the first openly gay secretary of transportation.
These servants of Wall Street and US imperialism have nothing in common with the working people of “their own” race, gender or sexual orientation. It is class, not identity, which is the fundamental dividing line in American society.
This was on display during a surreal press conference announcing the cabinet yesterday, in which Biden made little mention of the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the country and the world, instead focusing on the “personal stories” of the above-named nominees. When it was their turn to speak, the nominees congratulated themselves and their loved ones for the career advancement.
Meanwhile, in the real world, 260,000 Americans are dead from the pandemic, with a disastrous winter ahead. The dead include a disproportionate number of poor and working people of all races who were forced back to work for corporate profit. They could not retreat to second or third homes in the countryside. They could not afford adequate health care and for many, underlying health problems (heart disease, obesity, smoking) are themselves badges of generations of poverty and oppression.
The ruling class’s bipartisan policy is to fuel the markets with death like coal fuels a steam engine train. Biden has reassured corporate America that “there will be no national lockdown,” while Democrats and Republicans have conspired to ensure no substantial increase in benefits for the unemployed.
In the two days since Biden began announcing his cabinet picks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up nearly 1,000 points, breaking records and crashing through the 30,000 point mark. The affluent sections within each race and gender grow obscenely wealthy while workers of all races confront varying degrees of disaster.
The selection of Biden’s cabinet shows that politics based on race, gender and sexuality has become a fundamental part of the Democratic Party’s efforts to divide workers, enrich themselves, and falsely present themselves as “representational” of the broad masses, who in reality have no representation whatsoever in any branch of government.
Meanwhile, Trump and his fascist supporters capitalize on growing dissatisfaction with the race-obsessed Democrats. Trump doubled his support among black men and women in the 2020 election and tripled his support among LGBT people. At the same time, the far right sees recruitment opportunities among young white people who have no prospects for the future and are tired of being told by Democrats that they are nothing but racist “deplorables” who deserve their desperation.
In order to immediately address the social needs of workers around the world, the trillions of dollars hoarded by the rich must be seized and made available to alleviate human suffering. This requires the greatest possible degree of unity of all workers in a common struggle.
The world working class consists of billions of people who work thousands of different jobs, speak hundreds of different languages and have hundreds of different religions and local customs. Their skin, hair and eyes happen to come in many colors. For hundreds of years, in each country, the bourgeoisie has attempted to teach workers to hate one another based on pseudo-science, lies and violence.
The great historic task of socialists is to combat the long legacy of communalism and racial politics in order to make this massive, heterogeneous social force aware of its tremendous social power. The affluent proponents of identity politics who pretend to be “left-wing” are bitter opponents of the historic struggle to unify the international working class. For this reason they must be uncompromisingly opposed.
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
Biden is bringing the warmongers back to the White House
By Andrea Widburg
For almost all of the Bush administration, Democrats were the anti-war party. They took to the streets, to the airwaves, to the print media, wherever they could, to tout their anti-message.
During Obama’s presidency, the anti-war cohort vanished, even as he dropped bombs, created terrorist groups, started wars, and triggered mass refugee movements.
Then came Trump, a truly anti-war president who was the first president in decades not to start a war. With Biden now the AP's declared president, leftists are openly thrilled about the military-industrial complex moving into the White House.
BLOG EDITOR: READ THE BOOK HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD. BUSH AND HIS CORRUPT FAMILY HAS BEEN ON THE TAKE FROM THE 9-11 INVADERS FOR 50 YEARS!
President George W. Bush was the last of the Wilson Doctrine presidents: He believed that America could “make the world safe for democracy” by sending her blood and gold overseas to kill totalitarian dictators. Of course, he didn’t spell it out in such simple terms, but that was the gist of his belief that you could end Islamic terrorism by bringing Western-style democracy to the Middle East.
In retrospect, it was a dumb idea or, at least, it was a failed idea. The reason we were able to use war to bring democracy to Japan, Italy, and Germany was because, by WWII’s end, we had blasted those countries into dust and were able to rebuild them from the ground up. In addition, we left our troops in place to keep an eye on things for the next 75 years.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, America didn’t fight to win. Instead, she repeated the mistake from Vietnam, which was to fight bad guys within the country while simultaneously trying to be nice to the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. As my father, a veteran of two wars, always said, you can no more "sort of" fight a war than you can be "sort of" pregnant. If you don’t fight to win, you’re losing.
