The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the US war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.

You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the US power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy Number One in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The US “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”

The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:

1. Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
2. Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
3. Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
4. Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem

China Identified as Top ‘Threat’ in New National Defense Strategy
US military activity near China increased significantly in 2021
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #China https://t.co/L8gkis0WTF pic.twitter.com/22wbJFyEF6

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) March 29, 2022

“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.

Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the US-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.

“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.

And that right there ladies and gentlemen is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years. It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the US intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.

The US government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world. During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the USSR, which was when we saw business ties between China and the US lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the US as an economic superpower.

Once the USSR ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.

Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Hillary Clinton admits there was an expectation in Washington Russia would have no choice but to become the West’s junior partner due to the fear China could take over the Russian Far East. /1https://t.co/pJQeF0eCxf

— Artyom Lukin (@ArtyomLukin) November 20, 2021

In what history may one day view as the US empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China. Instead, the exact opposite happened.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.

“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”

The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come grovelling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship. NATO just kept on expanding and the empire got increasingly aggressive and belligerent in its games of global conquest. This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once. Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.

And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the US empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:

Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?

— CGTN LIU Xin 刘欣 (@LiuXininBeijing) March 19, 2022

On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”

Basically all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.

This is the Hail Mary pass of the US hegemon. Its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it. Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature. The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.

One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world. If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The semi-official United States government plus media lie machine knows that constructing a plausible reason to bomb the crap out of someone all depends on where you begin your narrative. If you keep starting your accusations at a point where the target has done something bad, all you have to do is repeat yourself over and over again to drown out any alternative backstory that surfaces. And if you really want to demolish all contrary views, all you have to do is liken the targeted foreign leader to Adolph Hitler and keep repeating. That tactic was used with Saddam Hussein of Iraq and is now being employed against Vladimir Putin of Russia and it always works.

In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia the trick has been to tie everything to the invasion by Putin’s armed forces over four weeks ago, an undoubted act of aggression. Once you establish that as your launching point, preceding developments are rendered moot. Who cares about US promises not to expand the NATO alliance eastwards after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991? And there is also Washington’s role in regime change in Ukraine in 2014? Or even the relentless demonization of Russia linked to the 2016 US presidential election followed by any unwillingness by Washington to negotiate even the most reasonable of Putin’s demands? Fuggedabout it! And also forget about considering whether or not the US has any national interest in going to war over Ukraine. Only Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard seem inclined to challenge the basic premise, which is to raise the question “Since Russia does not threaten us why are we doing this? Do we really want a possible nuclear war over Ukraine?”

Just read the New York Times and you will learn that it is not about what’s good for America at all. It is all about a big bully country attacking a “democratic” neighbor with the US and its brave allies standing up as the standard bearers of a Washington imposed “rules based international order.” And now the US is upping the ante by pushing ahead with its insistence that Russia is committing war crimes. But convincing the world on that point is a bit more difficult to accomplish. If one were to ask the question “Which nation in the world commits the most war crimes?” the general international response might well be Israel or the United States. Part of the problem would be working out an acceptable definition for a war crime while also developing a methodology for defining “the most.” If Israel attacks Syria four times in a week is that four separate war crimes or only part of one continuous war crime. As the United States has military bases in both Syria and Iraq that the respective governments have not authorized, and have in fact, asked the Americans to leave, is that a single war crime of illegal invasion and occupation or a continuous one punctuated only by the occasions when US troops kill a few of the natives?

In any event it is difficult to “convict” Russia as neither Israel nor the US has ever been held accountable for the war crimes they have committed, to include shooting and bombing civilians, hospitals, schools at random and occasionally wedding parties and other social gatherings. President George W. Bush even started a couple of wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq based on fabricated “intelligence” and the greatly beloved Barack Obama did the same to Libya and Syria. Both are now regarded as venerable elder statesmen even though they should be in prison and there is lately some talk among Democrats of seeing Obama or his wife run again in 2024 for the highest office in the land. And is that Hillary waiting in the wings for a second try? Either way, it will be a bad day for anyone trying to establish a modus vivendi for working with Russia.

America’s blood lust vis-à-vis Russia is completely bipartisan, with the few sensible voices in Congress drowned out by the drumroll in high places accompanying the avalanche of propaganda pouring out of the mainstream media. It has long been axiomatic that the first victim of war propaganda is truth, but the United States only needs the stimulus of the possibility of war or conflict to begin its pattern of lying. And, as the current situation illustrates, it is quite prepared to designate enemies that in reality do not threaten the country. It did so to bring about a greatly enlarged US commitment in Vietnam and also through the Cold War by deliberate CIA overestimates of the power and reach of the Soviet Union. Since 9/11 there has been a succession of presidents who have lied about nearly everything relating to national security and foreign policy, leading to invasions, assassinations, other types of interventions, and a “sanctions” prone government that has denied ordinary citizens of food and medicines while leaving the leadership of the targeted countries untouched.

One of the recent lies is a replay of the old “let’s get Saddam Hussein” playbook. Remember those savage Iraqi soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators and throwing them onto the floor? Of course, it was all a lie concocted by the Kuwaiti ruling family and US government largely neocon accomplices. Now we are learning that the vile Russians bombed a maternity hospital! Except, of course, that it may have turned out to be completely untrue. And the media is now exclaiming that “Russia is putting the planet on the brink of World War 3!” while the New York Times is indicting political conservatives as purveyors of Russian propaganda. Actually, it was the United States and NATO that have opened the door to a possible nuclear holocaust, but one hates to dispute what is an apparently a profitable and well-received story line.

But the best bit of lying has to be the ongoing propaganda war over twenty-six biological laboratories in Ukraine funded at least in part by the Pentagon. “Nothing to see here” says the Biden White House, while Russia is saying “Just a minute, folks…” Meanwhile the plot thickens as emails have now surfaced indicating that Joe Biden’s son Hunter was involved in obtaining, and profited from, the US government’s funding of the labs.

