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Iran says it will release Israeli nuclear secrets as pressure grows to reimpose sanctions

Tehran threat comes as European powers press for vote that could lead to reimposition of UN sanctions

Guardian Patrick Wintour, 9 June 25

Iran has said it will soon start releasing information from a hoard of Israeli nuclear secrets it claims to have obtained, as European countries push for a vote this week on reimposing UN sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear programme.

The unverified claims by Iranian intelligence of a massive leak of Israeli secrets may be designed to turn the focus away from what Iran argues is its own excessively monitored civil nuclear programme.

On Sunday, Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, claimed Tehran had obtained “a vast collection of strategic and sensitive [Israeli] documents, including plans and data on the nuclear facilities”. He added evidence would be released shortly, and implied some of the documentation was linked to Israel’s arrest of two Israeli nationals, Roi Mizrahi and Almog Attias, over alleged spying for Iran………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/09/iran-says-it-will-release-israeli-nuclear-secrets-as-pressure-grows-to-reimpose-sanctions

June 11, 2025 Posted by | Iran, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Defence review dodges Britain’s nuclear blind spot.

THE UK’s nuclear enterprise is in crisis. Not just because of cost
overruns or ageing submarines, but because of the deepening secrecy and
silence that surrounds it. That silence should have been broken by the
Labour Government’s new Strategic Defence Review 2025.

Instead, it was quietly reinforced. Presented as a roadmap to “Make Britain Safer”, the
review promised clarity and accountability, but it fails to confront the
most pressing truths: that the UK’s nuclear programme is financially
unsustainable, strategically unbalanced, increasingly unaccountable and a
real and present danger to us all.

These concerns are not hypothetical. In
the final months of the last Parliament, I raised them on the floor of the
House of Commons, not out of party dogma, but in response to serious and
public allegations from Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to the then
prime minister, remember him? He described Britain’s nuclear
infrastructure as a “dangerous disaster”, responsible for the secret
“cannibalisation” of other national security budgets and shielded from
meaningful scrutiny. Instead of confronting the truth, the review restates
familiar platitudes and leaves the public and Parliament no wiser about the
scale cost, or consequences of the UK’s nuclear commitment. The Defence
Secretary, who heard these warnings first-hand from the opposition bench,
is now in a position to act – he has chosen not to.

 The National 8th June 2025,
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25222635.defence-review-dodges-britains-nuclear-blind-spot/

June 9, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Epstein, Israel, ISIS, Palantir

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 06, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/epstein-israel-isis-palantir?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=165336332&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Amid the inevitable giant ego clash between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Musk tweeted that the president “is in the Epstein files,” saying “That is the real reason they have not been made public.”

As we have discussed previously, it is a known fact that Trump is on the Epstein flight logs and has been obstructing the release of the Epstein files. It is also a known fact that Jeffrey Epstein worked with Israeli intelligence and was running a sexual blackmail operation, and that Trump has been bending over backwards to give Israel everything it wants while stomping out American free speech that is critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

There’s no reason to take seriously anything Elon Musk says during a textbook case of narcissistic collapse, but for the record if anyone in Washington is likely to have been blackmailed by Epstein it’s Donald John Trump.

Israel has admitted to arming ISIS-linked gangs as proxy forces in Gaza, throwing some cold water on the fuzzbrained narrative that the west is backing Israel to help defeat Islamic extremism. Israel is backing these forces in order to sow chaos and strife with the goal of advancing its ethnic cleansing objectives in the Palestinian territory.

❖

Lately whenever I talk about Israel’s ethnic cleansing agenda I get Israel supporters telling me “They’re not doing ethnic cleansing! They’re just making the Palestinians leave Gaza because they don’t want them there!” Which is yet another reminder of how stupid Israel apologists are, because the forced mass expulsion of an undesired ethnic group is precisely the definition of ethnic cleansing.

I have this conversation every single day:

Me: Here’s evidence of Israel doing something evil.

Israel supporter: All Hamas has to do is surrender and release the hostages and this ends immediately.

Me: No that’s false, Israel is openly saying the slaughter will continue until all Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from Gaza regardless of whether Hamas surrenders or the hostages are released. Here’s a pile of evidence showing that this is the case.

Israel supporter: Yeah well that’s what happens when you start a war you can’t win. Next time don’t do terrorism.

Me: You were just claiming Hamas can end this at any time by making different decisions. Now that you know Hamas is powerless to stop Israel’s ethnic cleansing atrocities you have pivoted to saying all Palestinians deserve mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Sounds like you’ll just support Israel no matter what it does regardless of facts or morality.

Israel supporter: ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE

❖

I keep meaning to talk about how the Trump administration is reportedly granting oligarch Peter Thiel’s odious company Palantir a central role in a massive authoritarian expansion in government surveillance powers which would see American data compiled and tracked across multiple government agencies.

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with longstanding ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, and has already been playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

This is being framed by the political/media class as a Trump policy, but it’s obviously a US empire policy. These sweeping surveillance powers are intended to remain in place long after Trump is gone, regardless of who happens to be in office.

We are being asked to believe that individuals becoming violently radicalized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza is of greater concern than the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

No. That isn’t going to happen.

Perhaps the best way to stop people from committing acts of violence in response to the genocide in Gaza would be to cease actively fucking facilitating the fucking genocide in Gaza.

Palestine supporters: Here’s a video that just came out showing Israel massacring Palestinian civilians again.

Israel supporters: Okay, so, two thousand years ago…

❖

The world waking up to Israel’s depravity reminds me of the moment I first saw how nasty and abusive my ex was. That first glimpse when I finally let myself see the sadism and ill will he had for me was the beginning of the end.

