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AUKUS coming to dinner

AUKUS dinner guests at the Cosmos Club, Washington: US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro; Republican Congressman Rob Wittman; Labor MP Meryl Swanson; Australian ambassador, Kevin Rudd; Liberal senator James Paterson; ex-Minister for Defence, lobbyist Christopher Pyne. (Photo: Pyne & Partners)

by Kellie Tranter | Jun 10, 2023 https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-coming-to-dinner/

Declassified Australia reveals the feast for lobbyists, US defence contractors and hangers-on which is the AUKUS $370bn submarines deal, Kelly Tranter reports.

The defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners – chaired by the former Australian Defence Minister Christopher Pyne – co-hosted an AUKUS reception and dinner in Washington at the swanky Cosmos Club on Embassy Row, with Northrop Grumman Corporation, on 3 April 2023.

Northrop Grumman is one of the largest defence companies in the world, and is the parent company to spin-off Huntington Ingalls, the US’s largest naval shipbuilder and one of the builders of the Virginia-class submarines destined to come to Australia.

The meeting was ‘private’ even though it concerned Australian defence contracts and arrangements and was attended by the Australian Ambassador and two Australian MPs, and senior US defence officials. Without public disclosure of what happened at the gathering, the Australian public once again is left in the dark.  

However, Declassified Australia has been able to prise open the locked shutters on the private event to shine in some needed light. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake through the AUKUS submarine deal, what calibre of people could be expected to attend such an event and what could possibly be their interest?

Documents produced pursuant to Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, by this writer, confirm that Australia’s Ambassador to the USA, Kevin Rudd, was invited to provide a speech, the contents of which journalists had previously reported to be ‘off the record’.

Declassified Australia has obtained the Ambassador’s briefing notes – though somewhat redacted due to national security considerations, ‘for the security of the Commonwealth’ and to avoid ‘damage to the defence, or international relations, of the Commonwealth’.

Rudd’s address was scheduled to follow those of the US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro, and Congressional Representative Rob Wittman. Rudd was allowed a period of five minutes for his remarks, ‘in between the main course and dessert’.

Congressman Wittman was among a bipartisan group of members of the US House of Representatives who in January sent a letter to President Joe Biden expressing support for the AUKUS deal. He unsurprisingly welcomed the huge AUKUS submarine spend as ‘a unique opportunity to leverage the support and resources possible under AUKUS to grow our industrial base to support both US and Australian submarine construction’. 

In January he also was suggesting sending a jointly operated US submarine to Australia, saying, “I think it would be dual-crewed. I think too, that the command of the submarine would be a dual command”. These remarks, of course, raise sovereign control issues.

Another claim to fame of Representative Wittman was being named in a September 2022 analysis by The New York Times as one of at least 97 members of Congress who bought or sold stock, bonds or other financial assets that intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child. 

Rob the insider trader

Although the Times noted that U.S. lawmakers are not banned from investing in any company, including those that could be affected by their decisions, the report confirmed that Congressman Wittman traded shares of three defence contractors while he was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which incidentally included the AUKUS event co-sponsor, Northrop Grumman

The Congressman’s response to the media revelation was to say: “I have consistently believed members of Congress should not improperly benefit from their role, and I support measures to avoid conflicts of interest.” He went on to say, “This is why I relinquish all control of my investment decisions to my financial adviser to use third-party investment managers who implement trades at their own discretion without my consultation or input,” which, he noted, is allowed under House ethics rules.

The new FOI documents confirm that Congressman Wittman is currently the Vice Chair of the US House Committee on Armed Services, Chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Committee and Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, is on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party (sic), and is on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee of the US Congress.

The FOI documents reference that, ‘Rep Rob Wittman was first elected to serve the first congressional district of Virginia in December 2007. His district is adjacent to Naval Base Norfolk as well as the major shipbuilding facilities in Newport News, Virginia – including one of the shipyards that builds Virginia-class attack submarines (Huntington Ingalls). Many of his constituents are employed either by the shipyards themselves, or by the supporting industry in the region.’

So it’s all just hunky-dory that through his investment advisor he can invest to profit from the success of defence contractors. 

As to Secretary of the Navy, The Hon Carlos Del Toro, the FOI document suggests under the sub-heading, ‘Industrial collaboration’, that Ambassador Rudd was specifically tasked to ‘seek Toro’s ongoing support and endorsement’, and to recognise that ‘we continue to work with the US government agencies to overcome barriers to industrial base, supply chain and technology collaboration’.

China’s military modernisation program and its operation of nuclear-powered submarines, including both nuclear and conventionally armed, are mentioned in Ambassador Rudd’s ‘briefing notes’ obtained under FOI, along with this acknowledgement:

‘We do not oppose any nation’s right to invest in and develop defence capabilities. However, a lack of transparency around military capabilities can fuel insecurity.’

Transparency debacle

The stated concern about lack of transparency is at odds with the Australian government’s own lack of transparency to Australian citizens in relation to the entire AUKUS deal. They have yet to make signed copy of the agreement publicly available.

As to the effect of AUKUS on Australia’s defence sovereignty, Rudd’s briefing notes confirm Australia’s generous desire to ‘ease pressure on the US supply chains’ and provide the US submarines with their long-desired Indian Ocean naval base:

‘Australia will build new maintenance and repair capabilities that will directly benefit US submarines rotating through HMAS Stirling [naval base near Perth]’.

The language of the FOI document – ‘aligning national priorities’, ‘collective strength’, ‘mutual strategic benefit’, ‘deeper cooperation’ – all seems to be geared towards a fully integrated strategic and industrial base with little room for Australia’s sovereign defence issues.

And what does it say when a private Australian defence lobbyist funds eight-day international trips for the attendance of two Australian ‘non-Defence’ politicians to a private Washington event it is co-hosting with one of the largest defence companies in the world? And what does it say when the lobbyist invites a US guest speaker who trades in defence company stocks while holding political defence offices? And what does it say when input by senior US military officials and by our own ambassador to the US, until this FOI application, we’re not even permitted to see?

Transparency and integrity of decision-making in relation to AUKUS ought not be shrouded in lavish invitation-only discussions where private interests eye-off the billions in potential profits — and where Australia’s future is on the table.

This story was first published by Declassified Australia 

June 10, 2023 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, New York Times Admits

AZOV soldier, UKraine

BY TYLER DURDEN

The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons. 

The surprising Monday Times headline said that “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed… Ukraine’s military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem. This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years. 

But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a “thorny issue” of Ukraine’s “unique” “History” – suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it’s being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!–as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.

