The Russian People Have Given The Kremlin Carte Blanche To Get Even

strategic culture |  Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

Senseless Bloodbath In The Moscow Region

sonar21  |  Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:

“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United States.

“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .

“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels. The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working for Moscow all along.”

In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the European nations on its western border and installed governments that would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet Union.

One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and could not be trusted.

The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:

“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”

The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:

“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan, later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.

At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of “Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO countries combined — the CIA missed them all.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things....,

dailysignal  |  President Joe Biden gave a tumultuous news conference hours after special counsel Robert Hur released a report Thursday recommending against charging him for retaining classified documents from his years as vice president and senator, in part because the jury would find Biden sympathetic as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.

During the news conference, Biden claimed that Hur’s comments about his mental state were “extraneous commentary,” and he attempted to allay concerns. Yet the president blamed his staff for the mishandling of classified documents, insisted that his memory was fine but mixed up the countries of Egypt and Mexico and appeared to forget where his son Beau got a set of rosary beads the bereaved father says he highly values.

House Speaker Mike Johnson responded on X, saying the conference proved Biden is not fit to be president.

“The president’s press conference this evening further confirmed on live television what the special counsel report outlined. He is not fit to be president,” Johnson wrote.

In January 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Hur, the U.S. attorney in Maryland appointed by then-President Donald Trump, to investigate Biden’s improper retention of classified documents after he left the Senate in 2009 and the vice presidency in 2017.

The records Biden kept included classified documents regarding military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, along with national security records that implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” Hur’s report finds.

The special counsel’s report finds a “shortage of evidence” proving that Biden intentionally violated the law and concludes “there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.” Yet the report also finds that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.”

An attorney for Biden claimed the classified documents were “unexpectedly discovered” Nov. 2, 2022, at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and that he immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration. Biden lawyers later discovered a “small number” of additional classified documents in a storage space in the garage of Biden’s private home in Wilmington, Delaware.

These admissions from Biden’s attorneys came after the FBI opened an investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents in March 2022. Eight months later, Garland appointed former DOJ official Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents. A grand jury ultimately indicted Trump for his alleged offenses in June 2023.

Hur’s report notes Biden’s willing cooperation with his investigation, saying that cooperation “will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully—that is, with intent to break the law—as the statute requires.”

Hur’s report also takes Biden’s mental state into account on numerous occasions, finding that his “poor memory” and “diminished faculties” make his defenses plausible and would likely endear him to a jury.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report notes. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

 

Russia Makes More Artillery Shells In One Day Than The West Can Make In A Month

russiamatters  |  As Russia begins its one-year presidency of the BRICS in a turbulent world, great power competition in the Global South will intensify. The Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war have enabled the Kremlin to solidify and increase its influence in the Global South, or what Russia now calls the “World Majority.” The Global South comprises those developing or less- developed countries in the Southern Hemisphere. The Russian definition of the World Majority, however, is not economic, but political. It refers to a community of non-Western countries that have no binding relationships with the United States and the organizations it patronizes.

While the U.S. and its allies struggled to persuade these countries to support Ukraine and reject the Kremlin’s narrative about the origins and course of the war, Russia has largely succeeded in convincing them that the West is to blame for both the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas wars. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in his December interview with leading Russian TV propagandist Dmitri Kiselev, praised the “World Majority” countries “who have not publicly declared Russia as an enemy.” These countries, he declared, “are ready to work with us honestly, mutually beneficially and mutually respectfully, including in the economy, in politics, in the security sphere,” and he went on to predict that ties with these counties would further intensify in 2024. The West, Russia’s top diplomat proclaimed, does not respect these countries’ interests. In the interview, Lavrov also highlighted the 2024 Russian presidency of the BRICS, which began on Jan. 1, and now has expanded to include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran, bringing the group’s share of world GDP and population to 34% and 45%, respectively (see tables 1 and 2 below).[1] 

Why has Russia succeeded in strengthening its standing with many countries in the Global South even as it pursues its brutal war of attrition in Ukraine? Moscow starts out with a major advantage—deep skepticism amongst these countries about the West, especially the United States. Many Global South countries assert that they see no difference between what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what the United States did in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. Russia also taps into the alienation and resentment in many countries that both the war and the West’s rivalry with China are distracting attention and shifting resources away from their own urgent challenges, such as debt, economic growth, food, energy, climate change and health. These countries view the United States and many of its European allies as neo-colonial powers who still treat them with condescension. They do not accept that what Russia in doing in Ukraine is a form of colonialism, because Russia repeatedly invokes the Soviet past and the USSR’s support for anti-colonial liberation movements to prove its bona fides as the leading anti-colonial power. Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar Subrahmanyam told European ministers that they should “grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.”[2]

