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#blinken

faab64@diasp.org
Farhad đŸ†“đŸ‡”đŸ‡ž â˜źïžNow

#Azerbaijan dictator spreading lies about Armenia to prepare his move to start a war!

#Aliyev has received blessings from #Blinken that #UnitedStates will back his regime in case of a conflict with Iran.

Armenian sources say that Turkey and Pentagon have promised full support in phone calls with the dictator and guaranteed supply of weapons, drones and fighter jets in the coming months.

#Armenia #Iran #Russia #FogOfWar

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brainwavelost@nerdpol.ch
brainwavelost

On February 17 2022, a Thursday, the UN security Council held a meeting about the situation in #Ukraine:

Speaking at the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Antony #Blinken revealed some conclusions of U.S. intelligence in a strategy that the U.S. and Britain have hoped will expose and pre-empt any invasion planning. The U.S. has declined to reveal much of the evidence underlying its claims.

He told the diplomats that a sudden, seemingly violent event staged by Russia to justify invasion would kick it off.

“We don’t know exactly” the pretext — a “so-called terrorist bombing” inside Russia, a staged drone strike, “a fake, even a real attack 
 using chemical weapons,” he said.

It would open with cyberattacks, along with missiles and bombs across Ukraine, he said. Painting the U.S. picture further, Blinken described the entry of Russian troops, advancing on Kyiv, a city of nearly 3 million, and other key targets.

U.S. intelligence indicated Russia also would target “specific groups” of Ukrainians, Blinken said, again without giving details.

In an implicit nod to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s appearance before the Security Council in 2003, when he cited unsubstantiated and false U.S. intelligence to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Blinken added: “Let me be clear. I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one.”

We know today that there was no 'staged violent event'. There were also no cyberattacks and no attacks on specific groups. U.S. intelligence before the war seems to have been as bad as ever.

source

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faab64@diasp.org
Farhad đŸ†“đŸ‡”đŸ‡ž â˜źïžNow

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off a Middle East trip in Cairo on Monday focussed on urging calm amid an escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

The disgusting face of hypocrisy. Over 30 Palestinians have died since start of this year, nothing happened until a Palestinian went in and killed 7 Israeli civilians in a terrorist attack.

Suddenly, #Blinken is there to promote calm and to prevent the conflict to escalate.

I'm sure the main reason for his trip is to coordinate military action against Iran and to assure #Netanyahu that no matter what he does, he can always count on unconditional support of US government.

#palestine #Israel #Occupation #Apartheid #Politocs #Hypocrisy #Terrorism #Iran

https://news.yahoo.com/blinken-mideast-tour-israel-palestinian-092744607.html

brainwavelost@nerdpol.ch
brainwavelost

Is that a #fact?

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony #Blinken has said that #?Germany should replace low-priced Russian pipeline gas with high-priced U.S. LNG gas. To import this gas, Germany will have to spend over $5 billion quickly to build port capacity to handle LNG tankers. The effect will be to make German industry uncompetitive. Bankruptcies will spread, employment will decline, and Germany’s pro-NATO leaders will impose a chronic #depression and falling living standards.

#Deutschland

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faab64@diasp.org
Farhad đŸ†“đŸ‡”đŸ‡ž â˜źïžNow

#US PRESSURING NEW LEFT-WING #HONDURAS GOVERNMENT OVER PRIVATIZED CITIES

After the Honduran government fulfilled a campaign promise by moving to end an extreme form of special economic zone, two US senators threatened to withdraw foreign aid to the country.

Honduran President Xiomara Castro, who took office in January, promised on the campaign trail to abolish special economic zones known as ZEDEs (“Economic Development and Employment Zones” in English), where private investors have outsized power to shape labor laws, judicial systems, and local governance. These zones have garnered fierce opposition in Honduras for undermining the basic tenets of #democracy.

In April, she achieved a major win when the Congress of Honduras unanimously voted to repeal the law that allows for ZEDEs, and to abolish the current ones, though the latter has to be ratified next year. But the forces who want to keep ZEDEs in operation are retaliating, and they’ve found allies on Capitol Hill.

Earlier this month, Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) called on U.S. Secretary of State Antony #Blinken to act against the Honduran government for moving to get rid of ZEDEs. In doing so, the senators are citing the findings of an influential think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which has received direct support from a U.S.-based company that is invested in one of the ZEDEs.
#SouthAmerica #Imperialism #Politics

https://therealnews.com/us-pressuring-new-left-wing-honduras-government-over-privatized-cities

US pressuring new left-wing Honduras government over privatized cities

After the Honduran government fulfilled a campaign promise by moving to end an extreme form of special economic zone, two US senators threatened to withdraw foreign aid to the country.