The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers’ uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine’s military) are merely ‘unfortunate’ or misleading, the NYT report says, “In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.”

NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to delete images on its official social media accounts due to Nazi imagery being present among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.

The following line from the report says everything you need to know about the so-called “paper of record” and its one-sided and ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are finally waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and far from the MSM’s goodies vs. baddies Hollywoodesque narrative of Putler vs. the free world which is typical of networks from CNN to Fox to NBC…

From the NY Times: 

“In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.”

Oops!

…………..The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.

Some are writing more appropriate and apt headlines for the NYT story…

Only very recently Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and even President Zelensky’s office was caught in the act: 

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”

To be expected, the Times still tries to run cover while desperately seeking to ‘reassure’ its audience by writing that “In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be ‘de-Nazified’ — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.”

New levels of cope indeed…

But then still, the NYT concedes awkwardly, “More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.”  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/journalists-are-asking-ukrainian-soldiers-hide-their-nazi-patches-nyt-admits

June 8, 2023 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Washington Post reported Ukraine conducted a test strike with HIMARS on the Kahovka dam last year

the Washington Post reported in December 2022 that Ukraine had previously carried out a test strike using American HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) on a dam located on the Russian-held side of Ukraine along the Dnieper River in Kahovka. They cited Ukrainian Major-General Andriy Kovalchuk.

Human Events Media Group 06/06/2023

A dam on the Dnieper River was destroyed on Tuesday, flooding a substantial amount of the area where Ukrainian and Russian troops are engaged in fighting, after Ukraine launched their much-anticipated counter-offensive. The dam was in Russian control, and has been since shortly after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Ukraine claimed Russia blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam and said it was a war crime, while Russia has said that it was Ukraine who “sabotaged the dam, to distract attention from the launch of a major counteroffensive Moscow says is faltering,” Reuters reports.


Ukraine’s counter offensive has been in the works for some time, specifically targeting the Russian-held city of Kherson, and was just recently launched. 


“Russian terrorists,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram. “The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land.”

However, the Washington Post reported in December 2022 that Ukraine had previously carried out a test strike using American HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) on a dam located on the Russian-held side of Ukraine along the Dnieper River in Kahovka. They cited Ukrainian Major-General Andriy Kovalchuk.

“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river,” the Washington Post reported. “The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort.”………………..  https://humanevents.com/2023/06/06/wapo-reported-ukraine-conducted-a-test-strike-with-himars-on-the-kahovka-dam-last-year

June 8, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Leaks reveal FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info

AARON MATÉ·JUNE 7, 2023, The Grayzone,

The FBI aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to ban Twitter users and collect their data, new leaks show. Twitter declined to censor journalists targeted by Ukraine, including The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal.

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”

The FBI’s attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.

The FBI’s censorship request was relayed in a March 27th, 2022 email from FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the Assistant Legal Attaché at the US Embassy in Kyiv, to two Twitter executives. Four FBI colleagues were copied on the exchange…………………….

If granted, the users on the list would not only have been banned from Twitter but had their phone number, date of birth, and email address disclosed to both the FBI and SBU.

Read the full list of accounts targeted by the FBI and SBU here:

Twitter-Dissinf_20220327 SBU list

In response, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-Head of Trust and Safety, informed Special Agent Kobzanets and his FBI colleagues that Twitter would “review the reported accounts under our Rules.” But he warned that the list included “a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists (e.g. Aaron Mate).” Therefore, Roth said, Twitter’s review would “focus first and foremost on identifying any potential inauthenticity.”

Roth then suggested that he would be open to suspending authentic accounts if it could be proven that they have a hidden tie to a foreign government. Journalists “who cover the conflict with a pro-Russian stance are unlikely to be found in violation of our rules absent other context that might establish some kind of covert/deceptive association between them and a government,” Roth wrote. “Any additional information or context in those areas is of course welcome and appreciated.”……………………………………………

The Ukrainian nationals targeted by the SBU’s suppression request include Anatoly Shariy, a video blogger and politician who fled Ukraine in 2012 and subsequently received European Union asylum; and Andriy Portnov, a Ukrainian lawyer and politician who served as a senior official under Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych until the latter’s ouster in the February 2014 Maidan coup. (Both Shariy and Portnov’s Twitter accounts remain active).

The disclosure of a collaboration on censorship between the FBI and SBU is the latest documented instance of Ukrainian state-tied attempts to target foreign voices. A Ukrainian website known as Myrotvorets maintains a list of what it calls “enemies of Ukraine.” I was recently added to that list along with The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, as well as the comedian and YouTube host Jimmy Dore. The Myrotvorets database was co-founded by Anton Gerashchenko, former deputy minister at the Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he now serves as an advisor.

Last year, the global tech/media conference Web Summit withdrew a speaking invitation to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and me after Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded our cancellation. (Another Grayzone colleague, Kit Klarenberg, was recently detained and interrogated about his journalism by British authorities).

News of the FBI’s work with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Twitter users also follows reporting from journalist Lee Fang that the FBI has pressured Facebook to remove accounts and posts deemed by the SBU to be Russian “disinformation.” According to Fang, a senior Ukrainian official in regular contact with the FBI defined “disinformation” in such broad terms that it could mean viewpoints that “simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.”  https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/07/fbi-ukraine-twitter-users-including-journalists/—

June 8, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered

Former staff have criticized the interior department for ignoring the risk of fraud after the Trump administration ceased scrutiny of a $59m fund for nuclear survivors, which is now depleted

Pete McKenzie

Former staff have lashed the US Department of the Interior for failing to predict that a 2017 decision to lift oversight from a $59m trust fund for Pacific Islanders displaced by American nuclear testing would lead to the fund’s exhaustion through mismanagement and alleged fraud.

Tom Bussanich, who in 2017 was a senior official in the department’s Office of Insular Affairs, said that he “would have bet money that there would have been issues with the trust fund and that the money would have been wasted”. Allen Stayman, a former director of the Office of Insular Affairs, dismissed the office as “the agency of acquiescence”.

Meanwhile, confidential bank documents reviewed by the Guardian reveal red flags that could have alerted the department to potential issues had it been scrutinising the fund, including the transfer of millions of dollars to two personal checking accounts over which the fund’s trustees had no oversight……………………………..

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the fund had been whittled down to about $100,000, largely through extravagant spending by Anderson Jibas mayor of the Bikinian council, on projects including land development in Hawaii, new ships and planes, and an apartment complex in the Marshall Islands………………………………………

The release of large sums to checking accounts that trustees could not scrutinise might have attracted concern from American officials, but by then the interior department was no longer receiving information about the fund from the Bikinian council or bank officials. The department declined to comment on the bank documents…………………….