Votes in the United Nations General Assembly tend to reflect these sentiments. In February 2023, the votes in favor of condemning Russia’s invasion as a violation of the U.N. Charter and demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine were 141 in favor, 7 against, with 32 abstentions, including China, India and other countries in the Global South. However, a significant number of Global South countries did vote to condemn Russia.

Although Western countries have much more to offer the Global South economically than does Russia, Moscow does retain levers of economic influence. Energy remains the most important. Europe has largely weaned itself off Russian hydrocarbons, but cheap Russian oil remains attractive to many countries. India, a traditional partner of both the Soviet Union and Russia, has been the second largest  purchaser of Russian oil after China, enabling Russia to continue to earn billions of dollars despite Western sanctions on Russian energy and the oil price cap. Nuclear energy exports, which are not sanctioned, are also growing. Rosatom has a 74% share of the world’s nuclear power plant market, with 73 projects in 29 different countries. Russian fertilizer and grain exports are important for a number of countries. Recently Russia shipped free grain to six African countries, no doubt to counter the fact that its refusal to renew the earlier Black Sea grain deals had harmed its reputation in parts of the Global South. 

Arms sales have been a significant element in Russia’s competition with the United States in parts of the Global South. However, the sub-par performance of the Russia military in Ukraine and the shoddy condition of some of the weaponry made Russia’s customers question the wisdom of continuing to purchase its arms. Western sanctions have also curbed Russia’s ability to export weapons, as Russia needs to use its own weapons in Ukraine. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia’s share of global arms exports fell from 22% in 2013-2017 to 16% from 2018 to 2022, while the U.S. increased its share from 33% to 40%.[3] India has cut back on its imports of Russian weapons. Nevertheless, during Jaishankar’s December 2023 visit to Moscow, Lavrov announced that they had made significant progress on plans to jointly produce military equipment. [4]

Russia Inks Expansive New Energy And Weapons Deal With Iran

oilprice  |  Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, gave his official approval on 18 January to a new 20-year comprehensive cooperation deal between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, according to a senior energy source in Iran and a senior source in the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex, exclusively spoken to by OilPrice.com last week. The 20-year deal – ‘The Treaty on the Basis of Mutual Relations and Principles of Cooperation between Iran and Russia’ - was presented for his consideration on 11 December 2023. It will replace the 10-year-deal signed in March 2001 (extended twice by five years) and has been expanded not only in duration but also in scope and scale, particularly in the defense and energy sectors. In several respects, the new deal additionally complements key elements of the all-encompassing ‘Iran-China 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement’, as first revealed anywhere in the world in my 3 September 2019 article on the subject and analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order.

In the energy sector to begin with, the new deal gives Russia the first right of extraction in the Iranian section of the Caspian Sea, including the potentially huge Chalous field. The wider Caspian basins area, including both onshore and offshore fields, is conservatively estimated to have around 48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas in proven and probable reserves. In 2019, Russia was instrumental in changing the legal status of the Caspian basins area, cutting Iran’s share from 50 percent to just 11.875 percent in the process, as also detailed in my new book. Before the Chalous discovery, this meant that Iran would lose at least US$3.2 trillion in revenues from the lost value of energy products across the shared assets of the Caspian Sea resource going forward. Given the newest internal-use only estimates from Iran and Russia, this figure could be a lot higher. Previously, the estimates were that Chalous contained around 124 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas in place. This equated to around one quarter of the gas reserves contained in Iran’s supergiant South Pars natural gas field that account for around 40 percent of Iran’s total estimated gas reserves and about 80 per cent of its gas production. The new estimates are that it is a twin-field site, nine kilometres apart, with ‘Greater’ Chalous having 208 bcf of gas in place, and ‘Lesser’ Chalous having 42 bcf of gas, giving a combined figure of 250 bcm of gas. 