The Iraq War turned around only with the Surge when Bush decided to fight to win, rather than wallow in a Vietnam-esque quagmire in the face of guerilla (and Iranian) warfare. The gains from those bloody battles might have lasted if America had kept her troops there for a decade or two, not to fight but to maintain the peace. Instead, Obama, the “anti-war president,” pulled American troops out of Iraq rather than acknowledge victory, creating a giant gaping hole that ISIS and Iran quickly filled.
BLOG EDIOR: YOU SAW WAR PROFITEER SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN AT OBOMB'S FIRST INAUGURAL GIVING PART OF THE ADDRESS. THE OLD WHORE'S PIMP-HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM HAS PASSED AROUND BIG BRIBES SO DEM POLS WOULD KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT FEINSTEIN'S STAGGERING CORRUPTION. SHE HAS AMASSED MULTIPLE FORTUNES OFF ELECTED OFFICE AND HAS VOTED AGAINST ANY AND ALL ATTEMPTS TO FIX THE SQUALID ETHICS OF THE BRIBES SUCKING U.S. SENATE.
Of course, Obama was a pretty deadly guy for an anti-war president. He personally targeted the victims of drone strikes in the hinterlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He decided to engage in regime-change in Libya, even though the execrable Qaddafi had already laid down his arms against America. Having toppled Qaddafi, Obama left, turning the country into a terrorist haven. And of course, Obama meddled in Syria, creating a refugee crisis that permanently changed Europe for the worse.
And what about the Democrats as a whole? From 2002 to January 2009, they were the anti-War party, taking to the streets on a regular basis to call President Bush "Hitler incarnate." (Where have we heard that before?) They turned the pathetic Cindy Sheehan, who had broken down mentally after her son died fighting in Iraq, into a saint, only to dump her when she ceased to be useful.
In January 2009, when Obama entered the White House, the anti-war movement stopped. Suddenly, American aggression was fine, contingent upon one thing: Samantha Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” theory meant that America could engage in war provided that the war did not confer any direct benefit on her. America’s troops would henceforth die as martyrs to the causes of other nations.
Eventually, America’s working and middle classes, the people whose sons and daughters were filling up the ranks of martyrdom, were done. They rejected self-styled elites using their children as vehicles for the elites’ own sense that, by sacrificing the little people, they were doing a form of penance for America’s sordid history of capitalism and liberty.
That’s one of the reasons we got Trump, who didn’t like seeing Americans die pointlessly. He made it clear to our enemies that, like Teddy Roosevelt, he would speak softly and carrying a "yuuge" stick. It worked. Despite the leftists’ certainty that Trump was Hitler, he was the first president in decades not to embroil America in new wars. Naturally, the Pentagon crowd hates Trump. A peacetime military doesn’t provide scope for promotion, nor is the money following the military businesses that give well-paying jobs to retired Pentagon types.
Leftists have now become the party of war. They are incredibly pleased that Biden will bring the military-industrial complex and pointless wars back to the forefront of American politics. Paul Joseph Watson, with his usual acumen, points out what Obama did to the world and what Biden promises to do. It’s ugly. (As usual, these Watson videos come with a language warning.)
Image: Refugees heading to Europe. YouTube screengrab.
Ten years since
WikiLeaks published the
US diplomatic cables
Today is the tenth anniversary of “Cablegate” when WikiLeaks, leading a group of partner media organisations, began reporting on the contents of hundreds of thousands of leaked United States government diplomatic cables.
The documents revealed the vast scope and global reach of US imperialism’s criminal conspiracies against the international working class, and the brutality and corruption of capitalist governments the world over.
Julian Assange (Credit: Newsonline, Flickr)
Of historic significance in their own right, the publications followed WikiLeaks’s extraordinary releases earlier that year of the “Collateral Murder” video—showing the killing of Iraqi civilians, including journalists and first responders, by US soldiers—the Afghan War Logs and the Iraq War Logs.
These publications earned WikiLeaks, and in particular its founder, the journalist and publisher Julian Assange, the undying enmity of the ruling class. A vicious campaign of slander and pseudo-legal persecution was launched against Assange that continues to this day. He is currently locked up in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison awaiting a verdict on his extradition to the US, where he faces a likely sentence of 175 years in the darkest corner of the American prison system, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Just a small sample of the diplomatic cables exposures gives a sense of their significance.
They revealed that the US had knowledge of and approved the military coup that toppled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. American officials discussed the possibility of a similar overthrow of the Pakistani government in 2009 with the country’s top general. In 2009, Washington privately supported the military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and worked to cover up the repression which followed.