The biolab controversy began when the United States government’s State Department number three Victoria Nuland recently admitted to a congressional panel that the labs exist and also added that Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons. She then realized her error and both backtracked and elaborated that “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities [and] we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

The statement is absurd as the Russians undoubtedly already possess their own stocks of bioweapons. The existence of the labs themselves may be linked to the legacy of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when, by one account, the US provided assistance through its “Cooperative Threat Reduction Program” to manage the existing bio and chem labs lest their toxic chemicals and pathogens fall into the wrong hands. But the US has actually done much more than that, Ron Unz observes how “Over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on ‘biodefense,’ the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and [has] had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat.”

Currently, the US government claims blandly that the labs, which are run by America’s Department of Defense, remain active for “peaceful research and the development of vaccines.” The US Embassy in Kiev described the activity in greater detail as working “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”

Some Ukrainians have, however, been suspicious of their purpose, particularly as their activities are secret and are managed by the Pentagon rather than some civilian agency. And if the original objective was to prevent the development of bioweapons, why is the US still hanging around seventeen years later? Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who held the post under President Viktor Yanukovych, spoke about how the decision to start collaborating with the Americans was taken by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s office and subsequently implemented under President Viktor Yushchenko in 2005. It was generally believed in the government that the agreement was focused on Ukrainian biosecurity, but all its related activities were and are classified and Ukrainian citizens were not even allowed to work together with the Americans.

There was some pushback on the labs, to include a cursory inspection in 2010-2012 and by 2013 the Ukrainian government sent an official letter demanding that the labs be closed. The 2014 regime change intervened however, and the decision was never implemented by the new regime.

It should be noted that if one is to protect against toxins and pathogens one must first create them in order to manipulate them or prevent them. If one thinks back to the notorious Anthrax scare in the United States in 2001, investigators determined that the lethal strain of the pathogen had actually been created in a US Army biological weapons lab at Fort Detrick Maryland. One might also consider COVID and the widely held belief that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been manipulating various coronavirus strains to make them more contagious and lethal.

Nuland clearly admitted that there were US-funded bioweapons in Ukraine when she expressed concern that Russia might occupy one of the labs and be tempted to acquire the material for its own use against Kiev. And the Biden Administration, clearly embarrassed by the admission, has attempted to turn the tables by rejecting Russian suggestions that the labs might be seeking to design biological pathogens that target certain ethnic groups, which is why the existing labs have been placed all around the world, including Ukraine. As far back as 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his concerns about US collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, as Unz puts it “certainly a very suspicious project for our government to have undertaken.”

If these Pentagon funded laboratories are indeed involved in propagating mutated strains of pathogens like anthrax and plague as biological weapons, like may have taken place at Wuhan, it would be a violation of Article I of the “UN Biological Weapons Convention,” making the United States government indisputably a War Criminal, with its leaders subject to the death sentence under the Nuremberg Laws which were in large part established by the United States Government itself in 1946. That aside, the real concern right now should be that the US/NATO will stage some kind of false flag incident which will lead to calls for direct military intervention. Watching Biden’s serial blunders and cover-ups suggests that there is nothing that Biden and Blinken will not do, up to an include started some kind of hopefully manageable war to boost the presidents sinking approval ratings. Now that Joe Biden is talking tough, it is hard to imagine how he will get off of the horse that he is riding without stepping into some sort of armed conflict. As the former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts has astutely observed “The evil that [now] resides in Washington is unprecedented in human history.”

unz.com

By Joe LAURIA

The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war.

President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier this month. (The administration plan is to bring down the Russian government through a ground insurgency and economic war, not a direct military one.)

But pressure on the White House from Congress and the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.

Meanwhile, Western corporate media, depending almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources, report that Russia is losing the war, with its military offensive “stalled,” and in frustration has deliberately targeted civilians and flattened cities.

Biden has bought into this part of the story, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” He has also said that Russia is planning a “false flag” chemical attack to pin on Ukraine.

But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

The article says:

“As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.’”

These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.

Until these Pentagon leaks it was difficult to confirm that Russia was entirely telling the truth and that corporate media were publishing fables cooked up by Ukraine’s publicity machine.

No Evidence of Chemicals

The second article directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defense official said.”

It quoted the Pentagon official as saying, “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published the Reuters article, which appeared in the more obscure U.S. News and World Report. 

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story — even if it could lead to the most devastating consequences in history.

consortiumnews.com

The Pentagon has admitted it is providing the Ukrainian military with “actionable intelligence” in combat operations against Russian forces. If that is confirmed then the United States is at war with Russia. The implications are grave for two nuclear powers.

The admission came last week during congressional testimony by Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. He was speaking to the House Armed Services Committee, proudly telling Congress members how the Pentagon was helping the Ukrainian military fight Russian forces: “We are making a difference in accurate, actionable, and timely intel.”

That indicates the Americans are involved in providing information to the Ukrainians for lethal targeting of Russian troops.

It is an incredibly sensitive admission. Only two weeks before Moultrie’s testimony, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee had reportedly sought to downplay any such informational exchange between American and Ukrainian forces. “We are providing some intelligence” to Ukraine, but we’re “not providing the kind of real-time targeting,” said Representative Adam Smith who chairs the committee. The downplaying is understandable because such intelligence-sharing implies that the U.S. is a direct participant in the conflict.

One possible area where the Pentagon is “making a difference” is the reported high number of senior Russian commanders who have been killed on the battlefield. Since the Russian intervention in Ukraine on February 24, it is claimed in Western media reports that up to six top-ranking officers have been killed.

The latest reported victim was the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Andrey Paliy. The governor of Sevastopol, Crimea, was quoted by Reuters as acknowledging the death of the naval chief on Sunday. He was apparently killed during the battle for the port city of Mariupol.

Of course, in the conflict raging over Ukraine and with the information warfare at a fever pitch like never before, the NATO-backed Kiev regime and dutiful Western media are all too prone to exaggerate Russian losses. Claims of Russian generals being “picked off left and right off by snipers” are gleefully reported.

Some of the recent top Russian commanders named in reports as being killed in combat include Lt. Gen. Andrei Mordvichev who was shot at the weekend by a sniper at an airfield near Kherson.

Other senior officers reported killed in action include Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky and Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov. On March 3, Maj. Gen. Sukhovetsky was shot dead by a sniper claiming to be from the Azov Battalion, the openly Nazi paramilitary force.