Maybe the world is beginning its own moment of clarity.

June 8, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Watchdog probes Springbank baron over nuclear firm meeting

Herald Scotland, 29th May, Andrew Bowie, House of Lords,Politics

The House of Lords watchdog has launched an investigation into a Scottish Conservative peer over his role in arranging a meeting between a government minister and a Canadian nuclear technology firm he advises.

The probe into Ian Duncan by the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards’ Office, a former Scotland Office minister, follows a report published last month by the Guardian.

The paper stated that Lord Duncan of Springbank helped Terrestrial Energy secure a meeting in 2023 with Andrew Bowie, then the UK nuclear minister.

Lord Duncan, who has also served as a junior climate minister, has been an adviser to Terrestrial Energy since 2020.

The company is developing a new type of nuclear reactor it claims can be built more quickly and cheaply than traditional power stations.

Although Lord Duncan has not received a salary for the role, he has been granted share options—allowing him to buy company shares at a preferential rate if the business becomes profitable.

Documents released under freedom of information legislation show that, in 2023, Lord Duncan forwarded a letter from Terrestrial Energy’s chief executive, Simon Irish, to Mr Bowie.

In the letter, Mr Irish requested a meeting with the minister to introduce himself and brief him on the firm’s products. He noted that, alongside a partner, the company had “applied for a grant from [the] UK’s nuclear fuel fund programme”………………………………..

The House of Lords Commissioners for Standards’ website confirms that Lord Duncan is under investigation for a “potential breach” of paragraph 9(d) of the 12th edition of the House of Lords Code of Conduct, which states that “Members must not seek to profit from membership of the House by accepting or agreeing to accept payment or other incentive or reward in return for providing parliamentary advice or services.”………………………https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/westminster/25198535.watchdog-probes-springbank-baron-nuclear-firm-meeting/

June 1, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

France spent €90,000 countering research into impact of Pacific nuclear tests

Radiation-related thyroid, breast and lung cancers, as well as leukaemia and lymphoma, are prevalent across the islands.

Documents suggest campaign to discredit revelation that tests contaminated many more people than acknowledged

Jon Henley  Guardian, 27 May 25

France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has spent tens of thousands of euros in an effort to counter research revealing that Paris has consistently underestimated the devastating impact of its nuclear tests in French Polynesia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Days before a parliamentary inquiry presents its report on the tests, documents obtained by the investigative outlet Disclose, and seen by Le Monde and the Guardian, suggest the CEA ran a concerted campaign to discredit the revelations.

A 2021 book, Toxique, which focused on just six of the 193 nuclear tests that France carried out from 1966 to 1996 at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, drawing on 2,000 pages of declassified material and dozens of interviews, concluded that they contaminated many more people than France has ever acknowledged.

The latest documents show that a year after the book’s publication, the CEA published 5,000 copies of its own booklet – titled “Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences?” – and distributed them across the islands.

As part of an operation costing more than €90,000, the commission also flew a four-man team by business class to French Polynesia, where they stayed at the Hilton hotel, to meet local dignitaries and give interviews to the media.

The CEA’s booklet, printed on glossy paper, claimed to provide “scientific responses” to the “allegations” contained in Toxique, whose authors it said did not have “the same level of expertise”. It claimed contamination had been limited and that France always behaved transparently and with respect for local inhabitants’ health.

The publication of Toxique – based on the investigation by Disclose, Princeton University’s science and global security programme and Interprt, an environmental justice research collective – caused a furore in France, prompting visits to French Polynesia by a minister and the president, Emmanuel Macron, who acknowledged France’s “debt” to the region.

In one 1974 test alone, the scientific research found, 110,000 people – the population of Tahiti and its nearby islands – could have received a radiation dose high enough to qualify them for compensation if they later developed one of 23 different cancers.

Toxique alleged the CEA has long underestimated the radiation levels involved, significantly limiting the numbers eligible for compensation: by 2023, fewer than half the 2,846 compensation claims submitted had even been judged admissible.

The parliamentary inquiry, which has so far called more than 40 politicians, military personnel, scientists and victims, is due to report before the end of May on the social, economic and environmental impact of the tests – and whether France knowingly concealed the extent of contamination.

The CEA’s military division, CEA/DAM, the inventor of France’s atomic bomb, has repeatedly called this a “false assertion”. But France’s nuclear safety body, the ASNR, has since acknowledged “uncertainties associated with [the CEA’s] calculations” and confirmed to the parliamentary inquiry that it was impossible to prove people received radiation doses lower than the compensation threshold.

The CEA said in a statement that the aim of its booklet “was to provide Polynesians in particular with the elements to understand” the tests and their impact. It said the booklet applied “the necessary scientific rigour” to explain “the health and environmental consequences of the tests” in a “factual and transparent manner”……………………..

The inquiry has heard that the CEA/DAM has so far declassified only 380 documents in the four years since Macron demanded “greater transparency” around the tests and their consequences – compared with 173,000 declassified by the army.

Jérôme Demoment, the director of CEA/DAM, told the parliamentary inquiry earlier this year that it was “highly likely, if we were to have to manage [nuclear tests] today, that the system put in place would respond to a different logic”.

Forty-six of France’s nuclear tests were atmospheric, exposing the local population, site workers and French soldiers who were stationed in Polynesia at the time to high levels of radiation before the testing programme was moved underground in 1974.

Radiation-related thyroid, breast and lung cancers, as well as leukaemia and lymphoma, are prevalent across the islands. For its part, the French army has said up to 2,000 military personnel could have been exposed to enough radiation to cause cancer.