From 2018, Jibas refused to provide the council’s financial documents to the Marshallese auditor-general, forcing Marshallese police to forcibly seize the documents in 2021. In an interview with the New York Times, Jibas admitted he occasionally used money from the fund to pay for personal items.

Jibas told the Guardian that he had also directed between $200,000 and $250,000 from the fund towards the construction of a two-story house for his personal use. He claimed this project had been approved by the Bikinian council…………………………… more https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/bikini-atoll-nuclear-fund-interior-department

June 7, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Warren Report Reveals Vast Pentagon-to-Defense Contractor Lobbying Pipeline

In 2021, there were at least 672 former government officials working for top defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT April 27, 2023  https://truthout.org/articles/warren-report-reveals-vast-pentagon-to-defense-contractor-lobbying-pipeline/?utm_campaign=Truthout+Share+Buttons

Hundreds of former government officials, including former Pentagon officials, have been funneled through the infamous public-to-private revolving door to take their insider government knowledge to lobby for top defense contractors, a new report from the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) reveals.

According to the report released Wednesday, as of 2021, there were at least 672 former officials who were working for the top 20 defense contractors, with the vast majority — 91 percent — in positions lobbying the very government they formerly worked for. Officials who weren’t lobbyists were in top positions as board members or senior executives. The officials include former members of Congress, senior staffers and military officers.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the companies that employed the most former government officials are also the companies who receive the most from the government in contracts. In 2021 and 2022, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Pfizer were the top 5 federal defense contractors in the U.S. — and in 2021 also employed among the highest numbers of “revolving door hires” out of the top 20 contractors, the report found, each with dozens of former government employees.

Hiring former government employees is extremely lucrative for the private sector. This is especially true for lobbying firms, who can benefit greatly from the knowledge and connections brought by former government employees, but is also true for many industries; for instance, there is a well-established revolving door between jobs at the Treasury Department and other tax-related agencies and top accounting firms, an issue Warren has previously raised.

Defense contractors are especially able to take advantage of such lobbying, as Congress and the president regularly approve huge sums of money for defense each year —– more than half of that money typically goes straight to contractors, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Over the years, this leads to trillions of dollars in profits for defense contractors.

Warren highlighted the dangers of the revolving door in a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Wednesday.

“Why is it they want to hire former Pentagon employees to work for them as lobbyists?” Warren asked Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell. “Why is it better to have someone who, for instance, they could hire people whose profession is lobbying, someone who’s lobbied in another field, say for the last 10 years. But they don’t want that — they’ll take somebody who’s never lobbied before, but who’s been employed at the Pentagon. Why is that?”

Wilkerson responded that the former Pentagon official “knows how to work those contacts” within the government and knows what “lies” to tell to sell the company’s services.

“If it’s specific program like the F-35, for example, which I’m somewhat familiar, then you get people who are very familiar with that on the inside, know all about the lies that you’ve been telling the federal government with regard to the program, and will come out and reinforce those lies, deceit, if you will, from their position with your business,” Wilkerson said. “It’s a very insidious, pernicious thing.”

These issues are compounded by the fact that defense spending is rife with fraud and abuse, as those who support reducing the Pentagon budget point out. Despite receiving the vast majority of federal discretionary spending year over year, the Pentagon is the only federal agency to never have passed an audit.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Julian Assange: the plot thickens

The FBI has reopened its case against Wikileaks founder and Australian journalist Julian Assange, the SMH  reports, after agents tried to interview his ghostwriter, Andrew O’Hagan, in London.

O’Hagan refused to talk to them because he would never give a statement against “a fellow journalist being pursued for telling the truth”. Badass, particularly as O’Hagan isn’t exactly fond of Assange as a person, as he famously wrote in the London Review of Books.

Anyway, Assange’s lawyer, Stephen Kenny, was taken by surprise by the news — he says it’s been years since the indictment was issued, and he didn’t realise there was an investigation under way. What if they’re gathering evidence to clear Assange’s name, considering there are growing rumours the Albanese government is working on it, as The New Daily’s reporting indicates? It’s not impossible, Kenny says, but it would be “very unusual” if the FBI was trying to help him.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

‘Independent’ Ukrainian ‘kill list’ actually run by Kiev, backed by Washington

Myrotvorets lists thousands of “saboteurs”, “separatists”, “terrorists” and “traitors”. Sometimes, it has crossed out their photographs once they had been killed, with the label “liquidated”.

Mint Press, MAY 12TH, 2023, DAVID MILLER

Late last year, my name was added to a blacklist published online by the Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation. I joined over ninety others deemed to be “speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda.“

These included Manuel Pineda and Clare Daly, both leftist Members of the European Parliament (MEP); Also counted are people on the right, such as Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, neocon and former IDF officer Edward Luttwak, a slew of rightist MEPs; Ex CIA officer, Ray McGovern; former military and intelligence figures such as Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor, as well as academics such as John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. Journalists on the list included Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and Eva Bartlett, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, and even actor Steven Seagal.

What was my crime? It said my “pro-Russian narrative” was claiming that “NATO’s proxy war with Russia is taking place in Ukraine”. Of course, a NATO proxy war is exactly what is happening there, as this article will only further confirm.

The listing helpfully provided a link with the evidence, an article I wrote for Mayadeen English called “How disinformation works: Western intelligence agencies global war on the left.” It contained a single, 176-word  paragraph on Ukraine titled “‘Russian Disinformation’ or Ukrainian lies?” It recounted several examples of Ukrainian misinformation and concluded that “Anyone who mentions any particular truth is derided for echoing Putin’s ‘talking points’.” In the event I was actually denounced as an “information terrorist” who might be guilty of “war crimes.”

Being added to the blacklist concentrates the mind wonderfully on the forces ranged against the possibility of truth and justice in the crisis-ridden West. When I was first accused, over a decade ago now, of antisemitism, my response was to intensify my research and writing activities on the organizations involved in defaming me. Since then I have produced a long catalog of work on the Zionist movement as well as on Western propaganda activities. Of course, the defamatory attacks encourage an atmosphere where social media threats can be made. But the issue of Nazism in Ukraine will be seen in retrospect as a defining issue of our era and it is important to remember that the reason I and many others are threatened by the Ukraine government and their NATO backers is because we in turn threaten to expose them for what they are: Nazi collaborators.