The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have not publicly confirmed all of the high-ranking casualties, but reports of funerals and death notices in the Russian media have emerged.

Even if all of the deaths among senior officers are being exaggerated by the Kiev regime and Western media as part of a disinformation campaign to weaken Russian morale, the adage of no smoke without fire suggests that there has been an inordinately high number of senior casualties.

That seeming killing efficiency of the Kiev regime forces could be due to the Pentagon’s intelligence being able to pinpoint Russian commanders.

If that is the case, then it takes American involvement in the Ukraine war to a whole new and dangerous level.

The Biden administration has been funneling military aid into Ukraine over the past year. So, too, have the British and other NATO members. Up to a point, Washington and its allies could claim that the provision of arms was for “defensive” purposes. President Joe Biden last week signed off on supplying more inventories of Stinger anti-aircraft and Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. However, it remains to be seen how those new weapons will arrive given that Russia has warned that any such supply from NATO is a legitimate target.

Biden is traveling to Europe this week to meet with other leaders of the NATO alliance. So far, Washington has quashed strident requests from Kiev and some Eastern European NATO members for the imposition of a no-fly zone in Ukraine. The U.S. president balked at that idea by saying it would mean sparking a Third World War.

For the same reason, the Biden administration recently put the kibosh on Polish proposals to send Soviet-era MiG fighter jets to Ukraine. That would have marked overt participation by the NATO alliance in combat against Russian forces.

Biden is in a tough place of his making. The Russophobic rhetoric of his administration – Biden personally labeled Russia’s President Putin as a “war criminal” – has fueled an intense media campaign condemning Russia. There is a moral panic and hysteria about alleged Russian barbarity in Ukraine, comparing Russia with Nazi Germany and Putin with Hitler. Reason and rationale are being obliterated.

Washington has unleashed a propaganda monster that it is barely able to control. The dubious reports of Russian airstrikes and artillery barrages against civilian centers in Ukraine – incidents that seem to be fabricated in an echo of false flag provocations by the White Helmets in Syria – are putting Biden under intense pressure to become more involved militarily in Ukraine as a matter of moral imperative.

There is a sense that the Biden administration is being trapped by its own contradictions and information warfare which is resulting in an inexorable slide towards U.S. and NATO war with Russia. The Western disinformation has raised the stakes so high that it is increasingly difficult to avert an open war under its own terms and condemnations of Russia. There is hardly space for any diplomacy. Maybe that’s what some people want.

In any case, the United States seems already deep into waging hostilities against Russia. If it transpires that the Pentagon is actually helping Ukrainian militants – the Nazi Azov regiments no less – to assassinate Russia’s top generals then a grim conclusion is we may have reached a point of no return.

The United States and Russia continued this week with furious sparring over the issue of biological laboratories in Ukraine. The U.S. accuses Russia of “disinformation” about the labs, saying that they were standard sanitary facilities studying common diseases and epidemiology. For its part, Russia claims that the laboratories were conducting far more sinister and illicit research into developing biowarfare weapons.

Surely, the quickest way to discern the relative validity of concerns is the following basic fact. The research facilities numbering up to 30 locations in Kiev, Kharkov, Kherson, Lvov, Odessa and Poltava, among other cities, were being funded by the Pentagon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The figure is estimated at $200 million and, it seems, the research has been going on for several years up until recently. If the laboratories were involved in benign disease investigations then why was the Pentagon the sponsor and liaison organization? Why not the U.S. Department of Health, or Center for Disease Control, instead of the Department of Defense? And why were the laboratories ordered to destroy their samples when Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine – an intervention that Moscow claims is justified on the grounds of self-defense?

This week the Russian Ministry of Defense named the Pentagon’s liaison officer formerly at the U.S. embassy in Kiev who was responsible for the laboratory programs as Joanna Wintrol. It was suggested that American lawmakers should ask this person to give testimony on the purpose of the facilities.

The involvement of the Pentagon in the activities of dozens of laboratories across Ukraine is the most strident fact pointing to concerns that the research was being conducted for the nefarious purpose of developing biological weapons.

It is telling, too, that anyone who raises questions about the activity is immediately denounced as a Russian propagandist. They are vilified as trying to amplify Moscow’s justification for its military intervention into Ukraine that began on February 24. A diverse range of American public figures has called for a transparent investigation into concerns over U.S. bioweapons being developed in Ukraine. They include journalists like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and professor of international law Frances Boyle.

Russia is endeavoring to have the matter raised at the UN Security Council despite American objections. China has also endorsed Russia’s concerns and calls for a full investigation. Given that China has previously raised questions about U.S. covert laboratory work on coronaviruses at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as possibly being responsible for releasing the Covid-19 coronavirus and the ensuing global pandemic it is understandable why Beijing is now taking a keener interest in the discovery of shadowy Pentagon laboratories in Ukraine. China has angrily rejected American attempts to smear it as the originator of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In any case, the matter of Pentagon-funded laboratories in Ukraine can’t simply be dismissed by arrogant assertions of innocence by Washington. After all the lies the U.S. has told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were used for justifying a war that killed over one million Iraqis, the Americans have no credibility whatsoever. The irony here is that Russia went into Ukraine and seems to have actually found evidence of WMD unlike the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003.

The background to the present inquiry is that Russia has long expressed fears that the United States was engaged in biological warfare research at facilities set up in former Soviet republics. This concern over clandestine facilities has been shared by independent investigative journalists such as Dilyana Gaytandzhieva who has reported on U.S. bioweapon laboratories in Georgia among other places.

Officially, the United States has sought to deny all allegations of such illicit activities which would put it in gross violation of the Biological Warfare Convention (1983). The Pentagon has claimed that laboratories in Ukraine and elsewhere have been charged with securing Soviet-era bioweapons. But decades later, surely that explanation is wearing thin, if not altogether obsolete.

The issue flared up again – unintentionally – when Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Under Secretary of State with responsibility for Ukraine (responsibility in more ways than her formal title indicates) admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8 that there were dangerous biological research laboratories in Ukraine funded by Washington. So dangerous, indeed, that Nuland openly expressed concern that Russian forces might come into their possession. To do what? Use them as weapons? Or, more realistically, be able to prove that the Pentagon was funding the development of bioweapons in Ukraine?