Related: E&P Companies Face Tough Year Despite Oil Patch 'Bumper Crop'

The same right of first extraction for Russia will also now apply to Iran’s major oil and gas fields in the Khorramshahr and nearby Ilam provinces that border Iraq. The shared fields of Iran and Iraq have long allowed Tehran to side-step sanctions in place against its key oil sector, as it is impossible to tell what oil has come from the Iranian side or the Iraqi side of these fields, which means that Iran is able simply to rebrand its own sanctioned oil as unsanctioned Iraqi oil and ship it anywhere it wants, as also analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. Former Petroleum Minister, Bijan Zanganeh, publicly highlighted this very practice when he said in 2020: “What we export is not under Iran’s name. The documents are changed over and over, as well as [the] specifications.” Another advantage of the shared fields is that they allow effectively free movement of personnel from the Iranian side to the Iraqi side, and the utilisation of key oil and gas developments across Iraq is a key part of Iran’s longstanding plan, fully supported by Russia, to build a ‘land bridge’ to the Mediterranean Sea coast of Syria. This would enable Iran and Russia to exponentially increase weapons delivery into southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights area of Syria to be used in attacks on Israel. The core aim of this policy is to provoke a broader conflict in the Middle East that would draw in the U.S. and its allies into an unwinnable war of the sort seen recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which may soon be seen as the Israel-Hamas War escalates.

The price of all manufactured items traded between Russia and Iran, including military and energy hardware, has been formalised in the new deal, although also not in Iran’s favour. For Iranian goods exported to Russia, Tehran will receive the cost of production plus 8 percent. However, these export sales to Russia will not be transferred to Iran, but rather they will be held as credit in the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). Moreover, Iran will receive a huge markdown on US dollar/Rouble or Euro/Rouble exchange rates used to calculate its credits in the CBR. Conversely, for Russian goods exported to Iran, Moscow will receive the payment in advance of delivery and at a much stronger exchange rate that benefits Russia. Moreover, the base price before any exchange rate calculations are made, will be founded on the highest price that Russia has received in the previous 180 days for whichever product it is selling Iran. This system has informally been in place for several weeks now, and according to the senior energy sector source in Tehran exclusively spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, Russia has ensured itself the highest possible price by selling to Belarus at a very large premium whichever product it intends to sell later to Iran, so establishing the required pricing benchmark. Payments for goods and services falling outside the direct finance route between the central banks of the two countries can now be done through interbank transfers between Iranian and Russian banks. Those also involving renminbi can also be done through China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) system, its alternative to the globally-dominant Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system. 

In many cases, the expansion of military cooperation between Iran and Russia is tied into the energy sector elements of the new 20-year deal. Progress is earmarked to be made on upgrading the facilities at the key airports and seaports that have long been targeted by Russia as being especially useful for dual-use by its air force and navy, and which are also close to major oil and gas facilities. Top of the list of Iranian airports that Russia regards as the best for dual-use by its air force are Hamedan, Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, and Abadan, and it is apposite to note that in August 2016, Russia used the Hamedan airbase to launch attacks on targets in Syria using both Tupolev-22M3 long-range bombers and Sukhoi-34 strike fighters. Top of the list of seaports for use by its navy are Chabahar, Bandar-e-Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas. Similarly linked to Russia’s gaining the first right of extraction in the Iranian section of the Caspian Sea is that it will also be given a joint command capability over the northern aerospace defense section of Iran’s Caspian area.

The Pentagon Can't Account For 63% Of Its Assets But Congress Gives Them $886 Billion Just The Same...,

thepressunited  |   The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain

Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.

The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.

This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment. 

Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up. 

Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.

America Is Indispensable To Who?

responsiblestatecraft  |  In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is “the indispensable nation.” This is indeed the belief by which the U.S. foreign and security establishment lives and works.

As Biden’s speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be excused if they take place as part of America’s “indispensable” mission to lead the world towards “freedom” and “democracy.”

It is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims about the “Rules-Based Order” cannot answer this question. In the Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.

In this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that of providing stability.

Instead, it has all too often acted a force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious effort to promote a settlement.

Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.

This strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.

And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated: More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than 30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion subsequently expended in the “Global War on Terror.”

Netanyahu Laying Down With Dogs Has All Of Israel Itching With Fleas...,

timesofindia  |  NEW DELHI: Israel carried out deadly air strikes and pounded hundreds of locations in Gaza on Sunday, a day after suffering its bloodiest attack in decades when Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns, killing hundreds and abducting an unknown number of others, threatening a major new war in the Middle East.