As it turns out, the covert “kill list” website is a product of the Ukraine regime, effectively funded by the CIA (amongst others) and is hosted by NATO. One extraordinary thing is that many American citizens, including ex-military and intelligence operatives, are included, as well as a significant number of citizens of NATO member countries. Perhaps the most remarkable element is that NATO has hosted the site (and a collection of affiliated websites) on its servers in Brussels. At the same time as NATO think tank the Atlantic Council boasts that Henry Kissinger is on its Board of Directors, NATO also hosts a kill list website on which Kissinger appears.

As it turns out, the covert “kill list” website is a product of the Ukraine regime, effectively funded by the CIA (amongst others) and is hosted by NATO. One extraordinary thing is that many American citizens, including ex-military and intelligence operatives, are included, as well as a significant number of citizens of NATO member countries. Perhaps the most remarkable element is that NATO has hosted the site (and a collection of affiliated websites) on its servers in Brussels. At the same time as NATO think tank the Atlantic Council boasts that Henry Kissinger is on its Board of Directors, NATO also hosts a kill list website on which Kissinger appears.

•Psb-news.org (3 April 2015)
•Psb4ukr.ninja (19 April 2015)
•Psb4ukr.net (7 May 2015)
•Psbr4ukr.xyz (8 November 2015)
•Report2psb.online (19 August 2017)

These were used either as mirror sites, as digest news from the site, or, in the case of the last one, a form for reporting suspects. The Myrotvorets.center domain name was first registered on 7 November 2015 and the site was live by February 2016.

Three people are associated with these domains and they provide valuable clues to who and what was involved in the kill list site. They are:

Victor/Viktor Garbar is a longstanding Maidan activist and co-ordinator of the Maidan Monitoring Information Center…………………………………….

Vladimir/Volodymyr Kolesnikov is a webmaster and developer.  …………

Oksana/Oxana Tinko………..

OPERATION BUTTERFLY – THE PROTOTYPE KILL LIST

Tinko is also the registrant of a series of domains that appear to be components of the Myrotvorets project and one that appears to have been a prototype. It is particularly stark in its intention to use the website to kill traitors or “terrorists”. ……………….

Operation Butterfly website FAQs make it clear that it considers calling “for separatism or changes in the constitutional system” a crime. ……………………………………..

Myrotvorets lists thousands of “saboteurs”, “separatists”, “terrorists” and “traitors”. Sometimes, it has crossed out their photographs once they had been killed, with the label “liquidated”. This, for instance, happened after the murder of Daria Dugina in Moscow in August 2022. Today the Myrotvorets site houses links to two other domains which appear to be integral parts of the operation. One – ordilo.org – is titled “STORAGE OF INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMES AGAINST UKRAINE”. The other – identigraf.center – allows various categories of users to submit images of individuals for facial recognition scanning. Tinko registered both domains.

THE NATO CONNECTION

Kolesnikov and Tinko were successive registrants on Natocdn.work (from March 11, 2015).  Tinko registered a follow on domain Natocdn.net (28 January 2019). These obscure-sounding web addresses were used to host the files needed for the Myrotvorets site as can be seen by examining the “page source”(right-click in Chrome and select “View page source”) on the site including in versions held in the Internet Archive. The first domain name (.work) was previously used to host both the original and succeeding Myrotvorets web sites. Thus it is in the page source on psb4ukr.org on 15 December 2015 just before the launch of the myrotvorets.center website, and is in the latter page source when it was first captured in the internet archive on 25 February 2016. The archive also shows that the latter domain was later hosted via Natocdn.net.

The letters CDN perhaps refer to a Content Delivery Network, a device to speed up the delivery of web pages when they are searched from an otherwise remote location, such as the California based name servers also used by the site. In fact, the Natocdn.net domain is hosted at none other than the official website NATO.int, based at its headquarters in Brussels…………………………………………….

It is also noteworthy, however, that a Ukraine Ministry of Defense psyops Powerpoint from 2015, leaked in the same month of that year (April), refers to the NATO cyber center as one of seven Western groups with which it had “cooperation”.

Nevertheless, the link to the NATO servers remained in the page source of the Myrotvorets websites. It was not until the NATO connection became an issue again in late August 2022 that anything was done about this. This was after Henry Kissinger had been added to the site in May. Then on August 24, independent journalist Eva Bartlett (who was named on both the Myrotvorets and Center for Countering Disinformation lists) reported that the page source code for Myrotvorets included links to resources held at psb4ukr.natocdn.net. Later, on October 14, she drew attention to the fact that Elon Musk had been listed on the site briefly after he threatened not to continue supplying his Starlink system to the Ukraine military for free. Musk responded “Is this list real?” Within eight days the page source links to natocdn.net were gone.

……………………………………. More than one hundred links to natocdn.net were still there on October 21, 2022 at 22:35 but were all gone by the next morning at 09:14. Even after the incriminating text was removed, however, IP tracking sites show the domain natocdn.net is still, at the time of writing (Archive version), mounted on servers at NATO headquarters in Brussels. In fact, many of the image files used to make up the site are still hosted at that URL including the gory front page collage of alleged dead Russian soldiers. (Archive version).

But what of Informnapalm.org – the other site which appears to have been hosted on nato.int? The evidence suggests that Myrotvorets is a project of InformNapalm.

INFORMNAPALM AS A UKRAINE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE “SPECIAL PROJECT”

InformNapalm presents itself as a volunteer-run intelligence service. But this is a deception. A Ukrainian Ministry of Defense PowerPoint presentation leaked in 2015 refers to it as a “special project” of the ministry, along with a number of others who themselves stand in need of further investigation.

Corroborating information comes in the form of the identity of the person who registered the domain name informnapalm.org – the aforementioned Vladimir Kolesnikov on March 29 2014, six months before the first of the kill list domains were registered…………………………. Myrotvorets is, therefore, a project of InformNaplam which is, in turn, a ”special project” of the Ministry of Defense.

Other links between the two projects include that Oksana Tinko, in registering the domain Myrotverots.center, used her informnapalm.org email address…………..

Tinko is fond of displaying Nazi and Banderite imagery on her social media. There is a swastika on her Github page and her Facebook profile features a background with the red and black colors of Bandera and a star of David together with a reptilian dressed as an orthodox Jew.