US intelligence assets helped to engineer Kevin Rudd’s replacement as Australian prime minister by Julia Gillard in 2010, to ensure a continued Australian presence in the criminal US-led occupation of Afghanistan. Rudd was also targeted for suggesting America make minor accommodations to China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
The cables demonstrated that the US government was fully aware of the torture, random arrests, and extra-judicial killings carried out by its ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. They proved Washington’s detailed knowledge of state corruption in Tunisia and exposed the government’s collaboration in abrogating the rights of Tunisian citizens detained in Guantanamo Bay. Governments in Pakistan and Yemen were shown to have collaborated with US drone operations in their own countries, responsible for the repeated massacres of civilians.
American officials were aware of an explosion at a BP gas rig in the Caspian Sea in 2008 but took no action to investigate the safety of the company’s other sites. Two years later, an explosion at a rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people and created the largest marine oil spill in history. During the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the US successfully bribed and blackmailed poor countries over development aid to gain support for a watering down of climate commitments.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US embassies and UN representatives to gather personal information, including credit card and frequent flyer account numbers, internet passwords, work schedules and even DNA samples, from UN and foreign government officials. The only realistic purpose being to facilitate similar blackmail operations.
Yet more cables detailed the domination of the Nigerian state by Shell Oil.
Contrary to the claims of the US government that WikiLeaks recklessly endangered vulnerable sources named in the cables, a painstaking and collaborative process was established to review and redact the documents before publication. At Assange’s extradition hearing this September, journalists from all over the world testified to WikiLeaks’ “pioneering” use of encryption to protect sources and documents. The cables were scheduled to be released over the course of a year, on a country-by-country basis, making use of the expertise of local partner media organisations to ensure the appropriate redactions took place. In some cases, the US government itself provided suggestions for redactions.
Evidence heard at the hearing also established that it was Guardian journalist David Leigh who was responsible for allowing the release of tens of thousands of unredacted cables, which had been securely stored by WikiLeaks, in September 2011. In a hatchet-job on WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, Leigh published the password to a secure online archive containing the cables, making them freely accessible.
Assange called the US State Department to warn them of an impending release but was ignored. He and the other WikiLeaks editors then took the decision to publish the unredacted cables themselves, since the documents were already in the public domain. WikiLeaks’s main media partners, the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le Monde, used this event as a pretext to break off relations with the organisation and denounce its work.
The American government responded to the initial “Cablegate” publications with an embargo on WikiLeaks. Amazon removed the site from its web servers, PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account and Mastercard and Visa prevented payments being made to the organisation. Bank of America stopped handling WikiLeaks payments and Swiss bank PostFinance froze Assange’s assets.
WikiLeaks also came under a massive “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack, effectively preventing users from accessing its site.
Obama’s Democratic Party administration launched a furious salvo of denunciations, with then Vice President Joe Biden calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and Hilary Clinton reportedly asking, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” This opened the floodgates to a torrent of demands from Republicans and the right-wing media for his assassination.
Assange was subjected to a sprawling conspiracy, as Sweden launched a manufactured sexual assault investigation to secure his arrest. Swedish prosecutors were encouraged by the UK authorities who used a Swedish extradition request to arbitrarily detain Assange in the Ecuadorian Assembly in London, where he had claimed political asylum. Pseudo-left political organisations abandoned Assange entirely over this smear campaign, or openly attacked him as a “rapist”, despite no charges ever being laid.
In April 2019, the US, UK and a new Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno reached a deal to see Assange illegally seized from the embassy by British police.
Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign
9 July 2020
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.
Senator Dianne Feinstein
· Website
· SF Office
(415) 393-0707
· DC Office
(202) 224-3841
· Los Angeles Office
(310) 914-7300
WAR PROFITEER DIANNE FEINSTEIN SUCKS OFF BRIBES AND DEALS SIPHONED THROUGH HER PIMP-HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM FROM THE FOLLOWING:
https://twitter.com/philosophrob/status/1099103180552654848
1. Wells Fargo (Banking)
2. Northrop Grumman (Defense)
3. Bank of America (Banking)
4. General Atomics (Defense)
5. General Dynamics (Defense)
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN RANKS AS ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT AND SELF-SERVING POLITICIANS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
SHE HAS AMASSE A STAGGERING FORTUNE AS SHE STALKED THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT SHE AND BARBARA “BRIBES” BOXER VOTED ON THAT DROPPED HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS INTO THE POCKETS OF FEINSTEIN’S PIMP-HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM
BLUM HAS HANDED OUT CAMPAIGN “CONTRIBUTIONS” BRIBES TO VIRTUALLY ALL MAJOR DEM POLS SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS CLOSED ABOUT FEINSTEIN’S STAGGERING CORRUPTION.