Across the Middle East, there were demonstrations in support of Hamas while Iran and Hezbollah praised the attack.

Western countries, led by the United States, have denounced the attack by Hamas, while President Joe Biden issued a blunt warning to Iran and other countries: "This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks."

Israel pounds Gaza after deadly Hamas raid as conflict threatens to spiral

Osama Hamdan, Hamas leader in Lebanon, said Saturday's operation should make Arab states realise that accepting Israeli security demands would not bring peace.
Our guns and rockets are with you: Hezbollah tells Hamas

In a sign the conflict could quickly spread beyond Gaza, Israeli artillery responded to mortar fire from Lebanon and drone strikes hit a post of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia along Israel's northern border on Sunday.

Hezbollah said in a statement that it had carried out a rocket and artillery attack on three posts including a "radar site" in the Shebaa Farms, a slice of land occupied by Israel since 1967 that Lebanon claims. Israel responded with artillery fire on southern Lebanon. There were no reports of casualties.

Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said his group's "guns and rockets" were with Hamas. "Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you. Everything we have is with you," Safieddine said at an event in the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahieh on Beirut's outskirts in solidarity with the Palestinian fighters.

Hezbollah and Israel exchange fire as Israeli soldiers battle Hamas on second day of surprise attack

Hezbollah fought a war with Israel in 2006 and tensions have regularly flared since.

"We recommend Hezbollah not to come into this and I don't think they will," Israel's army spokesperson said.

Taliban fighters to join Palestine conflict?

Meanwhile, some media reports also stated that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has requested the Iranian and Iraqi governments to provide safe passage to its fighters so they can join the conflict in Palestine. Most of the reports have cited a social media account on X by the name 'Taliban Public Relations Department'.
The authenticity of the social media account has not been verified.

Several media reports have cited a Taliban spokesperson who denied that any such request had been sent to Iran or Iraq.

Ever since storming to power in Kabul after US troops pulled out in August 2021, the Taliban has been attempting -- with little success -- to train its fighters to use US military hardware that has been left behind. The fighters are, however, well armed.

More than $7.1 billion in US-funded military equipment was in the possession of the Afghan government when it fell to the Taliban in August 2021, according to a Defense Department report. Though more than half of it was ground vehicles, it also included more than 316,000 weapons plus ammunition and other accessories.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, meanwhile, said the assault that began in Gaza will spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem. Gazans have lived under an Israeli blockade for 16 years, since Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007.

Why is al-Aqsa at the centre of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In a speech, Haniyeh highlighted what he called threats to Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, a site that is also holy to Jews who know it as the Temple Mount, the continuation of Israel's blockade on Gaza and Israeli normalisation with countries in the region.


"How many times have we warned you that the Palestinian people have been living in refugee camps for 75 years, and you refuse to recognise the rights of our people?"

Everything The Biden Administration Does Seems Designed To Give Americans The Finger

jonathanturley  |  We previously discussed the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and its controversial head Nina Jankowicz. After the outcry over the program, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally relented and disbanded the board while insisting that it was never about censoring opposing views. Jankowicz has sued over the portrayal of her views. Now, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) has exposed just how broad the scope of the censorship efforts were under the board in combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM). This range of authority in what the agency called the “MDM space,” included targeting views on racial justice and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

New documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”

Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.

Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice, Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact but viewed as misleading in context.

What is also troubling is the continued effort to conceal these censorship activities. Homeland redacted much of this information on a now defunct board under FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations.” That claim is itself chilling.

After the demise of the board, National Public Radio ran an interview entitled “How DHS’s disinformation board fell victim to misinformation.”

As the title suggests, NPR just repeated the view of Jankowicz despite the objections of many of us in the free speech community. Jankowicz insisted “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently.” Yet, what were the criminal investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement efforts now being claimed as connected to this work?

Recently, a court found that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts constituted “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Those words by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty are part of a 155-page opinion granting a temporary injunction, requested by Louisiana and Missouri, to prevent White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship.

David Grusch New Interview

 

12:00 onwards - Grusch outlines that leakers are under penalty of imprisonment and execution.

16:50 onward “non human Biologics” he stated in an interview previously they’re pilots and he doesn’t know what their actual job was. They were “nonhuman intelligence” pilots.