“The notion of a ‘clean bomb’ has generated controversy, which I fully understand,” Demoment told the parliamentary inquiry. “No nuclear test generating radioactive fallout can be considered clean.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/27/france-spent-90000-countering-research-into-impact-of-pacific-nuclear-tests

May 29, 2025 Posted by | France, OCEANIA, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

How does the nuclear industry get away with its persistent, repetitive lies?

Radiation Free Lakeland * nuclear landfill/geological dump * NO TA!

Steve Wallis , 25 May 25.

Thoughts on the nuclear industry and how it is “run” and perceived by the people who work in the industry and how it is “sold” to the public. An earlier thread details Trump’s executive orders re “new” nuclear and the lies spouting forth about new this, new safety that, and not like the other nukes nonsense.

There are a few things that are very puzzling when it comes to the nuclear industry, perhaps the main one is why tell lies and why these lies are believed. Before talking about this I am interested in the “new” nuclear and the growing criticism concerning lack/lapse of regulation, mainly to build them quicker, cheaper and more of them. For example the SMR’s in the US will not fall under the current impact surveys for standard nuclear plants, re environmental/public safety.

Trump mentions SMR’s as if they already exist. This is not true, the modular means these reactors are built on a production line and then assembled on site. No factory production line exists at the moment.

Then the question is how does the nuclear industry get away with telling the same lies over and over, which it always does? Maybe this is because of regulatory capture, when a regulatory agency becomes dominated by the industry it is meant to regulate, and therefore does not protect public interest. Sellafield is an example of this over and over.

So why does the public believe Trump and the nuclear industry who are liars? This brings me to The Nietzsche Thesis, in his words we will accept and look for “truth” only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” So, I will accept what is said if it preserves my view of the world, conversely I present a hostile reaction to harmful truths. Surveys asking Trump supporters how they feel about the lies are unconcerned because the lies fulfil their goals, and do not threaten their status. Likewise, despite loads of nuclear accidents people still believe the industries lies about providing safe, clean and cheap energy.

The nuclear industry always tells the public it is safe, and how it prides itself on providing the safest form of energy. It is as if all the nuclear accidents simply never happened and the public tend to believe this lie rather than the truth.

May 28, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

UK’s  Geological Disposal Facility Community Partnership operates under restrictive government guidance and the management of Nuclear Waste Services

 An interesting article recently sent to the NFLAs prompted a reply by our
Secretary identifying the limitations placed upon members of the Geological
Disposal Facility Community Partnerships wishing to source independent
information or commission bespoke research.

Such Community Partnerships operate under restrictive government guidance and the management of Nuclear Waste Services.

The Author and Article: A Quiet Resistance is run by a
writer, author, and marketing copywriter, living with her small family near
Millom. Understanding how language is used to persuade, convince, and
influence the decisions of mass populations, she set out to unpack the
messaging around the unfolding climate catastrophe, to help others decode
truth from fiction for themselves, and to open up critical thinking
pathways through the consumerism.

A Quiet Resistance documents this journey of discovery. AQuietResistance.co.uk –
https://aquietresistance.co.uk/the-media-scientific-consensus-toxic-nuclear-waste
23 April 2025. The media, scientific consensus, and toxic nuclear waste

When government agencies are hard to trust, who do we look to? Scientists. But
what job is the concept of scientific consensus doing in the marketing of
the GDF? ‘Scientific consensus’ carries a lot of weight in news media
discussing the proposed Geological Disposal Facilities (GDFs) (nuclear
waste dumps) in West Cumbria.

This consensus is also being used as a
persuasion tool in the official literature handed out to communities by
Nuclear Waste Services (NWS). Since most of us aren’t scientists in either
the nuclear industry or geodisposal, we have to turn to those who are if
we’re to understand what’s going to happen to our community. Alongside the
regular newsletters and other marketing from NWS, we usually access those
people through articles in the news and on the internet. But it’s important
to keep asking questions about what we’re reading. ‘Scientific consensus’
doesn’t mean the science is settled; articles can contain facts and still
be biased.

 NFLA 16th May 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/A431-NB317-The-media-scientific-consensus-and-toxic-nuclear-waste-May-2025.pdf

May 21, 2025 Posted by | civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

How Donald Trump’s Crypto Dealings Push the Bounds of Corruption.

With the meme coin $TRUMP and the company World Liberty Financial, the President is using an underregulated industry to enrich himself and court foreign influence.

By Kyle Chayka, May 14, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-donald-trumps-crypto-dealings-push-the-bounds-of-corruption?cndid=30183386&bxid=5be9d23d24c17c6adf3bf435&esrc=subscribe-page&hashc=ac5a1f5526e7292c73f49dfa8fb6d5d0cb87d8773cec3b9b03d38a4ce482d7c8&hashb=e1c24f6a6459c7d1d625eb2ea55d9dfbbb4633bf&hasha=432fc0d0ad6543e820e2dfcd39f76c35&mbid=CRMNYR012019&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_term=TNY_Science_Tech&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Science_051725

Imagine that someone in a position of great political power created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually you will receive a reward: a proportional quantity of magic beans—and eventually each magic bean will be exchangeable for one United States dollar. What’s more, if you buy the raffle tickets early, you can get them for less than a dollar, perhaps for as little as five cents apiece. Not only will the raffle tickets eventually gain you more traditional currency; you can also vote on company matters with your raffle tickets and help manage the magic-bean supply, and the more tickets you purchase, the more say you have. Oh, and the creator of the raffle will keep a bunch of the tickets for himself, and much of the revenue generated by the magic-bean economy will also go back to him.