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berternste@pod.orkz.net
Bert Ernste

Wicked Leaks – Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage

Media Lens

(...) In our media alert of 26 July 2002, we wrote:

‘This does not mean that there is no dissent in the mainstream; on the contrary the system strongly requires the appearance of openness. In an ostensibly democratic society, a propaganda system must incorporate occasional instances of dissent. Like vaccines, these small doses of truth inoculate the public against awareness of the rigid limits of media freedom.’

That was true two decades ago when we started Media Lens. But, now, the state-corporate media system relies less on inoculation and more on quarantine: inconvenient facts, indeed whole issues, are simply kept from public awareness. We have moved far closer to a totalitarian system depending on outright censorship. (...)

(Text continues under the photo.)

Photo of chained newspapers

US media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), made the key point:

‘Any serious coverage of the Nord Stream attack should acknowledge that opposition to the pipeline has been a centerpiece of the US grand strategy in Europe. The long-term goal has been to keep Russia isolated and disjointed from Europe, and to keep the countries of Europe tied to US markets. Ever since German and Russian energy companies signed a deal to begin development on Nord Stream 2, the entire machinery of Washington has been working overtime to scuttle it.’

The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. For example, FAIR noted that during his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was ‘determined to do whatever I can to prevent’ Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the US State Department reiterated that ‘any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline’.

If that doesn’t make US hostility to the pipelines clear enough, President Joe Biden told reporters in February:

‘If Russia invades
then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’

Asked by a reporter how the US intended to end a project that was, after all, under German control, Biden responded:

‘I promise you, we will be able to do that.’

No surprise, then, that, following the attack, Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as a ‘tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,’ adding that this ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come’.

Former UN weapons inspector and political analyst Scott Ritter commented:

‘Intent, motive and means: People serving life sentences in U.S. prisons have been convicted on weaker grounds than the circumstantial evidence against Washington for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.’ (...)

Despite all of this, FAIR reported of US corporate media coverage:

‘Much of the media cast their suspicions towards Russia, including Bloomberg (9/27/22), Vox (9/29/22), Associated Press (9/30/22) and much of cable news. With few exceptions, speculation on US involvement has seemingly been deemed an intellectual no-fly-zone.’

Thus, the possibility of US involvement has been intellectually quarantined. Instead, US media have been tying themselves in knots trying to find alternative explanations. (...)

In Britain, the Guardian affected similar confusion. (...)

FAIR discussed a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski – a one-time Polish defence minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’ in 2012 by Foreign Policy. FAIR reported:

‘Sikorski tweeted a picture of the methane leak in the ocean, along with the caption, “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy.” He later tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” with the same picture.’ (...)

Curiously, non-corporate journalists like Jonathan Cook, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron MatĂ©, Bryce Green, even hippy Russell Brand, were able to find all the evidence and arguments omitted by ‘mainstream’ journalists supported by far greater resources.

And this makes the point with which we began this alert: there is now so much high-quality journalism exposing the establishment outside the state-corporate ‘mainstream’, that the task of the ‘mainstream’ now is to protect the establishment by acting as a buffer blocking citizen journalism from public awareness. (...)

Complete article

Tags: #media #mass_media #journalist #journalism #the_guardian #mainstream_media #msm #propaganda #censorship #putin #biden #blinken #nord_stream #sabotage #russia #ukraine #bloomberg #associated_press #ap #cable_news #the_telegraph #fair #sikorski #mail_on_sunday #observer

faab64@diasp.org
Farhad đŸ†“đŸ‡”đŸ‡ž â˜źïžNow

#Blinken Says #NordStream Sabotage Is a ‘Tremendous Opportunity’

The secretary of state says it's an opportunity to remove Europe's dependency on Russian energy
#Politics #Europe #Russia #Energy

https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-canadian-foreign-minister-melanie-joly-at-a-joint-press-availability/#:~:text=It’s%20a%20tremendous,years%20to%20come

Secretary Antony J. Blinken And Canadian Foreign Minister MĂ©lanie Joly At a Joint Press Availability - United States Department of State

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Well, good afternoon, everybody.  Bonjour, tout le monde. Foreign Minister Joly, MĂ©lanie, as always, I’m delighted to welcome you back to the State Department, to the United States, and it is a great pleasure to continue our...