FEINSTEIN HAS VOTED AGAINST ALL SENATE ATTEMPTS TO CURB SIPHONING OFF BRIBES TO FAMILY MEMBERS IN THE FORM OF “CONSULTANT” FEES.
BARBARA “BRIBES” BOXER MADE A VAST FORTUNE SHE SIPHONED OVER TO HER SON, OAKLAN LAWYER DOUG BOXER.
PELOSI HAS SIPHONED OFF BRIBES TO HER HUSBAND. AND THEN THERE ARE THE BACK ROOM DEALS BLUM MADE TO PROFIT ON FEINSTEIN’S RED CHINA CONNECTIONS.
JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY AS THESE TRAITORS DESTROY OUR COUNTRY AND FILL THEIR POCKETS DOING IT!
SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I got rich, really, rich, selling out my country as my husband/pimp paid out bribes to other DEM POLS so they would keep their mouths closed about our corruption!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/07/she-ranks-as-one-of-most-corrupt-and.html
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com
A SEARCH FOR FEINSTEIN AND WAR PROFITEER
Search Results
Web results
freepress.org › article › dianne-feinstein-war-profiteer-and-war-criminal
Dianne Feinstein: War profiteer and war criminal | Freepress.org
1.
Jul 5, 2013 - Dianne Feinstein: War profiteer and war criminal ... Senator Feinstein has been quick to be at the forefront of defending these programs and ...
original.antiwar.com › joshua-frank › 2006/02/28 › senator-feinsteins...
Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering - Antiwar.com Original
1.
Feb 28, 2006 - If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings, a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. ... According to the Center for Public Integrity, Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a ...
original.antiwar.com › justin › 2009/10/11 › dianne-feinstein-war-pro...
Dianne Feinstein: War Profiteer - Antiwar.com Original
1.
Oct 11, 2009 - Dianne Feinstein: War Profiteer. Justin Raimondo ... A particularly brazen example of the latter is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California ...
www.dailykos.com › story
Feinstein Family War Profits - Daily Kos
1.
May 11, 2006 - Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, could well be called ... ties and war profiteering, as it did in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, then ... senator's spouse gleaning off the spoils of war and passing it along to ...
www.dailykos.com › story
Senator Feinstein - War Profiteer by Marriage. - Daily Kos
1.
Feb 28, 2006 - Is this the kind of Democrat we want serving us? We already have Lieberman, Biden, Dodd and a host of other DINOs. It's about time for ...
www.lewrockwell.com › 2007/04 › joshua-frank › sen-feinstein-as-a-...
Sen. Feinstein as a Merchant of Death - LewRockwell
1.
Apr 4, 2007 - Democratic Blood Money and Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering ... Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California silently resigned from ...
www.sfgate.com › news › article › Army-contract-for-Feinstein-s-hus...
Army contract for Feinstein's husband / Blum is a director of ...
1.
Apr 22, 2003 - URS Corp., a San Francisco planning and engineering firm partially owned by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband, landed an Army ...
dissidentvoice.org › Apr07 › Frank05
Democratic Blood Money and Senator Feinstein's War ...
1.
Apr 5, 2007 - Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California silently resigned ... Here's a brief rundown of the Feinstein family's blatant war profiteering.
dissidentvoice.org › Mar06 › Frank01
(DV) Frank: Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering
1.
Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering by Joshua Frank www.dissidentvoice.org. March 1, 2006. Send this page to a friend! (click here). It happens all the time.
theintercept.com › 2015/09/25 › dianne-feinstein-husband-threaten-u...
The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From ...
1.
2.
Sep 25, 2015 - ... about Israel that Dianne Feinstein and her war-profiteering husband ... Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin — is merely illustrative of this ...
Page 2 of about 28,100 results (0.42 seconds)
Search Results
Web results
www.sanjoseinside.com › 2015/07/16 › sen-dianne-feinsteins-husban...
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's Husband, Richard Blum, Grows Fortune
1.
Jul 16, 2015 - Richard Blum, husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, has ... has a $50,000–$100,000 investment in Colony American Homes War I and no ...
www.fogcityjournal.com › lt_code_pink_feinstein_070409
Code Pink, Raging Grannies ask Feinstein to return profits to ...
1.
Apr 9, 2007 - of corruption and war profiteering. Feinstein releases statement ... Senator Dianne Feinstein and Richard C. Blum. Feinstein has since broken ...
www.theguardian.com › commentisfree › mar › cia-double-life-diann...
The CIA: the double life of Dianne Feinstein | Editorial ...
1.