This effectively describes the workings of a new cryptocurrency created by World Liberty Financial, a company affiliated with the Trump family, with President Donald Trump serving as its “Chief Crypto Advocate.” The cryptocurrency, a so-called governance token called WLFI, is the raffle ticket, and another cryptocurrency, a “stablecoin” called USD1, is the magic bean. World Liberty deals in the nascent industry of “decentralized finance,” in which cryptocurrency instruments allow users to circumvent the traditional, regulated banking ecosystem for moving, storing, and lending money. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a single currency value, such as one U.S. dollar, though they are not always so stable: Terra, a once successful stablecoin, lost its peg and suffered a collapse in 2022. Stablecoins fall nebulously within the bounds of the law, so long as they don’t appear to function as securities (as, for instance, stock in a publicly traded company does). A banner on the World Liberty website serves as a legal disclaimer: “World Liberty Financial does not consider the tokens to be securities.” Donald Trump et fils quietly assumed a controlling stake of World Liberty, in January, through a company called DT Marks Defi. Though fine print specifies that no member of the Trump family is an “officer, director or employee” of World Liberty, DT Marks Defi receives seventy-five per cent of its subsidiary company’s net revenue. (The remaining twenty-five per cent goes to Axiom Management Group, which is connected with two of World Liberty’s official leaders, Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, a pair of self-described “crypto-punks,” whose other ventures include, in Folkman’s case, a company called Date Hotter Girls.)

Trump is a onetime crypto skeptic who announced, in a tweet in 2019, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin.” Yet in recent years, he has touted several varieties of magic beans, bringing a P.R. boost to an industry in which new ventures are often dead on arrival. In 2022, he released Trump Digital Trading Cards, a series of non-fungible tokens that has continued to produce new batches, including a January, 2024, “Mugshot” edition, featuring his glaring police photo. (Bulk buyers of the mug-shot N.F.T. received invitations to Mar-a-Lago.) Three days before his Inauguration, he launched a so-called meme coin, cryptocurrencies based on online notoriety that become de-facto pyramid schemes as early buyers sell off to later ones at higher prices. $TRUMP consists of a billion coins, eighty per cent of which were kept by Trump-related companies, and the remainder sold to the public. It reportedly made around three hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue in its sale and has a market capitalization of nearly three billion dollars; Trump’s business earns a fee for every $TRUMP transaction.

The price of the meme coin is now down to less than a fifth of its all-time high, and the majority of its buyers have seen their purchases lose value. An official Melania Trump meme coin released soon after Trump’s has fared even worse. But $TRUMP was given a recent bump when Fight Fight Fight, a business associated with the Trump Organization and its crypto projects, ran a contest in which the two hundred and twenty largest holders of the meme coin won invitations to a gala dinner with Donald Trump, to be hosted at the Trump National Golf Club near Washington, D.C. (Black tie is optional.) The top twenty-five will get access to a more private reception with the President. The contest offers an explicit way to buy Trump’s attention, lending magic beans a new appeal as a lobbying tool. Many of the meme-coin investors are based abroad, and some have been unequivocal about their goal of influencing Trump’s agenda. (One Australian entrepreneur told the Times that he hopes to talk to the President about crypto policy; a Mexican buyer said that he would like Trump’s ear on tariffs.) On Tuesday, a small Chinese company that operates an e-commerce business on TikTok announced plans for a three-hundred-million-dollar purchase of $TRUMP and Bitcoin—at a time when the Trump Administration is considering whether to follow through on a TikTok ban.

The World Liberty operation has far vaster implications than the meme coin, however, because its stablecoin, which can be easily and reliably exchanged for U.S. dollars, creates something like an entire Trump-sponsored underground economy. It’s as if a new bank had opened under the sitting President’s name, and it was being sent large quantities of funds by various foreign businesses and political élites. Major buyers of WLFI have included Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto entrepreneur, who bought seventy-five million dollars’ worth, and DWF Labs, an Abu Dhabi-based cryptocurrency trading firm, which bought twenty-five million dollars’ worth. In March, World Liberty announced that it had sold more than half a billion dollars’ worth of its token. Earlier this month, another Abu Dhabi-based investment firm announced that it would use USD1, the stablecoin controlled by World Liberty, for a two-billion-dollar investment in Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.

Buying the Trumpian magic beans provides a way of purchasing influence, not unlike how foreign dignitaries could rent rooms at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. during Trump’s first Administration. But World Liberty makes renting hotel rooms look quaint by comparison. The more money that flows into WLFI and USD1, the more legitimate and valuable these currencies appear, and the higher their market capitalizations creep. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, has a market capitalization nearing a hundred and fifty billion dollars, with more than thirty billion dollars in daily trading volume. World Liberty aspires to create something similar.

The American public has been inundated with news of the Trump family’s self-enrichment for so long that many of their dealings now barely create a stir. Just this week, it was revealed that the Administration is preparing to accept the gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jet offered by the royal family of Qatar, to be used as a new Air Force One, at least until a new Air Force One is completed by Boeing. The Department of Defense will receive the jet, but when Trump leaves office it will reportedly be donated to his Presidential library, effectively turning the plane, worth four hundred million dollars, into a private possession—never mind that this arrangement would seem to blatantly contradict the foreign-emoluments clause, which prevents U.S. officials from accepting gifts from foreign leaders and governments. (Trump has dismissed ethical concerns by saying that declining a gift would be “stupid.”) In the realm of crypto, though, a backlash against Trump’s ventures may be mounting in Congress. Last week, some Senate Democrats balked at passing a popular crypto-friendly bill in light of the President’s naked profiteering. In a bit of almost farcical understatement, Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, recently told the Times, “The optics are challenging.” But the Trump family has so far wagered correctly that no one will stop them. ♦

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His column, Infinite Scroll, examines the people and platforms shaping the Internet. His books include “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

May 19, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Conflicts of interest in the Trump group’s push to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia.