Some American media have gladly quoted a few Russian biologists who are dismissive of Moscow’s claims of U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine. They assert the strains of pathogens are not particularly dangerous. How they can be so insouciant is curious. The Russian military experts on biological weapons say the samples being experimented on in Ukrainian laboratories included pathogens causing a host of deadly diseases, ranging from brucellosis, diphtheria, dysentery, and leptospirosis. Pathogens being studied included anthrax and coronaviruses. Furthermore, the research also involved investigating animal to human transmission of these diseases, such as through bird migration paths specific to Russia. There is also evidence of local outbreaks of these diseases in recent years that are atypical for seasonal conditions.

The documents demonstrating Pentagon sponsorship of the Ukrainian laboratories are original and verifiable, according to Moscow. It has published some of the documents which appear to be genuine. Of course, with Western draconian censorship against Russian news outlets, it is harder for the international public interest to avail of relevant information.

Still, however, the case for an international investigation under the auspices of neutral biowarfare experts is one that is valid and urgent.

We have already seen the worldwide impact of the Covid-19 disease that erupted in late 2019. The last thing Europe and the world needs are a chain of potentially deadly bioweapons facilities in Ukraine that the Pentagon is desperate to cover up.

Many questions need answering seriously. It is contemptible to simply brush these questions aside as “Russian propaganda”. The U.S. has a long and vile history of using bioweapons dating back to killing native American populations with smallpox and later civilian populations in Central America and Cuba. Thus, the U.S. has forfeited any benefit of the doubt owing to its well-documented practices of bioterrorism; especially considering the conspicuous involvement of the Pentagon in Ukraine’s laboratories.

The issue also opens up the bigger picture of Russia’s demands for a security treaty in Europe and the end to NATO expansionism and decades of aggressive threatening. Right now the Western media is saturated with anti-Russian smears and Russophobia. Yet, this is precisely why the questions about the U.S., NATO, Pentagon, and their connections to Ukraine need to be focused on.

Russia has insisted on Ukraine and other former Soviet republics being excluded from the U.S.-led military bloc – for good reasons. The turning of Ukraine into a platform of hostility towards Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 is the essential background to why the current war has manifested in Ukraine. The apparent involvement of Pentagon biowarfare laboratories in Ukraine is one reason among several why Russia was compelled to take defensive action with its intervention in Ukraine.

If we are ever to restore peace, then we need to understand where the hostility comes from, how, and why.

As Russia confirms the existence of biological research laboratories on Ukrainian soil, one of the primary architects of the 2014 Ukrainian coup, Victoria Nuland, has sounded the alarm. With yet another ‘conspiracy theory’ debunked as reality, does the shocking revelation provide Russia with the ultimate casus belli?

The fog of war is clearing fast in Ukraine, and what’s being discovered is profoundly disturbing.

That much became obvious this week when the Republican Marc Rubio asked U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland during a Senate Committee hearing: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?” The response was every bit as unexpected as it was unnerving. First, the unexpected part: Nuland the inveterate neocon actually confirmed the existence of these previously denied labs.

Choosing her words as though the jobs of millions of fact-checkers hung in the balance, Nuland said: “Uh, Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to, uh, gain control of. So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of, uh, Russian forces should they approach.”

Despite all the previous talk about the ‘Ukrainian labs’ story being a fever dream of QAnon chat rooms, Russian media was reporting on the existence of these facilities over two years ago, just as Covid viral symptoms were sweeping a locked-down planet.

“Eight laboratories … were built and modernized with the participation of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) as part of the ‘Program of Involvement in Special Biological Activities’ in the period from 2005 to 2014,” Izvestia reported in March 2020 to the sound of crickets in the West. “Laboratories were built in Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Transcarpathian, Lviv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Ternopil regions…”

So much for ‘Russian disinformation.’

Jen Psaki’s spin on Victoria Nuland’s confession about #biolabs in Ukraine makes no sense. Why would Russia ever want to release biological weapons in a country bordering theirs where they currently have ~150K soldiers? Just doesn’t make sense.

— Dave Schwab (@FreeDaveSchwab) March 10, 2022

Although it has become unfashionable these days to dabble in coincidence theories, one reason for Washington coming clean about the dirty labs was likely connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs releasing a statement – the very same day as Nuland’s confessional – confirming the existence of these facilities, as well as the toxic research being conducted there.

“We confirm that, during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Kiev regime was found to have been concealing traces of a military biological program implemented with funding from the United States Department of Defence,” Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

“Documentation on the urgent eradication of highly hazardous pathogens of plague, anthrax, rabbit-fever, cholera and other lethal diseases on February 24 [the same day the Russian ‘special operation’ kicked off] was received from employees of Ukrainian biolaboratories,” she continued. “This included an instruction from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine on the urgent eradication of stored reserves of highly hazardous pathogens sent to all biolaboratories.”

And now for the unnerving part. Of all the possible things the daft Republican Senator could have asked Nuland next – especially in a crucial election year – Rubio opted for a scene straight out of the Keystone Cops.

“I’m sure you’re aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out … information about how they’ve uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country, with NATO’s coordination,” Rubio ruminated, before delivering Nuland one of those limp-wristed underhand volleyball serves one normally gives to a child. “If there is a biological or chemical weapons incident or attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100 percent it would be the Russians that would be behind it?”

To which Nuland responded: “There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves.”

FACT: The US State Department CONFIRMED in UNDER OATH testimony that there ARE dangerous biolabs in Ukraine

FACT: The Federal gov. has a documented paper trail of *funding* biolabs in Ukraine

FACT: The fed is now deleting documentation of this funding

We need to know more- NOW

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) March 10, 2022

It is certainly strange that the bipolar American establishment, which trembles at the thought of a few Proud Boys, has given judicial carte blanche powers to a Ukrainian government that has proven to be infiltrated by neo-Nazi ideology. But since we’re talking about the Russians, it seems that everything is fair game, up to and including Facebook endorsing hate speech against Russians. Whatever nefarious actions the fascists may undertake, the gavel of justice will fall heavy against the Russians. Case already closed.