18:00 onward he was cleared by the Pentagon to talk about this.

19:00 onward Grusch insinuates that the initial reasoning for hiding the information was the ontological shock it would cause in society due to society’s religiousness at the time, along with concealing the information from adversaries like Russia.

20:40 onward - the officials involved in the Manhattan Project also created the laws related to obfuscation and secrecy of the topic. 21:28 - retrieved UAP materials that give off radiation are classified under the Atomic Energy Act (intentionally).

23:00 onward - there was a deeper classified project (related to the Manhattan Project) studying UFOs aside from Project Blue Book

28:00 onward- Grusch states that it’s hard to tell how far ahead their (the nonhuman intelligence) technology is. “It’s hard to state how far in advance it is. You’re just assuming some sort of linear progression. They’ve made an asymptotal leap that put them over the edge. They’re similarly as advanced as us but they’ve had an asymmetric evolution they went a different path than us. While we’ve made nuclear weapons, they’ve made a propulsion discovery but they’re not that much more advanced than you and I”.

29:50- Grusch states that once we unlocked nuclear power we made major technological strides. We may be one discovery away from manipulating spacetime.

30:29- the UFOs are interested in our nuclear technology.

36:00 onward - Grusch references Lue Elizondo’s comment on the ETs studying us and it’s possible the UFO crashes were intentionally seeded to test humanity’s development in relation to being exposed to this technology.

42:00 onwards - there may have been scientific breakthroughs that were hidden from the public.

44:00 - Dr Hal Puthoff of the Pentagon insinuates that antigravity research did get somewhere (made progress) and then was hidden.

47:00 onward - UFO metamaterials are discussed.

59:50- the connection of the “UFO Disclosure” movement (and intentional disinformation) to the “elite” is described by the host.

1:04:00 onwards - there’s a long history of “UFO debunkers” being directly linked to government organizations that have actually studied UAP.

1:17:28- this portion is interesting since it references information that Elizondo and Dr Garry Nolan have stated.

For background, Elizondo (Pentagon), Dr. Garry Nolan (accomplished academic who was approached by the CIA to study UAPs, also stated they told him information regarding the beings operating the crafts), and John Ramirez [CIA- was referenced as having worked there separately by Jim Semivan of the CIA, referenced in this article (https://www.benzinga.com/amp/content/34082411)] have all stated, in summary, that members within the defense establishment believe these beings are bioengineered AI.

Grusch notably references this at this time stamp as a possibility to what these beings are. If you notice, he goes out of his way to reference specifically what Elizondo had stated in a past interview, that the ETs are designed to look humanoid to interact with humans. (In Elizondo’s interview, he brought up an example of how zookeepers in China disguise themselves as pandas to interact with the pandas, and what we are seeing is a similar situation).

1:19:30- ETs being our descendants from the future is discussed. The host describes this as being a possible reason for the ET non-interventionism. As in, they don’t want to harm the timeline too much such that their own existence is nullified. (My note: it would be interesting if some of what people have witnessed is in fact humans from the future that have mastered ET propulsion and time travel technology, which is why they only appear fleetingly in some instances and choose not to intervene in major events).

1:27:00 onward - military sensory systems disproportionately detect UFOs since their collection mechanisms are more advanced than what’s available to the average person.

1:32:30 onward - Grusch details how being on the Autism spectrum have shaped his interactions.

Grusch background (wiki): David Charles Grusch is a decorated Afghanistan combat veteran and former Air Force intelligence officer[1] who worked in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).[2][3][4][5] From 2019 to 2021, he was the representative of the NRO to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.[3][4][6] From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the co-lead for UAP analysis at the NGA and its representative to the task force.[2] He assisted in drafting the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023,[7] which includes provisions for reporting of UFOs, including whistleblower protections and exemptions to non-disclosure orders and agreements.[8][9][10] Congressional interest in UFO sightings immediately prior to Grusch's public claims surrounded questions about the four objects that the Air Force shot down in February 2023.[11]

Obama Literally Would Not Exist Without The Central Intelligence Agency

reason  |  Although the debate over Barack Obama's national identity ended with the release of his long-form birth certificate, questions about his political identity continue. Is he a socialist, a New Deal liberal, a neoliberal, a neoconservative, a fascist, an Uncle Tom, a black nationalist, or just an unprincipled coward? Does he identify with whites, with blacks, or, as Cornel West recently claimed, with Jews? Does he want an accountable or monarchical executive branch? Does he side with investment bankers or with foreclosed mortgagers? Does he really believe in God? If so, which one?