May 12, 2025 Posted by | marketing, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Deep State & the Death of Democracy

This is a must read – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Bruce Gagnon, May 10, 2025, https://brucegagnon177089.substack.com/p/the-deep-state-and-the-death-of-democracy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3720343&post_id=163213827&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1vapg7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

This is an important book – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I would say without any hesitation that this is one of the top 3-4 most important books that I have ever read. I highly recommend that everyone read it.

There is so much I learned from the book and I’ve been studying the whole US-Nazi connection after WW II for many years – but author David Talbot really wrote a spell-binding book – it’s like reading a real life mystery story. You come away from the book with a very clear understanding how the US became the corporate fascist state that we have today.

“During the war [Maj. Gen.] Gehlen had served as Hitler’s intelligence chief on the eastern front. His Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) apparatus relentlessly probed for weaknesses in the Soviet defenses as the Nazi juggernaut made its eastward thrust. Gehlen’s FHO also pinpointed the location of Jews, Communists, and other enemies of the Reich in the ‘bloodlands’ overrun by Hitler’s forces, so they could be rounded up and executed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war – which eventually totaled four million – that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard, which won him the Fuhrer’s admiration and his major general’s rank, derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.”

To make it quick and simple, Maj. Gen. Gehlen made a deal with Allen Dulles (then running the precursor of the CIA called the OSS) that if he and his team were spared trial at Nuremberg he’d turn over his ‘rat line’ of fascist operatives throughout Europe and would work for the US. Gehlen was brought to the US and put through loyalty tests and eventually sent back to the newly created West Germany where he was put in charge of intelligence in the post war ‘free’ Germany.

Gehlen’s post-war operatives across Europe where used to disrupt and destroy left-wing attempts to win electoral victories in European countries (Operation Gladio). His death squads were used to target the Algerian independence movement. Gehlen and Dulles worked overtime to destabilize the Soviet eastern bloc taking great pleasure in making Stalin hyper-paranoid thus getting him to overreact and launch brutal internal crackdowns on innocent Soviet citizens.

Talbot quotes JFK White House staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saying he was offended by “the notion of American spooks” like Dulles and other leading post-war CIA operatives “cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen….There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices [27 million killed during the war] had made the allied victory possible.”

Talbot painstakingly reveals how Dulles used his CIA rat line to set up the JFK assassination in 1963. One of the key players in the killing of President Kennedy was the CIA agent William Harvey who worked closely with Gehlen’s notorious fascist organization, and Gehlen came to consider Harvey a “very esteemed [and] really reliable friend.”

In the spring of 1968, soon after the killing of Sen. Bobby Kennedy, Allen Dulles took the time to write to the last Kennedy brother Ted sending his “sympathy and regards”. Talbot reports that Dulles hated Bobby and had used his seat on the President Lyndon Johnson appointed Warren Commission to smash any hopes for a true investigation into the killing of JFK that Dulles had been a mastermind in executing. Bobby had been privately hoping to expose Dulles and the CIA as the killer of his big brother if he were to be elected president.


Talbot shares that in the fall of 1968 the main social event of the season for Dulles was “the Washington fete in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen’s US sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler’s old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre – Gehlen’s former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany’s top intelligence liaison in Washington.”

One could easily say that the US and German fascists had all the bases covered.

Why then have the American people, and the people of the world, been largely ignorant about this ugly history of the resurrection of the Nazi war machine during the post WW II years? After viewing the video [ Operation Mockingbird, CIA Media Control Program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCfTIapds0&t=89s ]about the CIA’s clandestine infiltration of US and international media it is no surprise that the public has been spoon fed only what the propagandists, disguised as democratic patriots, wanted people to know. History has been rewritten to suit the needs of the deep state.

In 1977, Rolling Stone Magazine alleged that one of the most important journalists under the thumb of the CIA’s media control program called Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by the CIA’s Frank Wisner (director of the Office of Special Projects). The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.

Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).

The American democracy story is illusion created by what author Bertram Gross called “three piece suit fascism” years ago in his book entitled Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. But to emerging democracy movements around the world, brutally suppressed by the CIA and its death squad agents, there was nothing friendly or democratic about these tactics. Because of the relative affluence of America during this period the public was docile and easily keep under control by the manipulations of the media and the political circles controlled by the deep state.

Now that the American imperial project is crashing and burning the story has begun to emerge and the blinders of deception are steadily falling from the public’s eyes. What comes next is unknown but until the American people learn the real story behind this ‘Hollywood democracy’ little can change for the good.

May 10, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

‘It’s deceitful’: Critics slam owners of TMI Unit 2 for not reporting fire at plant

Penn Live, By Charles Thompson | cthompson@pennlive.com,  May. 08, 2025

Accidents can happen.

But when they happen at a nuclear power plant, who gets told, and when?

That’s a question that some neighbors of the still-shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power stations are asking after recent disclosures about a small fire at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor building this winter.

The owners of Unit 2 – the scene of the notorious March 1979 partial meltdown – have received a “non-cited violation” from federal regulators for the fire that broke out at its reactor building on Feb. 11.

The fire got its first public disclosure through a May 2 posting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s public library.

No one was hurt in the incident, in which a partition surrounding a worksite at the crippled plant’s ongoing deconstruction ignited.

And according to the NRC’s inspection report, there were no releases of radiation associated with it.

Overall, and importantly, the inspection report concludes, the incident itself was one of “very low safety significance.”

But the fact the fire was not publicly reported in real time is raising some alarm bells with some of the plant’s critics.

Neither plant owners TMI-2 Solutions nor federal or state regulators put out a real-time public notice about the incident.