The journalist George Eliason who excavated much of the story of InformNapalm reports that the people involved are “mostly Pravy Sektor” (Right Sector), in other words far right supporters of Stepan Bandera.  Pravy Sektor uses the red and black colors of Bandera in its flag, just as Tinko does on her Facebook profile. In late 2019 Myrotvorets proudly displayed a portrait of Bandera on its homepage to mark the Nazi collaborator’s birthday.

picture below is not from Myrotvorets

In the early days of the Myrotvorets project the InformNapalm logo was prominently displayed. It was still there on May 13, 2016, but was gone by August of that year.  This may have been because of its publication of the list of thousands of journalists’ names which caused significant backlash and led to a statement that “taking into account the reaction… the Center ‘Peacemaker’ made a difficult decision to close the site.” The site did not shutter, however. By 2017, Myrotvorets continued to boast of its links with InformNapalm,……………..

It would appear that InformNapalm is the parent or coordinating body for an evolving team of pro-Ukrainian hackers, researchers, journalists and devotees of the far right.

………………………… PROMETHEUS

It is a matter of public record that InformationNapalm has been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA proxy. For example, in its now deleted list of funding for UKraine, the NED reported that $100,000 was given to a project of “Prometheus”. t would “conduct open-source investigations that monitor and spotlight external Russian military actions and post them on its popular and trusted website, https://informnapalm.org”. The Prometheus domain Prometheus.ngo was also registered by Volodymyr Kolesnykov on March 11, 2016.

Prometheus advertises two “information partners” in its operation, InformNapalm and The Ukraine Media Crisis Center. InformNapalm, created in early 2014, obviously only became a project of Prometheus after the latter was created in 2016.

The Ukraine Crisis Media Center is of course another Western-funded project.  It even admits to a long list of Western State funding on its website (including USAID, Embassies of the U.S., Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Germany), as well as military/intelligence funding agencies such as the NED, NATO, the U.K. based Institute for Statecraft (a military intelligence cut out), regime change enthusiasts at the Soros network of foundations and the Open Information Partnership an MI6 funded project from the U.K., in which Bellingcat and other MI6 contractors were/are involved.

An avalanche of Western cash has been showered on such organizations, all of which appear to have gone to some trouble to disguise their real origins and connections (including to each other), not to mention their affiliations to the Banderite far right.

BACK TO NATO

InformNaplam boasts in its list of achievements of working closely with NATO run groups ……………………………………..

These boasts put both the DFR Lab and Bellingcat in the frame as collaborators with the Nazi kill list, which is itself based on the OSINT techniques pioneered by both groups. Now that we know that the “volunteers” of Mirotvorets, InformNapalm and the Ukraine Hacker Alliance are a project of the Ukrainian government with significant NATO support, the role of the DFR Labs and Bellingcat appears to be part of that support for the Nazi kill list.

In the West, these Nazi collaborators and apologists attempt to push an altogether softer narrative. ……………..

……..the evidence here supports the contention that NATO is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. There is a link between the Nazi kill list and the blacklist to which I was added and that is that both are operations of the regime in Kiev. ………………………………….

Finally,  it seems likely a key reason why the Nazi kill list remains online is that it is protected by the regime, the U.S. government and NATO.

Professor David Miller is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University and a former Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a broadcaster, writer and investigative researcher; the producer of the weekly show Palestine Declassified on PressTV; and the co-director of Public Interest Investigations, of which spinwatch.org and powerbase.info are projects. He tweets @Tracking_Powe  https://www.mintpressnews.com/independent-ukraine-kill-list-actually-run-by-kiev-backed-by-washington/284639/

May 30, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | | 1 Comment

Ukraine claims Russia is plotting ‘a provocation’ at nuclear plant, offers no evidence

By Associated Press May 28, 2023, 9 News,

Ukraine’s military intelligence has claimed, without offering evidence, that Russia is plotting a “large-scale provocation” at a nuclear power plant it occupies in the southeast of the country with the aim of disrupting a looming Ukrainian counteroffensive.

A statement released by the intelligence directorate of Ukraine’s Defence Ministry claimed that Russian forces would strike the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, and then report a radioactive leak in order to trigger an international probe that would pause the hostilities and give the Russian forces the respite they need to regroup ahead of the counteroffensive………………………………………………….. https://www.9news.com.au/world/ukraine-claims-russia-is-plotting-a-provocation-at-nuclear-plant-offers-no-evidence/1f4512db-127f-4065-96ab-4db90cd60065
—

May 29, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Stella Assange at Sydney rally: “It’s not just Julian who has lost his freedom, but all of us”

The whistleblower noted the comments of Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has made extremely tepid statements expressing “concern” over Assange’s plight. Albanese has said that “enough is enough” in relation to the Assange case. He claims to have made private representations to the US and British governments on behalf of Assange, but has stopped far short of any public demand for the Australian journalist’s freedom.

Albanese has recently hinted at the prospect of a plea deal in the Assange case. Kenny forcefully rejected this course. “Is there a Hicks solution? Why should there be? He has not committed any crime. He should not be forced to plead to anything. We need our prime minister to stand up, not just say ‘enough is enough.’”

Oscar Grenfell@Oscar_Grenfell, 24 May 2023

Some 800 people attended a protest in Sydney yesterday morning demanding the immediate freedom of imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. People came from across New South Wales and from around the country to attend the rally, which was one of the largest demanding Assange’s freedom yet, despite being held on a weekday.

Speaking at the demonstration, Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, declared that the protesters were “at the forefront of a global movement for justice. A global movement that converges on one man, but the meaning of which goes far beyond Julian’s freedom. It’s not just Julian who has lost his freedom, but all of us. Because in order to keep Julian in prison, they have had to corrupt their own rules and their own principles.”

Stella, visiting Australia for the first time, noted that her tour had initially been planned to coincide with a scheduled visit of US President Joe Biden. He had been set down to attend a summit of the warmongering and anti-China Quadrilateral Strategic Dialogue this week in Sydney.

Biden cancelled, however Stella proceeded with the visit. She explained the crucial importance of the fight within Australia to securing her husband’s freedom. Assange is detained in Britain and faces extradition to the US, where he would be tried on Espionage Act charges carrying 175 years imprisonment for exposing American war crimes.

Assange is an Australian citizen. Stella explained: “Julian’s case is a case of global importance. But you guys are at the centre of it because Julian is an Australian, he’s a country boy, and he’s from this country. That means that the key to securing Julian’s release lies with you.”

Assange’s supporters in Australia were part of a “global movement” involving millions of people all over the world, she said. There is a growing recognition, internationally, that “he’s in prison because he exposed the crimes of others. No decent human being will ever tolerate that. The only people whose interest remains Julian’s imprisonment, are the ones who are guilty and implicated in those crimes.”

Within Australia, there had been a “sea change.” Only a few years ago, there had been “radio silence” on Assange’s case. But increasingly it was being discussed in the media, as well as by official politicians. This, Stella stressed, was a consequence of the demands made by ordinary people and a protracted grassroots campaign.