Mar 11, 2014 - Editorial: The exasperation with the Democratic senator from California is that she hasn't also directed her outrage at the NSA.
underground.net › birds-eye-view › war-profiteering
War Profiteering – Underground Network
1.
2.
War profiteers are people, corporations, or any actors that profit from war. ... US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution, and her ...
www.democraticunderground.com › discuss › duboard
Sen Dianne Feinstein's Husband Top Iraq War Profiteer - Democratic ...
1.
Jul 24, 2008 - 32 posts - 28 authors
That's because Blum's wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, appears to have used her seat on the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee ...
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Dianne_Feinstein
Dianne Feinstein - Wikipedia
1.
2.
Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein is an American politician serving as the senior United ... At the age of 86, Feinstein is the oldest sitting U.S. Senator. ... committee has coincided with the Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq and the ...
Political party: Democratic
Children: Katherine
Education: Stanford University (BA)
Constituency: At-large district (1970–1978); 2nd ...
Missing: profiteers | Must include: profiteers
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Political_positions_of_Dianne_Feinstein
Political positions of Dianne Feinstein - Wikipedia
1.
2.
Dianne Feinstein is the current senior senator in the U.S. Senate representing California. ... Feinstein supported the Iraq war resolution in the vote of October 11, 2002; she has since claimed that she was misled by President Bush on the ...
Political party: Democratic
Missing: profiteers | Must include: profiteers
books.google.com › books
Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08
Peter Phillips, Andy Lee Roth, Project Censored - 2011 - Political Science
And in December 2007, Judicial Watch ranked Senator Feinstein as one of ... Sources “The Diane Feinstein War Profiteering Scandal,” Rush Limbaugh, ...
books.google.com › books
The Economics of War: Profiteering, Militarism and Imperialism
Imad A. Moosa - 2019 - Political Science
Profiteering, Militarism and Imperialism Imad A. Moosa ... (2003) has reported that US senator Dianne Feinstein, who voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq, and ...
books.google.com › books
Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most ...
Greg Grandin - 2015 - Biography & Autobiography
Iran-Contra and Senator John Kerry's hearings on the CIA's use of drug ... activities in Nicaragua, and now to Senator Dianne Feinstein's torture report, and the ... the press; Blackwater; Abu Ghraib; war profiteering; the torture memos; drones.
Page 3 of about 24 results (0.37 seconds)
Search Results
Web results
books.google.com › books
Combating War Profiteering: Are We Doing Enough to ...
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary - 2007 - Contracting out
Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One ... Jr., Delaware HERB KOHL, Wisconsin DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California RUSSELL ...
www.indybay.org › uploads › 2015/12/10 › feinstein_corruption_1.2...
The Corruption of Senator Feinstein - Indybay
1.
2.
PDF
Dec 10, 2015 - Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband wins CA rail contract . ... The Feinsstein Family held war profiteering contracts in Afghanistan, Bolivia and ...
www.rushlimbaugh.com › daily › 2007/03/29 › the_dianne_feinstein...
The Dianne Feinstein War Profiteering Scandal - The Rush ...
1.
Mar 29, 2007 - The Dianne Feinstein War Profiteering Scandal. Mar 29 ... 'Sen. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations ...
View all
More images for sen. dianne feinstein war profiteersReport images
Web results
www.paloaltoonline.com › square › 2008/02/24 › diane-feinsteins-co...
Diane Feinstein's Conflict of Interest in Iraq | Town Square ...
1.
Feb 24, 2008 - Shortly before my expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein's conflict of interest was published in January ... Blum & Feinstein - Corrupt War Profiteer
www.wnd.com › 2007/03
Feinstein quits committee under war-profiteer cloud - WND
1.
Mar 28, 2007 - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has abruptly walked away from her responsibilities with the Senate Military Construction Appropriations ...
dyncorp.wordpress.com › 2009/10/12 › dianne-feinstein-war-profiteer
Dianne Feinstein: War Profiteer | Dyncorp Sucks
1.
Oct 12, 2009 - A particularly brazen example of the latter is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and formerly the mayor of what is generally ...
nymag.com › intelligencer › 2020/01 › lev-parnas-on-maddow-trump-k...
Lev Parnas on Maddow: Trump Knew 'Exactly What Was ...
2 days ago - “It was never about corruption,” Parnas said, referring to the unreliable Trump-team claim that the administration wanted to go after profiteering ...
www.youtube.com › watch
How to Profit Off War: Iraq, Afghanistan and Big-Money ...
1.
2.
Jan 18, 2015 - A war profiteer is any person or organization that profits from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term has ...
.jpg){kind=link}