A similar thing happened with Hillary Clinton’s disappeared emails. The main subject of inquiry is not possible criminal behavior on the part of U.S. officialdom, but rather that the Russians will somehow capitalize on it. So let’s not waste time questioning what damaging information were on Clinton’s servers or brewing inside of those Ukrainian labs, because the intentions of the United States and its allies are always beyond suspicion! This is sheer madness, of course, and the very same dirty tactics were used against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad in its fight against ‘moderate’ rebel groups.

Does Moscow have grounds for concern over these developments happening on its border? All things considered, yes, they most certainly do. Suffice it to recall that in July 2017 the U.S. Air Education and Training Command (AETC), one of the nine Major Commands of the United States Air Force, issued a tender to collect samples of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and synovial fluid from the Russian population. The advertisement specifically mentioned that the samples “shall be collected from Russia and must be Caucasian.” It is particularly interesting that the Air Force specifically emphasized – yet never explained – that it would not consider tissue samples from Ukrainians.

The DNA work was startling enough to get a mention from the Russian president.

“Do you know that biological material is being collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical regions of the Russian Federation,” Vladimir Putin asked the Russia’s Human Rights Council. “We are a kind of object of great interest.”

Then, with a hint of things to come, the Russian leader said: “Let them do what they want, and we must do what we must.”

In October 2017, Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s Committee for Defense and Security, commented on Putin’s remarks on his Facebook page: “This kind of activity has been going on for quite some time. But lately it has taken quite “indecent” forms,” Klintsevich wrote. “I do not claim that it is directly about preparing a biological war against Russia. But her scripts are undoubtedly being developed.”

So how did the Western establishment respond to the news of biological weapons being developed on the territory of Ukraine? With a lockstep clampdown on Russian news agencies. Even DuckDuckGo, the alternative website that millions of users trusted not to rig algorithms to any ideology, said they would, exactly like Google, down rank Russian news stories. This egregious tampering and censorship, coming at a time when the Russians are on the ground in Ukraine, gaining access to the most disturbing revelations, looks like Big Tech is working directly with the government to bury news on weapons of mass destruction – incidentally, the pretext that the United States and its allies used when they attacked Iraq in March 200.

Now that the Russians seem to have discovered yet another smoking gun in Ukraine in the form of chemical WMDs, their argument for opening a ‘special operation’ there just got a massive boost.

TJ COLES

In a blatant threat to China’s presence, Djibouti recently hosted the US-led “Allied Appreciation Day,” in which Britain, France, and Japan showcased “a variety of equipment that is part of their military operations in the Horn of Africa” (HOA). The Pentagon’s Combined Joint Task Force-HOA reported that the events fused Armistice, Remembrance, and Veterans’ Days. Attendees participated in “demonstrations featuring a variety of allied military capabilities to include a military flyover.”

Successive Djiboutian regimes have clung to power by promoting their small country in the Horn of Africa as a vital tool in the West’s quest for global dominance. During Europe’s late-19^th century Scramble for Africa, the French colonists understood the strategic importance of the region for trade ships and naval deployments. After the Second World War and particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, the Pentagon seized France’s imperial mantle and expanded a major military base, Camp Lemonnier (which, for many years, the US misspelled by leaving out an “n”).

Today, American military and political planners fear the presence of China in what they consider to be “their” African territory. In 2017, China opened its first, and at the time of writing, only confirmed foreign military base — the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Support Base — 30 minutes northwest of Camp Lemonnier.

As the right-wing NY Post cited dubious warnings by unnamed US officials about China’s construction of a secret base in Equatorial Guinea (EG) on the other side of Africa, the US Africa Command has quietly expanded its operations in Djibouti.

A former colonial power maintains its grip on Djibouti

Djibouti has a population of around 1 million. With 48 deaths per 1,000 live births, its infant mortality rate remains one of the worst in the world, while life expectancy hovers around 67. Over 400,000 Djiboutians live in extreme poverty, with 90 percent of the nation’s food dependent on imports. Around 60 percent of the population is ethnic Issa (sometimes broadly referred to as “Somali”) and 35 percent Afar (a.k.a., Danakil).

Between 600 and 1000 migrants and asylum seekers pass through Djibouti daily, nearly half of whom are children. The US Department of Labor (DoL) says: “Children in Djibouti are subjected to the worst forms of child labor.” In addition to begging and selling drugs, “[s]treet work, such as shining shoes, washing and guarding cars, cleaning storefronts, sorting merchandise, collecting garbage, begging, and selling items” is common. In addition to human trafficking, Djiboutian children are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual abuse. The country hosts “the largest number of foreign military installations in the world, including thousands of military personnel and security contractors.” The DoL concludes: “This foreign military presence heightens the risks of commercial sexual exploitation of girls.”

Western colonial rule in what is now Djibouti began in the mid-1800s. France purchased land on which it established stations for the steamships that passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal, north of the territory. In the decades that followed the Second World War, the broader region was known as French Somaliland. A likely-rigged vote in 1958 saw the population choose to remain under French control. In response to several factors including domestic independence movements, Somali claims to the territory, and continued Ethiopian usage of the ports, the French established the Territory of the Afars and the Issas in 1967.

A decade later, and following negotiations with the colonial power, Hassan Gouled Aptidon of African People’s League for Independence, became President, forming the People’s Rally for Progress. Gouled governed the one-party state until his alleged nephew, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, replaced him in 1999. With France’s Indian Ocean navy squadron based there, the Franco-Djiboutian Defense Treaty 1977 granted the “former” colonial power unimpeded access to air and maritime facilities.

Enter America: “Use Djibouti,” maintain a “pro-Western course”

Basing his assessment on a commissioned CIA report in 1979, Paul B. Henze of the National Security Council Staff advised President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the French military presence in Djibouti would be enough to prevent the Soviet-backed Ethiopian government from invading. “[I]f we are going to continue to use Djibouti (and there are good reasons for doing this), we need to be frank with the French about our need for their alertness and support there.”