This fight had to be deepened, she said. “You guys need to shout louder, fight harder, put the pressure on each of your representatives, make Julian’s situation visible everywhere, every day, on your cars, on your shirts. Every day you tell all your friends, you talk about it with your family… Make sure Julian remains top priority until he steps out of that prison. I think we’re near, we can achieve this together.”

Stella noted that it was her first time in Australia, but it would not be her last. “I will come back here, home with Julian, and our kids who are Australian citizens will come home too.”

John Shipton, Assange’s father, placed the persecution of Assange within a broader context. Brown University, in the United States, had recently published a report showing that there had been 4.5 million deaths in the Middle East following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. An earlier document, from the same institution, estimated that the predatory US-led wars in the region had displaced 38 million people.

Speaking of those US interventions Shipton condemned a “hegemon standing in a river of blood.” He emphasised the striving of ordinary people for “justice” and “humanity,” which would ultimately be victorious. Assange’s case and the fight for his freedom were integral to this broader struggle.

Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, said: “If anything is to be taken from Julian’s persecution, it is that it has mobilised people all around the world… The fight gives meaning to Julian’s work. It has brought us all together here to fight for something that is so important to our Western democracies and that’s a free press. How can we make decisions about what our governments do in our name if we don’t know? It’s not possible.”

David McBride addressed the protest. A former Australian army lawyer, he faces life behind bars for blowing the whistle on Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. They included verified murders of civilians and prisoners and other violations of international law. For these offenses, McBride, the man who exposed them, is the first to face court proceedings.

“There’s a good chance that even though I reported murders and cover-ups, that I’m going to go to jail for the rest of my life… It’s not something I hang my head about. It’s something I’m proud of… We need to stand up, the future of the planet depends on it.”

The whistleblower noted the comments of Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has made extremely tepid statements expressing “concern” over Assange’s plight. Albanese has said that “enough is enough” in relation to the Assange case. He claims to have made private representations to the US and British governments on behalf of Assange, but has stopped far short of any public demand for the Australian journalist’s freedom.

McBride responded: “I say this to Anthony Albanese. Enough of you saying ‘enough is enough.’ It means nothing. Imagine if I had witnessed war crimes in Afghanistan, witnessed murder and cover-up… and all I said to them is ‘enough is enough.’ It’s not enough.” McBride called for Albanese to “step up to the plate” and secure Assange’s unconditional freedom.

Stephen Kenny, Assange’s Australian lawyer, issued the same demand. Kenny represented Australian citizen David Hicks, who was rendered to the American military prison in Guantánamo Bay as part of the “war on terror.” Hicks was eventually freed and returned to Australia, as the result of a powerful campaign led by his father Terry Hicks. David Hicks had been compelled to sign a plea deal, despite having committed no crime.

Kenny noted the parallels. “Like David Hicks, Julian Assange has not committed any crime at all. So why is he in jail?” The editors of other major publications, who were involved in WikiLeaks’ 2010 and 2011 releases, for which Assange is being prosecuted, remain at liberty. This, Kenny explained, made clear that the case against Assange was political and required a political solution.

He outlined some of the abuses of the British judiciary. This included placing Assange in a glass box at the back of his courtroom during the first extradition proceedings, denying him the right to participate in his own case. Assange’s lawyers, moreover, had filed their latest appeal in November. The British judges merely need to determine whether he has an arguable case, a process which Kenny said should take several days or at most a week. But six months on and this task has not been completed.

Albanese has recently hinted at the prospect of a plea deal in the Assange case. Kenny forcefully rejected this course. “Is there a Hicks solution? Why should there be? He has not committed any crime. He should not be forced to plead to anything. We need our prime minister to stand up, not just say ‘enough is enough.’”

The rally raised several political issues. Many of the speakers, importantly, emphasised the decisive role of mobilising ordinary people in the fight to free Assange.

Inevitably, the statements of Albanese and other Labor representatives have generated some hope within the Assange camp. But there is no indication, whatsoever, that Albanese is fighting for Assange’s freedom, behind closed doors or anywhere else. This week he refused to even meet with Stella Assange. Albanese was part of the Gillard Labor government, which in 2010 and 2011, played a central role in the initial stages of the persecution of Assange…….. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/25/rgzp-m25.html?fbclid=IwAR1yfKnxx-_FuaTf0qdcSzFjaiYawdDU8YzVOUBFX5GT0RrBI6gj61xvWCE

May 27, 2023 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, civil liberties | Leave a comment

Ukraine admits to murdering “quite a few” Russian civilians

BY TYLER DURDEN, Zero Hedge, 22 May 23

A senior Ukrainian official has admitted that his country has assassinated “quite a few” Russian civilians who support Putin and his war to assert control of the Donbas region. In interviews first reported by The Times of London, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukraine’s military intelligence service, also promised more attacks are to come. 

“We’ve already successfully targeted quite a few people,” said Budanov. He didn’t name any of the victims, but said “there have been well-publicized cases everyone knows about, thanks to the media coverage.”

Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, several prominent Russian supporters of the invasion — and many innocent bystanders — have been killed or wounded in the campaign. 

One of the most prominent such attacks happened last August, when a car bomb killed journalist Darya Dugina — in a possible attempt to kill her father, the political scientist-philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. 

Like her father, Darya was a vocal supporter of Putin and his invasion. Both she and her father were sanctioned by the United States after the war began. Given her profile, it’s possible Ukraine may have intentionally murdered her in a sinister two-for-one act of punishment.  

Most recently, novelist Zakhar Prielepin was wounded in a May 6 car-bombing, and Russian military blogger Vladen Tatarsky was killed at an April public appearance after a woman presented him a statuette with a bomb concealed inside it. Fifteen others were injured. 

For perspective, a hypothetical parallel for this campaign would be Iraq’s intelligence service blowing up Iraq-invasion cheerleaders like Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ann Coulter and Max Boot in 2003. Ukraine’s targeting of civilians doesn’t merely violate vague “international norms” that Washington pretends to hold dear — they are explicitly war crimes.    

What’s more, if one accepts the definition of terrorism as “the intentional use of violence against civilians in order to obtain political aims,” Budanov has implicated Ukraine as a state sponsor of terror — one that’s received $37 billion in US military aid since the war started, and perhaps double that in other assistance. 