Obama's apparent inconsistency on several issues has helped fuel the public debate over his beliefs. But if anything in Obama's rhetoric and policies has been constant, it is his devotion to the American empire. Throughout the presidential campaign, he promised to fulfill the mission of his heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy: strengthening American influence across the world. Obama declared that, like the globalist American leaders of the past, "we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events."

Many of the candidate's most loyal supporters were veterans of the movements against U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Central America, but Obama himself flatly asserted that the United States "has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known" and therefore "must lead the world, by deed and example." Before audiences who somehow saw him as a peace candidate, he lauded Franklin Roosevelt for building "the most formidable military the world has ever seen" and promised to continue the tradition. As lifelong peaceniks plastered his face on their cars and homes and made their children march in parades for him, the candidate made it clear, in speeches, articles, and the 2008 Democratic National Platform, that if elected he would seek to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps, increase military spending, and escalate the war in Afghanistan.

Similarly, 10 months after taking office, Obama used the Nobel Peace Prize to declare war on potentially most of the world. In his October 2009 acceptance speech, the president pledged to go "beyond self-defense"—with armed intervention when necessary—anywhere "the inherent rights and dignity of every individual" are denied. Moreover, he ominously asserted that economic development "rarely takes root without security" and that "military leaders in my own country" believe that "our common security hangs in the balance" so long as climate change is not swiftly and forcefully addressed. Seldom has a political leader delivered such a strident and comprehensive call for American hegemony.

As we now know, Obama's imperial rhetoric was not empty. With the cooperation of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, he did in fact increase Pentagon spending and expand the Army and Marine Corps to create the largest and most powerful military in the history of the world, tripled down in Afghanistan and Pakistan, launched new military operations in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, and maintained 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Clearly, anyone who saw Obama as a peacemaker simply did not listen to what he was saying. But his commitment to preserving and expanding the American empire should also be no surprise to anyone familiar with the facts of his childhood. Obama is, after all, the empire's son. Neither New York Times reporter Janny Scott nor conservative public intellectual Dinesh D'Souza—the authors of books on Obama's mother and father, respectively—understand this. But for anyone with knowledge of the involvement of the United States in Indonesia and Kenya during Obama's childhood, the information Scott and D'Souza provide makes it clear that Obama is fundamentally a product of American imperialism.

 

The Greatest Military In Human History

tomdispatch  |  In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”

As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?

Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.

In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.

Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.

And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?

The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)

Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.

The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole

In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.

Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.

Disclosure Is FAR From Sudden Transparency To The Public

AOC on UAP hearing & government corruption, Full Video
by u/strawberrybrooks in UFOs

 

What we are witnessing is the results of years of hard work by more than a few brave souls that have been working (and risking) their asses off to bring about more transparency to this issue.

I recently put together a timeline of some of what I consider the most important events that I feel have led us here. I share it in case some of you reading find it useful or interesting. Just keep in mind these are but a handful of remarkable events in an ongoing process that arguably has decades in the making.

2017 - The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — previously known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) — hits the public stage.

An unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP).

2017 - The Pentagon declassifies and releases 3 videos of confirmed Unidentified Flying Objects — obtained from credible military instruments and sources (Now renamed to “UAPs”, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). The NY Times reports on the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/pentagon-ufo-videos.html

2020 - Fighter pilot Commander David Fravor reveals he had an aerial interaction with an UPA — which displayed tech capabilities far beyond what we currently have. An incident related to the operations involved to one of the videos released by the Pentagon, which were recorded back in 2004.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E

2021 - Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood, Navy Weapon Systems Officer corroborates Commander Favor's testimony — and comes forth as the person who recorded the “Tic Tac Video”, one of the Pentagon's declassified UFO/UAP videos.

https://youtu.be/xPXFcFyZma0

2022 - The US Department of Defense announces the establishment of AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, an office within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other phenomena in the air, sea, and/or space and/or on land: sometimes referred to as "unidentified aerial phenomena" or "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP); after mounting evidence of the potential existence of these technologies.