President Gouled saw foreign de facto occupation as a bulwark against potential aggression by Djibouti’s neighbors, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. A heavily-redacted CIA Intelligence Estimate from 1986 describes the country as basically a city-state. “Largely because of its excellent deepwater port and chokepoint location on the Bab el Mandeb Strait (sic),” which separates the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea, “Djibouti has long been subject to competing African, Arab, Soviet, and Western interests.” Indicative of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet “interests” highlighted at the outset of the report are later revealed to be scholarship programs and a maritime visit.

The CIA lauded Gouled’s “pro-Western course,” rejecting, for instance, aid packages offered by Libya’s then-ruler, Muammar Gaddafi. “[I]n a region dominated by Marxist and military regimes, the Gouled regime enjoys French security protection and supports Western interests,” particularly by providing the US with a port, airfield, and reconnaissance airspace.

When Ethiopia’s ruler was deposed in 1991, Eritrea gained independence. Robbed of its port, Ethiopia turned to Djibouti, but Afar rebels known as the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) based themselves in Ethiopia. The Dini faction of FRUD later claimed that Ethiopia was supporting Djibouti’s Issa-majority government. A Civil War ensued leading to a peace agreement in 1994, when a small number of Afar were given token positions in Gouled’s government.

Post-9/11: “The primary base for US operations”

Significant elite US interests in Djibouti began after 9/11, when the Navy and the Central Command (CENTCOM) effectively took over the old French Foreign Legion fort, Camp Lemonnier, and established a permanent presence. In 2002 under President George W. Bush, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) began surveillance and reconnaissance of alleged “al-Qaeda” operatives in neighboring Somalia from Lemonnier.

By the end of that year, at least 800 US Special Operations Forces were present. The period also saw the launch of exercises by the 24^th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

In November 2002, six Yemeni “al-Qaeda” suspects were killed by a CIA Predator operator whose drone was launched from Djibouti. In a rare moment of honesty, the New York Times article exposing the attack added: “The sea lanes near Djibouti are particularly crucial since they are used for commercial shipping and to transport American war matériel to the Persian Gulf.” In May 2003, CJTF-HOA personnel had arrived.

Lemonnier is described by the US Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) as “the largest U.S. military installation in Africa.” The CNA highlights Djibouti’s importance to rival powers: its regional “stability,” “strategically important position next to the Bab el Mandeb (sic), a critical maritime chokepoint[,]” while serving “as the main port for landlocked Ethiopia.” The oddly-named “Commander, Navy Installations Command” describes Lemonnier as “the primary base of operations for U.S. Africa Command in the Horn of Africa.”

Between 2004 and 2011, Presidents Bush and Barack Obama respectively sold Djibouti a total of $68 million-worth of arms and services under a single program. In late-2006, the US and Britain used Ethiopia as a proxy to invade Somalia and replace the moderate Islamic Courts Union government with an extremist entity called the Transitional Federal Government. Djibouti later posed as a peace-broker between the warring Somali and Ethiopian factions, but behind the scenes the Franco-American-backed Djiboutian Armed Forces were training hundreds of Somali military officers.

Besides using Djibouti as a base for the CIA, Special Forces, the Navy, and other operations, the US trains domestic enforcement units in the country. In 2007, as domestic tensions simmered with the Afar people and potential conflicts brewed with neighbors, the Marines were pictured instructing the Djibouti National Police “on basic weapons procedures and room clearing.

US psy-ops in the Horn of Africa: celebrating MLK on a military base and “the gift of hope”

In 2008, the newly-created US military alliance known as AFRICOM took over operations in Djibouti from CENTCOM. That June, the French and British joined with the militaries of 10 African nations to cooperate on maritime operations.

At the time, countering Somali “piracy” was a widely-used pretext for regional dominance. As the transfer to AFRICOM was arranged, CJTF-HOA continued its propaganda offensive against Djiboutians by painting US military personnel in a positive light. Staff “donated more than 50 book bags containing school supplies, flip flops, shampoo, soap and treats to girls at Center Aicha Bogoreh [sic],” in Djibouti City.

As he rang in Christmas in 2008 with the lighting of trees and singing of festive songs, Rear Admiral Philip Greene said of the Navy: “We are sharing our time and talents with the people of Eastern Africa, giving them the gift of hope for a better, more secure future.” The “gift of hope” is part of US psychological operations, soft power, or political warfare as the tactic is interchangeably called.

In January 2009, in a prime example of the soft power tactic, CJTF-HOA personnel “celebrated” Martin Luther King Day with a program entitled, “Realizing the Vision,” in which AFRICOM highlighted King’s life through speeches, a slideshow, and a performance of the somber Sam Cooke ballad, “A Change is Gonna Come.”

A “Hollywood Handshake Tour” later that year took the “gift of hope” to new heights with visits by industry b-listers Christian Slater, Zac Levi, Joel Moore, and Kal Penn, who each “personally thank[ed] members for their sacrifice.” In July, the Navy Seabees and CJTF-HOA built a canteen for the newly-constructed Douda de Ecole Primary School. A year later, the US hosted a meeting by the Djiboutian Chamber of Commerce in an effort to present the de facto US occupation as an investment opportunity for the business class.

As the PR-friendly pleasantries continued, so too did the military training. In September, officers of the Ugandan Senior Command and Staff College visited Djibouti to study with the CJTF-HOA. Facilitated by the Lemonnier-based 449^th Air Expeditionary Group (or Flying Horsemen), Ethiopian Air Force officers convened with Djiboutian forces to discuss operations including airdrops.

Remote warfare: overcoming “the tyranny of distance”

In addition to acting as a hub for the training of Ethiopian, Somali, Ugandan, and other forces, Djibouti hosts regional propaganda broadcasters and privatization outfits that operate as aid agencies.

A 2010 US Embassy cable notes that Djibouti is home to “[US government] broadcasting facilities used by [the] Arabic-language Radio Sawa and the Voice of America Somali Service, the only USAID Food for Peace warehouse for pre-positioned emergency food relief outside [the continental U.S.], and naval refueling facilities for U.S. and coalition ships.”