Budanov isn’t merely an unapologetic terrorist, he’s a boastful one. “These cases have happened and will continue,” he said. Such people will receive a well-deserved punishment, and the appropriate punishment can only be liquidation and I will implement it.”……………………………….more https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-admits-murdering-quite-few-russian-civilians-who-back-putin-and-his-invasion

May 24, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Nuclear would be labeled ‘clean energy’ under new legislation

KEVIN GARCIA-GALINDO, MAY 22, 2023, The Carolina Journal

Senate Bill 678, “Promote Clean Energy,” currently in the N.C. House Rules Committee, could pave the way for more investment in nuclear energy in North Carolina.

The bill would relabel “renewable energy resources” as “clean energy resources” in the State’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard and add nuclear fission and fusion into the definition of clean energy. If approved by the state legislature, this bill would make nuclear energy a viable option toward replacing coal-fired power plants with new cleaner sources.

S.B. 678 would also help further the proliferation of nuclear energy by eliminating statutes that had previously restricted the construction of nuclear facilities in House Bill 951, which passed in 2021.

COOPER INDICATES RESISTANCE

The N.C. Senate passed S.B. 678 in late April, but it is now seeing opposition from Gov. Roy Cooper. At the State Energy Conference last month, Cooper told business leaders that he did not want politicians to be seen as influencing which energy sources are prioritized over others.

 Environmental activist group CleanAIRE NC told the Wilmington Star-News in a statement that “nuclear energy may be zero-emission, but it is not renewable and it’s certainly not clean. … Uranium is a mined resource. And on the backend storing nuclear waste poses major, unanswered safety questions. With wind and solar capacity rapidly expanding, is it really worth gambling with our health and safety?”

A Cooper spokesperson stated that the governor would not look at the bill until it reached his desk………………………………………………….. https://www.carolinajournal.com/nuclear-would-be-labeled-clean-energy-under-new-legislation/

May 23, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 1 Comment

AUKUS may turn out to be the largest financial swindle perpetrated by the United States and the United Kingdom against Australia and other Asia Pacific nations

 Now, it appears that Australia is becoming yet another naval base for the deployment of US and British fleets in the Asia-Pacific Region, including the basing of US nuclear submarines in 2026, without any hope of restoring economic ties with China and, consequently, the prior level of welfare in the near future. This is in addition to paying “compensation” under the guise of investing in unfeasible defense plans.

https://journal-neo.org/2023/05/20/aukus-may-turn-out-to-be-the-largest-financial-swindle-perpetrated-by-the-united-states-and-the-united-kingdom-against-australia-and-other-asia-pacific-nations/ 20.05.2023 Author: Bakhtiar Urusov

Equipment for the country’s ground forces “arrives with depressing regularity,” years behind time, and substantially over budget, according to a report issued on April 19 by the British Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee. For instance, the programs, which provide new Ajax armored fighting vehicles and Morpheus tactical communication and information systems, have faced significant difficulties. According to the MPs’ assessment, the issue is made worse by underfunding of the defense budget expenditures and the pound’s declining purchasing value in relation to the dollar.

Ten days later, on April 28 this year, the Royal Navy informed the public about the decision to decommission the HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier, launched just four years ago (in 2019), to be used as a donor for spare parts for the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier of the same class. According to the Royal Navy, the $3.72 billion aircraft carrier has docked more frequently than it has participated in naval operations, and the most recent maintenance cost $42 million.

This dispiriting news came just a month after the leaders of the US, the UK, and Australia had disclosed their ambitious long-term plans to build a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for Canberra on the basis of British technology, which will cost the Australian budget $245 billion.

When it comes to extremely sophisticated projects like nuclear submarines, it seems inconceivable that the parties involved would be so irresponsible as to neglect to evaluate the contractors’ capacity to meet their obligations. Still, if you trust the claims made by senior US, British, and Australian officials, the opposite is true in the case of AUKUS. Canberra would never have consented to work together on submarine design and construction with Great Britain’s waning technological strength otherwise. The example of the HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier shows that not only is Great Britain unable to complete a big naval project, but it is also facing significant technological difficulties in order to satisfy present ambitions for defense construction and equipment upgrades.

In the realm of economic crime, assigning work to a contractor who is known to be unable to perform is fraud, money laundering, or corruption.

In the context of Anglo-Saxon big politics, this appears to be retaliation against a certain sector of Australia’s elites for Canberra’s departure from a coordinated approach to restrain the PRC back in the day. This is primarily about the carefree era when Australia and China’s trading and economic relations remained unbroken, providing Canberra with significant revenue from exports to the PRC of a wide range of items, from wine and agricultural products to hard coal and other minerals.

Now, it appears that Australia is becoming yet another naval base for the deployment of US and British fleets in the Asia-Pacific Region, including the basing of US nuclear submarines in 2026, without any hope of restoring economic ties with China and, consequently, the prior level of welfare in the near future. This is in addition to paying “compensation” under the guise of investing in unfeasible defense plans.

All nations, including India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, and some ASEAN members that have been invited to participate in the AUKUS, should take a closer look at this alliance.

Bakhtiar Urusov, a political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

May 22, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Lying is the new black

    by beyondnuclearinternational  https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/05/21/lying-is-the-new-black/

And the nuclear industry is going for the fiction prize

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Lying is the new black. It is everywhere. It is in, and cool and entirely acceptable in the circles where judgement and ethics are permanently suspended. Disgraced (and now criminally charged) U.S. congressman, George Santos, is the poster child of this new fashion statement. Make up something outlandish and Santos has probably claimed to have said it or done it. None of it is true. And he is still in Congress.

In this (hopefully permanently) post-Trump era, lying with impunity has become precisely that: unpunishable, even applauded, as Trump was on his CNN debacle, which consigned that network to the dustbin of what once used to be called journalism.

It’s all about entertainment now, and clicks, likes, readership and ratings. And fiction. And the nuclear industry boosters are going for the Pulitzer Prize on that one. We used to say, “you couldn’t make this stuff up,” but the pro-nukers do. All the time.

So nuclear power is “the cheapest, safest, greenest” form of energy ever invented. It is “carbon-free.” No one ever died because of a nuclear accident. Irrational fear-mongering by the anti-nuclear movement killed off nuclear power growth in the United States. Renewables are a pipe-dream of the crunchy granola set and about as boring and superfluous. And so on and so on.

There used to be fact-checkers at media organizations. Not any more. Because all this twaddle appears in print and on the air, unchecked and unchallenged. Not only that, media outlets are no longer impartial and are, in fact, deliberately fanning the flames of deceit. Thus, Bloomberg could trumpet an article about the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia with this headline: Nuclear Power Makes Comeback with Massive Carbon-Free Vogtle Plant in Georgia. 