AARO was succeeding the "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force" (UAPTF), a program within the Office of Naval Intelligence used to "standardize collection and reporting" of sightings of UFOs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3100053/dod-announces-the-establishment-of-the-all-domain-anomaly-resolution-office/

2022 - The US senate passes the "Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act of 2021" — UFO Whistleblowers would get immunity under new amendment, giving government employees and contractors immunity from reprisal for coming forward about UFO encounters and secret programs.

https://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/UAP%20Reporting%20Procedures220705122640993.pdf

https://www.realcleardefense.com/2022/07/08/ufo_whistleblowers_would_get_immunity_under_new_amendment_841436.html

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblowers-would-get-protection-under-new-amendment

June 5, 2023, - U.S. Air Force (USAF) officer and former intelligence official David Grusch testimony — a decorated combat officer within the USAF during the War in Afghanistan and is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), publicly claimed, based upon information he alleged to have received from other officials, that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program, is in possession of non-human spacecraft, and has seen pilot corpses belonging to another intelligent species.

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/gfZUA9DMzYQ

And over the past few weeks:

*A USAF Officer and former Intelligence Official comes out publicly stating Non-human intelligent beings are real, we have their tech, and bodies, and not telling congress about it.

*The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General signs a letter saying his statement are "urgent and credible".

*Several US Senators talk about it openly to the public, including statements about how several high-ranking US military officials with top clearances have corroborated his claims in close-door briefings, and that they even fear for their lives.

*The senate works and proposes legislation with clear language that all but orders private enterprises and military contractors—in no uncertain terms— to disclose and report any and all pieces of tech and research made around any potential exotic or non-earth origin tech handed to them by the government within six month after approval, and they have do so to the official governmental body tasked to investigate UAPs (AARO).

*Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds reveal a 64 page amendmet to the 2024 defense appropriations bill titled the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023. The bill is understood to have been worked for months in collaboration with the white house and several high-profile and credible whistleblowers with insider knowledge on the topic. The bill defines things like "Non-human intelligences" and UAP observable capabilities.

*UAP Hearings

Fighting The Government-Led Internet Information War Through The Courts

tablet  |  One year ago, I joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several other co-plaintiffs to file a suit in federal court challenging what journalist Michael Shellenberger has called the censorship-industrial complex. While much of the press cooperated with the state’s censorship efforts and has ignored our court battle, we expect that it will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, setting up Missouri v. Biden to be the most important free speech case of our generation—and arguably, of the past 50 years.

Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years. This unprecedented breach was made possible by the wholly novel reach and breadth of the new digital social media landscape.

My co-plaintiffs, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and I were censored for content related to COVID and public health policy that the government disfavored. Documents we have reviewed on discovery demonstrate that government censorship was far more wide-ranging than previously known, from election integrity and the Hunter Biden laptop story to gender ideology, abortion, monetary policy, the U.S. banking system, the war in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more. There is hardly a topic of recent public discussion and debate that the U.S. government has not targeted for censorship.

Jacob Seigel, Matt Taibbi, and other investigative reporters have begun to document the anatomy of the censorship leviathan, a tightly interconnected network of federal agencies and private entities receiving public funding—where much of the censorship grunt work is outsourced. The “industrial” in censorship-industrial complex should be understood literally: censorship is now a highly developed industry, complete with career-training institutions in higher education (like Stanford’s Internet Observatory or the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public), full-time job opportunities in industry and government (from the Virality Project and the Election Integrity Partnership to any number of federal agencies engaged in censorship), and insider jargon and euphemisms (like disinformation, misinformation, and “malinformation” which must be debunked and “prebunked”) to render the distasteful work of censorship more palatable to industry insiders.

Our lawyers were in court last week arguing for a preliminary injunction to halt the activities of the censorship machine while our case is tried. I will spare you a full account of the government’s endless procedural wrangling, obfuscation, attempts to hide, delays, and diversionary tactics in this case—futile efforts to dodge even the most legally straightforward aspects of discovery, such as our request to depose former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki. So far, the government has been caught hiding discovery materials, which the judge chastised them about before ruling against their motion to dismiss, reminding the government that the limited discovery so far would widen once the case went to trial.

The government’s lawyers were not able to block the deposition of Anthony Fauci, however, who had to answer some pointed questions about his COVID policies for the first time under the threat of the penalty of perjury. Dr. Fauci seemed to suffer from a strange syndrome of “sudden-onset amnesia” during his deposition, as I have described elsewhere.