That same year, Lemonnier hosted Africa’s first Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Summit Conference. Basing forces near strategic locations and using digital relays to aid drone strikes defeats what the Pentagon calls “the tyranny of distance.”

Seated in joint operations rooms, at least three British officers in the Camp assisted CJTF-HOA-led drone operations against targets in Yemen. By the mid-2010s, drone killings had been committed from Djibouti against people in Afghanistan, Mali, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

In 2012, BT (formerly British Telecom) built a $23m fiber-optic cable for the US Defense Information Systems Network and National Security Agency. The cable ran from the US Air Force-run Royal Air Force Croughton (north of London) to Naples (Italy) and onto Camp Lemonnier. The broadband service was 30 times faster than commercial capacity and could carry live drone video.

Describing Lemonnier and by extension Djibouti as “a sun-baked Third World outpost,” the Washington Post reported that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was instrumental in setting up Lemonnier and its crucial drone component, with at least 300 JSOC personnel working secretly at the base.

Enter China: threats are “exaggerated”

The Trump-era Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff kept a close eye on China’s presence in Djibouti. It wrote: “In 2017, China established in Djibouti its first foreign military base. The base looks out on the Bab-el-Mandeb Straits in the Gulf of Aden, through which passes nearly 10 percent of the world’s total seaborne-traded petroleum.” The report highlighted the perceived threat to US energy market dominance. “This comprises 6.2 billion barrels per day of crude oil, condensate, and refined petroleum. Together with China’s anti-piracy activities in the Gulf of Aden and growing presence in the Gulf of Guinea,” it concluded, “the base has extended China’s military reach off Africa’s coasts and into the Indian Ocean.”

China and Djibouti established diplomatic relations in 1979 but did not expand militarily until 2009, with China’s counter-piracy operations in the nearby Gulf of Aden. In 2015, China announced plans to join seven other countries, including the US, to establish its first and only foreign base in Djibouti.

Under the subheading “Don’t Believe the Headlines,” the US Center for Naval Analysis wrote: “media reporting on Chinese economic ties is sometimes exaggerated.” It does not list threats to US “interests” or allies in the context of China’s military expansion, but rather China’s intentions to launch counter-piracy, intelligence collection, evacuation missions, counterterrorism, and peacekeeping operations (i.e., China’s contribution to UN forces).

In July 2015, the Pentagon reported that the 1^st Marine Regiment, the 15^th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the Navy Battalion Landing Team 3^rd Battalion, and the USS Anchorage exercised on Arta Beach, Djibouti. Executing attack and maneuver drills with machine guns, squads, and night attacks, the 15^th MEU went ashore “for sustainment training to maintain and enhance [their] skills.” Between September and October 2015, the 15^th MEU participated in a bilateral training exercise with the French 5^th Overseas Combined Arms Regiment.

The 15^th MEU’s reconnaissance element trains Rapid Response Teams to send ashore in Djibouti, Hawaii, Iraq, and Singapore and to “push secure voice, video, and data back to the ship with a very small foot print.” Maj. Matthew Bowman of the Communications Department, said: “we have … to be able to project power ashore quickly.”

What US forces do with the training

Much of the US-led allied training traces back to Djibouti. So-called violent extremist organizations are entities that operate outside domestic law and make local environments unsafe for US operations and unstable for US investors. For these reasons, the Pentagon seeks to counter VEOs.

Through military information support operations (MISOs), the Lemonnier-based CJTF-HOA oversees the Ohio-based 346^th Tactical Psychological Operations Company (Airborne). Under the rubric of the African Union Mission in Somalia to counter al-Shabaab, the MISO operations involve training the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). Because locals tend to broadly support extremist groups as leverage against US imperialism, PSYOPs try to propagandize locals into backing the US.

Another example is the Sicily-based Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12), which worked with the California-based 4^th Force Reconnaissance Company to train the UPDF to counter the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a cohort of bandits which seeks to overthrow the US-backed government of Uganda.

The continued existence of the LRA gives the US military an excuse to maintain a troop presence, or at least proxy presence, in Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, where LRA leader Joseph Kony is supposedly hiding. He is a “Christian” version of the omnipresent Osama bin Laden, who for many years offered the US a pretext to invade multiple nations from the Middle East to Central Asia. The SPMAGTF-12 relies on support from Marines in Lemonnier.

Much of the US activity in Djibouti is either covert and therefore not reported or confined to press releases by the Pentagon. Recently, however, CNN painted the Pentagon as the Lone Ranger riding to the rescue in its coverage of the presence of the US Army 1^st Battalion 75^th Ranger Regiment in Djibouti, which was ready to deploy for supposed evacuations in Ethiopia.

Beyond the growing deployment of ground and special forces in the Horn of Africa, the US Navy is making waves. In August 2021, Comorian and Somali personnel worked with US service members as part of Cutlass Express at L’Escale Marine, Djibouti, to practice “visit, board, search and seizure” procedures and simulate various scenarios, including counter-piracy.

A de facto occupation

The US presence in Djibouti is a de facto occupation which ensures American naval dominance of the region, as well as continuing training of regional forces and growing surveillance operations. European militaries are also benefiting from shared, US-led exercises in the region. The build-up exacerbates a power struggle between what the US hopes is a unified West against what they are trying to turn into an increasingly isolated China.

In recent years, the US has sought to weaponize Japan by pushing successive governments to drop the Peace Clause of their constitution and turn up the heat on China. In September, the Japanese Ambassador to Djibouti, Umio Otsuka, met with the US Army Commander at Lemonnier, Maj. Gen. William Zana, “to dAir Forceiscuss future plans for combined cooperation.” Under CJTF-HOA, the so-called Japanese Self-Defense Forces trained in target practice at the Djiboutian Police Range.

In November, a US Air Force B-1B Lancer from the 9^th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron and a C-130 Hercules, two F-35 Lightning IIs from the UK Carrier Strike Group’s HMS Queen Elizabeth, two French Dassault Mirage 2000s, and a Japanese P-3 Orion flew missions over Djibouti. In December, it was reported that, as part of Exercise Bull Shark, Spanish forces had trained with the 82^nd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron in the Gulf of Aden, “to strengthen personnel recovery capabilities in support of the Warfighter Recovery Network initiative throughout Africa.”