This is a comeback? From what, exactly? A comeback is usually a triumphant return to greatness by a previously successful but then faded star. Actor Robert Downey Jr made a comeback. Basketball legend, Michael Jordan, made a comeback.

But Vogtle 3 and 4 are a nuclear comeback? The two reactors are more expensive than any previous reactors — far more — and will exceed at least $35 billion when both are finally operational. That’s over $21 billion more than originally planned. 

Massive? That would be the bill paid by Georgia ratepayers. As Stephanie Cooke reported recently in Energy Intelligencer, ratepayers haver already “been charged for the financing portion — but not the actual capital costs — of Georgia Power’s construction bills since 2011.” This has now gone on six years longer than expected, and counting.

And, as Patty Durand, a candidate for the Georgia Public Service Commission, pointed out in a recent column in Utility, Dive, “if all construction costs for Plant Vogtle get moved into the rate base, Georgia Power bills will increase 20% for 60 years.”

Another $2.1 billion of capital costs will be folded into the rate base once Vogtle 3 is fully operational. There will likely be a similar rate hike once Vogtle 4 starts up.

As for carbon-free, do the Bloomberg writers imagine that these plants just magically dropped into place like manna from heaven? Did they really not notice all the cement and steel and other manufactured parts and the trucks delivering it all, and the construction activities on the site? Do they know what fuel these reactors use (uranium) and where it comes from and what kind of carbon footprint uranium mining, milling and enrichment leave behind? Apparently not. Or, maybe calling it “carbon-free” is just, well, a lie.

The Vogtle 3 and 4 project has been beset by numerous delays and technical flaws along with its cost over-runs. It began more than 16 years ago and is still incomplete. If this is a “comeback” then during its previous go-around it must have fallen at the first fence, broken its leg and been shot on the spot. Because it really can’t get much worse than Vogtle.

Unless you are French. Then it can get positively scandaleuse. The French flagship new reactor is called the Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR), but unless time is running backwards it’s not evolutionary. Like its American AP1000 counterpart, it has suffered years of delays at construction sites in France, Finland and the UK, and run up enormous cost over-runs. 

Cost estimates for France’s twin reactor EPR project, Hinkley Point C in the UK, are now predicted to reach at least $40 billion, making it second only to the Great Mosque of Mecca as the most expensive building in the world.

Undeterred, voilà, along comes the French small modular reactor (SMR) known as the “Nuward”. (Notice how a version of “new” has to creep into the branding here — like the “NuScale” counterpart in the United States.)

When asked about the timeline for Nuward’s first concrete pour, the company’s president and CEO, Renaud Crassous, stated blandly: “The constant timeline has been to focus on 2030 as the best compromise between the expectation of the potential market and our ability to grow quickly to deliver this new product.”

2030? Quickly? Hello? So seven years from now, if we continue along our current path of doing too few renewables too late, by which time we will be in grave climate chaos (arguably in some parts of the world we are already there), the nuclear industry will proudly point to, drumroll, a concrete pad. But no actual reactor. 

Reality check anyone? Why aren’t the editors at Bloomberg and the New York Times asking questions about time at the very least? And cost? The carbon-free part — that dominated the Bloomberg headline and which isn’t even true — is entirely irrelevant if nuclear power is too slow and too expensive. Which it is.

No matter. The nuclear industry will instead try to distract us with what they call “science”. (In their Thesaurus, ‘science’ is a synonym for ‘alchemy’.) One such example of their “science” is a claim that new reactors will consume their own waste as fresh fuel! No need for uranium mining, they crow!

Except that the claim that a nuclear reactor could “burn” or “consume” nuclear waste is misleading. Reactors can only use a fraction of irradiated fuel as new fuel, and separating that fraction — which requires carbon-intensive and radioactively polluting reprocessing — increases proliferation and terrorism risks. 

Undeterred by, heaven forfend, actual facts, those who claim that reactors can eat their own waste won’t eat their own words. Because that would be uncool. And ethical. And these days, embracing integrity and the truth is just so last year. 

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International. 

May 22, 2023 Posted by | 2 WORLD, media, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Washington Post censors its own report of interview that showed President Vladimir Zelensky in a poor light

 https://www.rt.com/russia/576284-zelensky-wapo-transcript-deleted/ 15 May 23 Washington Post deletes ‘treason’ quotes from Zelensky interview

The Ukrainian president reacted angrily when confronted about his own intelligence agents’ supposed “dealings” with Russia’s Wagner Group

The Washington Post has cut a large segment from an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, in which he pushed the newspaper to reveal alleged traitors in his ranks and angrily accused its reporters of aiding Russia by publishing information from leaked documents.

The Post published a transcript of a lengthy interview with Zelensky on Saturday. After a discussion of a Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces, the newspaper asked whether his military intelligence agency – the GUR – had “back-channel contact” with Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian private military company Wagner Group.

Citing recently leaked Pentagon documents, the Post explained to Zelensky that American spies noted a meeting between the president and GUR chief Kirill Budanov in February in which Budanov told him that he had learned of a Wagner plan to “destabilize Moldova,” but could counter this alleged plan by exposing his own “dealings” with Prigozhin, thus portraying the Wagner boss as “a traitor who has been working with Ukraine.”

Zelensky responded angrily, first asking who within his government had handed this document to the Post. Whoever it was, he said, was committing “treason,” which “is the most severe felony in our country.”

Despite being told that the document did not come from Kiev, but from Washington, Zelensky asked his interviewer to reveal “with which Ukrainian official did you talk?”

The Post has not yet published a story based on the document, and when informed that he was the first Ukrainian official the newspaper had spoken to, Zelensky urged his interviewer not to run the story, arguing that doing so would “demotivate Ukraine,” and accusing them of “playing games with me.”

“You are right now playing with, I think, things that aren’t good for our people,” he warned, asking the Post’s reporter “is your goal to help Russia?” When the reporter said that it was not, Zelensky countered “well, it looks different.”

By Sunday, however, the explosive exchange – during which Zelensky did not dispute that the meeting with Budanov had happened – was missing from the Post’s transcript. The entire 1,400-word back-and-forth about the document was removed, with no explanation given.

The Post’s edit is not the first incident in which Western governments or media outlets have scrubbed information potentially embarrassing or damaging to Kiev. Back in December, the European Commission deleted a video and its associated transcript in which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the Ukrainian military had suffered 100,000 fatalities since Russia’s military operation began ten months earlier. 

Kiev keeps its losses a closely guarded secret, and when asked by the Washington Post to comment on this policy, Zelensky sniped “if you have the relevant documents, maybe you can tell us how many people have died…and what their names were.”

May 17, 2023 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

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