It also wasn’t briefed at a March meeting of a community advisory panel established specifically “to enhance open communication, public involvement and education about the… decommissioning project,” according to two people who attended that session.

“It’s not only tone-deaf. It’s deceitful, because they know how the public feels about it,” said Joyce Corradi, a Lower Swatara Township resident who 45 years ago was a founding member of Concerned Mothers’ and Women, a grassroots group concerned about the accident.

To be clear, TMI-2 Solutions wasn’t exactly hiding the situation.

The company did make same-day courtesy calls to “appropriate stakeholders” including the NRC, the state Department of Environmental Protection …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“Constellation Energy does not own Three Mile Island Unit 2, but anything that happens at Unit 1 can be influenced by accidents at Unit 2,” Stilp said.

“The best solution is not to restart Unit 1, so that there will never be a chance that a nuclear incident will occur there.”

And the lack of full public disclosure infuriated others.

“It undermines confidence in their ability to communicate during a (bigger) incident or accident,” said Eric Epstein, longtime leader of Three Mile Island Alert.

“This is how we had the (1979) accident in the first place,” said Corradi, who co-founded the women’s group after the partial meltdown. “A lack of checking out the details and doing things safely.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2025/05/its-deceitful-critics-slam-tmi-for-not-reporting-fire-at-plant.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawKKKKJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkE

May 10, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

US-Ukraine minerals deal ‘hides secret agreements’ – Ukrainian MP

2 May 25 https://www.rt.com/news/616662-ukraine-us-deal-secret-agreements/

Separate provisions outline Kiev’s “indefinite obligations” and bypass parliamentary ratification, Irina Gerashchenko has claimed.

The US-Ukraine minerals agreement announced this week “hides” details of Kiev’s “indefinite obligations” to Washington, a Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed.

In a Facebook post on Friday, Irina Gerashchenko, a member of European Solidarity party said the deal includes two “secret,” supplementary documents that will not be subject to parliamentary ratification.

The minerals deal reportedly grants the US preferential access to Ukrainian mining projects in exchange for assistance with an investment fund to support the country’s reconstruction. Initially portrayed by Washington as repayment forbears of military support – estimated at $350 billion by President Donald Trump – the final text, published on Thursday by the Ukrainian government, states that only future aid will count toward US contributions to the fund.

Gerashchenko claimed however that instead of one agreement, the US and Ukraine signed three.

“The Zelensky government has not provided deputies and society with all the agreements signed in the US, which, as it turned out, are three, not one,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, they want to ratify only one framework document in the Verkhovna Rada. Others are labeled ‘implementation documents,’ despite the fact that it is in these two secret agreements that all the technical details of indefinite Ukrainian obligations are hidden.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal “avoided” commenting on the two documents and the lack of security guarantees in the published agreement – reportedly a key point of contention during negotiations – Gerashchenko told the country’s parliament on Friday.

The claim has raised questions among Ukrainian lawmakers and the public on the actual scope of the agreement. MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak claimed on Telegram that, when pressed, Shmigal acknowledged the two additional documents but downplayed them as “technical” and exempt from ratification. The texts “must be signed after the ratification” of the main agreement, Shmigal claimed, noting that lawmakers would see them when the Ukrainian negotiating team returns from the US next week.

Western media reports have also noted the existence of additional documents and claimed that a last-minute dispute arose when Washington demanded Kiev sign all three. Ukrainian officials reportedly argued they could not sign the annexes until the main agreement was ratified in Parliament. Later reports suggested all three documents were ultimately signed.

Further details about the contents of the supplementary documents have not been publicly released, and the Ukrainian government has not issued an official statement addressing their existence or content.

May 5, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Scotland does not need nuclear power and people aren’t being told the truth

 Commonweal 1st May 2025,
https://www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefings/briefing-r57be

The nuclear industry has one of the most aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns of all energy sources. It pushes relentlessly on politicians and the public to support the merits of nuclear power based on partial or inaccurate information. Very often this goes unchallenged in the Scottish media.

Given that nuclear power presents itself as a pragmatic response to decarbonising energy and given the scale of the PR campaign, it is perhaps not enormously surprising that SNP voters appear to split with their party over this issue. But would they continue to support nuclear power if they knew the numbers?

Here are some stark realities. The cost of generating of electricity from renewable sources is £38 to £44 per MWh. The estimated cost of the same electricity from nuclear (at the new Hinkley Point C reactor) in 2025 is £150 per MWh. It can only be presumed that the participants in this survey were not told that generating electricity would become between three times as expensive with nuclear.

But even that hides the true costs. Nuclear power is very dangerous and, at the end of its lifecycle, is very complex to decommission and make safe. Every spent rod of nuclear fuel takes a full ten years simply to cool down. They must be immersed in a deep pool of cold, constantly-circulating water and monitored closely for ten years just to bring them down to a cool enough temperature that they can be processed.

That’s just the ongoing fuel. The complexity of decommissioning and entire nuclear power plant is significantly greater. In fact the current estimate of the cost for decommissioning nuclear power is about £132 billion. That is not paid for by consumers in their electricity bill – it is paid for by consumers through their tax.

This is the second stark reality that nuclear power works hard to conceal; not only is it three times as expensive as renewables to run, there is then a cost of at least £4,600 for every household to decommission the nuclear power plants and make them safe for the future.

Of course, safety is another issue here. Nuclear power stations are very vulnerable. They are extremely sensitive sites which require substantial long-term attention. There are currently concerns around the world that unreliable power supplies could mean existing plants may struggle to keep spent fuel rods from combusting if they cannot constantly and continually keep large amounts of cold water circulating round spent fuel.