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berternste@pod.orkz.net
Bert Ernste

Welcome to a Science-Fiction Planet

How George Orwell's Doublethink Became the Way of the World

Tom Dispatch

(...) Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush’s assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east” — and that pledge has been verified. My question to you is, why didn’t Gorbachev get that in writing?

Noam Chomsky: He accepted a gentleman’s agreement, which is not that uncommon in diplomacy. Shake-of-the-hand. Furthermore, having it on paper would have made no difference whatsoever. Treaties that are on paper are torn up all the time. What matters is good faith. And in fact, H.W. Bush, the first Bush, did honor the agreement explicitly. (...)

Clinton in his first couple of years also adhered to it. What the specialists say is that by about 1994, Clinton started to, as they put it, talk from both sides of his mouth. To the Russians he was saying: Yes, we’re going to adhere to the agreement. To the Polish community in the United States and other ethnic minorities, he was saying: Don’t worry, we’ll incorporate you within NATO. (...)

From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine — advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command. (...)

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming majority — I think about 70% of the vote — on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium. He was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.

Well, he’s a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had had any backing from the United States. The U.S. refused. (...) The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by step into the NATO military command. That accelerated further when President Biden was elected. (...)

On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.

The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. (...) So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. (...)

Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.

There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia. (...)

Barsamian: In the media, and among the political class in the United States, and probably in Europe, there’s much moral outrage about Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are occurring as they do in every war. Don’t you find that moral outrage a bit selective though?

Chomsky: The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral outrage. (...)

When people in the Global South hear this, they don’t know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. (...) George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq. (...)

Or take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia — “anything that flies on anything that moves” was his phrase. I don’t know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing of Cambodia. We don’t know much about it because we don’t investigate our own crimes. (...) Then there’s our role in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and instituting a vicious dictatorship there, and on and on. (...)

Barsamian: I’ve got a little puzzle for you. It’s in two parts. Russia’s military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy’s and Spain’s. That’s one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let’s expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts?

(...) George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both of them. (...)

Such doublethink is, for instance, characteristic of Cold War thinking. You go way back to the major Cold War document of those years, NSC-68 in 1950. Look at it carefully and it showed that Europe alone, quite apart from the United States, was militarily on a par with Russia. But of course, we still had to have a huge rearmament program to counter the Kremlin design for world conquest. (...)

Russia, [diplomat George Kennan] thought, would ultimately collapse from internal contradictions, which turned out to be correct. But he was considered a dove all the way through. In 1952, he was in favor of the unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin’s proposal as well. Kennan was ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.

Stalin’s initiative. Kennan’s proposal. Some Europeans supported it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington. (...)

Barsamian: In an article in Truthout, you quote Eisenhower’s 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech. What did you find of interest there?

Chomsky: You should read it and you’ll see why it’s interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He — or whoever wrote the speech — put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we’re building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves. (...)

Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge military budget. Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which represents a major attack on our society. (...)

The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper tiger, so militarily incompetent it can’t move a couple of miles beyond its border without collapse. (...)

Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible. That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures.

If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.

Complete article

Cover of book by David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky

Tags: #ukraine #us #bush #clinton #nato #diplomacy #war #invasion #agression #russia #donbas #zelensky #minsk_II #biden #putin #blinken #food_shortages #hunger #europa #eu #european_union #afghanistan #iraq #global_south #cambodia #carpet_bombing #kissinger #chile #allende #coup #cold_war #kennedy #Khrushchev #eisenhower #military_industrial_complex #pentagon #doublethink

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sylviaj@joindiaspora.com
Sylvia J

Who Will Step Up in Biden’s DOJ to Save Julian Assange?

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/11/who-will-step-up-in-bidens-doj-to-save-julian-assange/

In 1999, #VanitaGupta fought for the #freedom of nearly 40 #wrongfully #convicted people in the small town of #Tulia, #Texas. She made their fight, her fight - and she #won their freedom. Now, we need her to make #OurFightHerFight.

#julianassange #assange #gupta #associate-attorney-general #aclu #doj #justice #firstamendment #journalism #wikileaks #freepress #freespeech #civilrights #video #randycredico #haiti #immigration #danielfoote #joebiden #extradition #us #britain #australia #blinken #merrickgarland #sigurdurthordarson #dropthecharges #noextradition #organize #weareallassange

Who Will Step Up in Biden's DOJ to Save Julian Assange?

Last month Biden's Haitian envoy resigned on principle. Is there someone in Biden's Justice Department who would push the attorney general to drop the prosecution of Julian Assange?, asks Joe Lauria. By Joe Lauria Special to Consortium...

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