As the Pentagon takes the brute-force approach to countering China’s Africa presence, the US increasingly relies on old proxy outfits like NATO while developing new ones, like allied forces in the Horn of Africa. Given that all three major powers have nuclear weapons, Western concerns over pandemics and climate change could prove ephemeral in the face of a miscalculation or worse, a deliberate military action.

thegrayzone.com

As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.

With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.

The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.

When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!

The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.

In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.

The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?

The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.

But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.

Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.

The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.

‘Nuclear winter’ is defined in Britannica as “the environmental devastation that certain scientists contend would probably result from the hundreds of nuclear explosions in a nuclear war.” One immediately direct effect of such a conflict would be to block out the sun’s rays, which would lead to “a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease. A nuclear war could thus reduce the Earth’s human population to a fraction of its previous numbers.” There have been innumerable portrayals of what would happen in a nuclear-devastated world of which the most evocative are the film Threads, made in 1984, depicting the ghastly aftermath in the United Kingdom, and the U.S. ABC television movie The Day After, of the previous year, which was even more horrifying, even though there was a lot of censorship before it was permitted to be shown.

It is only too apparent that a nuclear war would be catastrophic — and also that a nuclear exchange would be encouraged, indeed initiated, by the country that first fired or otherwise despatched one of these systems. No nuclear-armed country could accept nuclear devastation in its own lands without retaliating in force. The conclusion is that nobody in their right mind would advocate what is called ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons.

So step forward U.S. legislator, Senator Roger Wicker, who was reported as declaring that if there were conflict between Russia and Ukraine then the U.S. would have to be involved to the extent that this “could mean American troops on the ground.” And taking a massive leap backwards for mankind the senator declared on Fox News on December 8 that in the event of engagement against Russia “we don’t rule out first use nuclear action.”

The U.S. mainstream media, including The New York Times and the Washington Post did not publish the senator’s remarks, or make the slightest reference to them, which was unfortunate because his “no first use” statement is of enormous importance, especially because he used the word “we” in his public declaration of national policy. The senator is a member of the Armed Services Committee which according to its website has jurisdiction over “Aeronautical and space activities peculiar to or primarily associated with the development of weapons systems or military operations… Common Defence… Department of Defence, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, and the Department of the Air Force, generally.” These are most important responsibilities, and it is therefore assumed that his proclamation has basis in policy to which he is privy.

The only (fairly) prominent American political figure to criticise the senator was former member of Congress Tulsi Gabbard who declared that Wicker’s statement “exposes exactly how dumb, insane, and sadistic he and other like-minded warmongers are,” which, while undeniably apposite, received no wide cover. And while it is realised that President Biden has many problems with which to deal at the moment, it is reprehensible that he has not said a word in refutation of Wicker’s insane proclamation concerning national nuclear policy.

It seems that Senator Wicker has not read what his President has said about the undesirability of nuclear war, as recorded in the “U.S.-Russia Presidential Statement on Strategic Stability” of June 16 which included the agreement that “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Consistent with these goals, the United States and Russia will embark together on an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue in the near future that will be deliberate and robust. Through this Dialogue, we seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”

Direct contradiction of the U.S. President by a U.S. senator concerning national policy on nuclear war is beyond disconcerting : it is alarming to the point that clarification is urgently required. The Congressional Research Service recorded that “In his press briefing following the summit, President Biden noted that this dialogue would allow diplomats “to work on a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now that reduce the times of response, that raise the prospects of accidental war.” Presumably following Presidential guidance, the 2021 ‘Nuclear Posture Review’ commissioned by the Pentagon makes it clear that there will be examination of “how the United States can take steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy while ensuring the strategic deterrent remains safe, secure and effective and that the extended deterrence commitments to its allies remain strong and credible.”

This might have been taken as a small step towards the beginning of another approach to arms reduction, had it not been that Colin H. Kahl, the undersecretary of defence for policy, fenced off the route when he stated that “We also see that the role that nuclear weapons play in Russia’s doctrine is quite elevated in the sense that, I think, Russia sees much higher utility for nuclear weapons than any other state.” Which is a strange pronouncement from a nation that, as noted on December 9, is “developing a totally new $100 billion missile, known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.”

Kahl did not equivocate about the Pentagon’s approach to U.S. nuclear policy when he explained that “especially important to the FY 2023 budget” will be “decisions the department makes about modernizing and replacing the aging systems of the nuclear triad, which includes ground-launched, submarine-launched and air-launched nuclear weapons. Modernization also involves new submarines, such as the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines; new intercontinental ballistic missiles as part of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program; and new bomber aircraft, such as the B-21 Raider.”

In spite of President Biden and President Putin agreeing in June that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” it is apparent that the Pentagon is at best paying lip-service to their joint declaration. And this prompted the observation by President Putin on December 23 that “The United States is standing with missiles on our doorstep. Is it an excessive requirement not to install shock systems at our house? How would the Americans react if missiles were placed at the border with Canada or Mexico?”

We can imagine what Senator Wicker would advocate in such circumstances, but it is reassuring to know that there are some adult voices in the political games arena of the U.S. legislature, with Senator Ed Markey, for example, bringing a note of sanity by saying in a speech that “The United States has a moral responsibility to make the world safe from nuclear weapons. As Congress debates Defence Department spending, our budgets must reflect our values. It’s time to bolster climate funding, not our nuclear arsenal. President Biden should stick to his own instincts in reducing nuclear weapons risks, not follow the recklessness of the military industrial complex that was a cheerleader of the Cold War arms race and endless wars in the Middle East . . .”

The first things that President Biden should do is remove U.S.-Nato nuclear weapons and their support infrastructure from the bases on Russia’s doorstep, while concurrently indicating publicly to Senator Wicker that such action is consistent with national defence policy. The Pentagon must be made to understand that its desired upgrading of the nuclear triad is an indicator of intent to expand the existing U.S. nuclear threat to Russia and China and that this is massively counter-productive. Remove the missiles and the threat of nuclear winter will be eliminated. That would be a good New Year present to mankind.