Nuclear power stations do not like loss of electricity, especially for any extended period of time. This makes them very climate-vulnerable. And of course who knows what sorts of extreme weather we may face before the lifetime of a nuclear station is complete. Fukushima is not a cautionary tale for no reason.

And it is uncomfortable to dwell on the risks of nuclear sites if they become targets for terrorism or in war. No-one is expressing continent-wide anxiety over the threat-to-life status of Ukraine’s wind turbines; they absolutely are over the shelling of Ukrainian nuclear power stations.

The remaining case for nuclear is to provide ‘electricity baseline’ – the ability to bring electricity provision on and off line as renewable generation rates rise or fall (if the wind does blow), or during periods of peak demand. This just isn’t really honest – nuclear power does not like rapid changes in supply and are designed to run flat out, all the time, not least because costs rise rapidly if they are running at less then full power. You can’t just ‘turn them on and off’. So yes, they can provide baseline electricity but not ‘on demand’ electricity that can balance renewables.

Hydrogen storage can though. Scotland currently dumps enormous amounts of perfectly useable electricity in the ground if it is generated when there is no demand. This can be turned into hydrogen and then, on demand, converted back into electricity. At the moment the cost of electricity from hydrogen is about half as much again that of generating by nuclear. But there are big caveats to that.

First, the current hydrogen electricity price is about £230 per MWh, but this is a rapidly-developing area of technology and the current industry target is £100 per MWh. That makes it cheaper than nuclear. Second, there is no hidden capital cost – the incredible costs of building and decommissioning nuclear which are hidden from consumers by subsidy from tax just isn’t there for hydrogen. It is a simple technology.

Third, these costs all assume that you are generating hydrogen from electricity at full wholesale grid prices. But if you are using electricity that would otherwise be dumped because it is being generated at the ‘wrong time’, the hydrogen becomes a waste product. It is in practice much cheaper than nuclear and can supply long-term baseline. (Battery storage for short term is even cheaper.)

That is the reality that respondents in this poll were not given. Try the poll again with ‘do you want to pay three times as much for your electricity with an additional costs to your household of £4,600 to have unsafe nuclear power when renewables with hydrogen storage are cleaner, cheaper and safer’.

Consistent, reliable renewable energy isn’t hard to solve in Scotland. There are nations where nuclear may have to be part of a clean energy solution, but Scotland is not one of them. You need to withhold a lot of information from people to make them believe the wrong thing about nuclear.

May 4, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Kingston Fossil Plant and Oakridge Nuclear Facility – an unholy alliance of radioactive pollution,

While no one was killed by the 2008 coal ash spill itself, dozens of workers have died from illnesses that emerged during or after the cleanup. Hundreds of other workers are sick from respiratory, cardiac, neurological, and blood disorders, as well as cancers.

The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, so much cesium-137 and mercury was released into the Clinch from Oak Ridge that the Department of Energy, or DOE, said that the river and its feeder stream “served as pipelines for contaminants.” Yet TVA and its contractors, with the blessing of both state and federal regulators, classified all 4 million tons of material they recovered from the Emory as “non-hazardous.”

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis confirms that the ash that was left in the river was “found to be commingled with contamination from the Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Reservation site.

For nearly a century, both Oak Ridge and TVA treated their waste with less care than most families treat household garbage. It was often dumped into unlined, and sometimes unmarked, pits that continue to leak into waterways. For decades, Oak Ridge served as the Southeast’s burial ground for nuclear waste. It was stored within watersheds and floodplains that fed the Clinch River. But exactly where and how this waste was buried has been notoriously hard to track.

A Legacy of Contamination, How the Kingston coal ash spill unearthed a nuclear nightmare, Grist By Austyn Gaffney on Dec 15, 2020  This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.

In 2009, App Thacker was hired to run a dredge along the Emory River in eastern Tennessee. Picture anindustrialized fleet modeled after Huck Finn’s raft: Nicknamed Adelyn, Kylee, and Shirley, the blue, flat-bottomed boats used mechanical arms called cutterheads to dig up riverbeds and siphon the excavated sediment into shoreline canals. The largest dredge, a two-story behemoth called the Sandpiper, had pipes wide enough to swallow a push lawnmower. Smaller dredges like Thacker’s scuttled behind it, scooping up excess muck like fish skimming a whale’s corpse. They all had the same directive: Remove the thick grey sludge that clogged the Emory.

The sludge was coal ash, the waste leftover when coal is burned to generate electricity. Twelve years ago this month, more than a billion gallons of wet ash burst from a holding pond monitored by the region’s major utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. Thacker, a heavy machinery operator with Knoxville’s 917 union, became one of hundreds of people that TVA contractors hired to clean up the spill. For about four years, Thacker spent every afternoon driving 35 miles from his home to arrive in time for his 5 p.m. shift, just as the makeshift overhead lights illuminating the canals of ash flicked on.

Dredging at night was hard work. The pump inside the dredge clogged repeatedly, so Thacker took off his shirt and entered water up to his armpits to remove rocks, tree limbs, tires, and other debris, sometimes in below-freezing temperatures. Soon, ringworm-like sores crested along his arms, interwoven with his fading red and blue tattoos. Thacker’s supervisors gave him a cream for the skin lesions, and he began wearing long black cow-birthing gloves while he unclogged pumps. While Thacker knew that the water was contaminated — that was the point of the dredging — he felt relatively safe. After all, TVA was one of the oldest and most respected employers in the state, with a sterling reputation for worker safety.

Then, one night, the dredging stopped.

Sometime between December 2009 and January 2010, roughly halfway through the final, 500-foot-wide section of the Emory designated for cleanup, operators turned off the pumps that sucked the ash from the river. For a multi-billion dollar remediation project, this order was unprecedented. The dredges had been operating 24/7 in an effort to clean up the disaster area as quickly as possible, removing roughly 3,000 cubic yards of material — almost enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool — each day. But official reports from TVA show that the dredging of the Emory encountered unusually high levels of contamination: Sediment samples showed that mercury levels were three times higher in the river than they were in coal ash from the holding pond that caused the disaster.

Then there was the nuclear waste. Continue reading →

May 3, 2025 Posted by | employment, environment, history, legal, PERSONAL STORIES, politics, Reference, safety, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Australian Government ignores AUKUS ‘very high risk’ warning from the Admiral in charge


Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

by Rex Patrick | Apr 29, 2025, https://michaelwest.com.au/government-ignores-aukus-high-risk-warning-from-the-admiral-in-charge/

The AUKUS submarine project faces huge risks, and Cabinet knows. But as the Government ships $2B of taxpayers’ money to the US this year, with much more to follow, the taxpayer is not being told. Rex Patrick reports.

On 26 February this year, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, the man in charge of AUKUS, advised the Senate that the AUKUS submarine program was “very high risk”. He said, “We’ve made that clear to government, and the government has made that clear to the public.”

However, it has not.

I follow AUKUS closely and had not heard that publicly before. Whilst it is absolutely the case, and something MWM has reported on extensively, this was the first public admission of the very high risk nature of the project from the Australian Submarine Agency.

Concerns about US submarine production rates and the weakness of the UK’s submarine industrial base have generated grave doubts about whether the $368B AUKUS scheme will deliver nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.

Moreover, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed, after conversations with insiders, that there is no Plan B.

“Plan B is that we will not get any submarines.”

FOI ahoy

I was somewhat surprised by Admiral Mead’s unusual candour, so on 27 February, I moved to test the veracity of his remarks with an FOI application directed at the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) seeking access to “any ministerial submission or briefing provided by ASA to the Minister for Defence … that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

I also sought access to ‘any statement made by the Minister for Defence or the Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

A decision on those was made this week. FOI applications can reveal the truth by what is disclosed, by what is withheld, and by confirming what doesn’t exist.

ASA confirmed the existence of a ministerial briefing characterising the AUKUS submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’, but refused access to that briefing on national security and Cabinet secrecy grounds. Significantly, ASA’s refusal decision confirmed this document was produced for the dominant purpose of briefing a Minister on an attached Cabinet submission.


In effect, the Submarine Agency confirmed Admiral Mead’s statement that ASA has briefed the government on the ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’ nature of the AUKUS project, and that briefing was submitted to the Defence Minister for Cabinet consideration.

“That high-risk assessment has gone to the very top of the Government.”

Alarm bells should be ringing.

Misleading the public

But the FOI decision also reveals that Defence Minister Richard Marles has not been forthcoming with the Australian public about the full hazards of AUKUS.

In relation to statements the minister has made to the public on the risk status of the project, the Australian Submarine Agency advised that ‘no in scope documents were identified’ that show the Defence Minister has made any public statement that acknowledges the ‘high’ or ‘very high’ risk of the AUKUS scheme.

The agency was able to find only a handful of statements referring to risk management in general and assertions that the United Kingdom will carry the primary risks of the AUKUS-SSN construction.

Admiral Mead was not correct in his statement to the Senate, but more importantly, the Government has been caught red-handed fudging the risks associated with the AUKUS scheme. The public has been misled.


Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

Last week, at a pre-polling booth, I was standing next to a Labor volunteer who was handing out how-to-vote cards for the seat of Adelaide. An elderly gentleman stuck out his hand and asked the volunteer for a how-to-vote card.

“We have to stop the Liberals getting in”, he said. “We don’t need nuclear power”.

I couldn’t resist. “But you’re taking a Labor how-to-vote”, I said. He gave me a strange look. “What about the eight naval reactors?” I queried. “A naval reactor is a reactor, and naval nuclear waste is nuclear waste”.

Many in the Labor camp think AUKUS is Morrison’s (and Peter Dutton’s) baby. But for Labor, that’s just a convenient mistruth. In September 2021, Morrison announced AUKUS. But he only announced a study. It was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the March 2023 San Diego “kabuki show” (as described by Paul Keating) that turned it into a formal Defence project behemoth with a projected cost of $368 billion.

Pre-polling booths are a good place to hang out for political gossip. I also held a discussion with a long-standing grassroots Labor Party member who proceeded to tell me how he had been sidelined for his opposition to AUKUS.

There’s no doubt the Labor rank-and-file have been cut out of the party’s decision-making with the Labor leadership ramming an AUKUS endorsement through the party’s 2023 national conference. Since then, the dissenting views of many, perhaps even a majority of Labor members, have been marginalised and suppressed.

AUKUS to be torpedoed

Politics aside, any project manager worth their salt would put an end to AUKUS. It’s a looming procurement shipwreck.

The US will not be able to supply the Virginia Class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. The US Congressional Research Service has calculated a US build rate of 2.3 boats per annum is necessary to enable the US to provide boats to Australia without harming US undersea warfare capability. The current build rate is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 boats per annum.

The British submarine industry is one big cluster fiasco. Fruit that will flow from that program will be late, possibly rotten, and far more expensive than planned.

Meeting delivery obligations by the US and UK under the program will be really hard. And the fact that the Australian Government can’t even be up front and honest about the program

Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and earlier a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is running for the Senate on the Lambie Network ticket next year – www.transparencywarrior.com.au.

“suggests there is no chance of success.”

But Albanese need not worry, nor Marles. By the time all of this sinks in, they’ll be out of the system. It will be our children who suffer from the tens of billions wasted and the massive hole in our national security capability.

Rex Patrick

May 2, 2025 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

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