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USA, France, continue to buy nuclear supplies from Russia – no sanctions on that industry!

Stop funding Russia’s nuclear weapons, The Hill, BY HENRY SOKOLSKI, – 11/13/22

As Washington and the commentariat wring their hands about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sword rattling, the United States and the European Union (EU) continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to Rosatom — a Russian nuclear firm that maintains Moscow’s nuclear weapons complex and just filched a $60-billion Ukrainian nuclear plant.

Why would Washington and Brussels back such a nuclear villain? Do we really want to support Russian organizations that are critical to Putin building the nuclear bombs he is now threatening us with? No one will say yes, but the nuclear industry in Europe and the United States insist we can’t afford not to.

Besides being in charge of all of Russia’s nuclear weapons production and development, Rosatom supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. Any European Union (EU) decision to cut off fuel to these plants would immediately harm these states economically. So, when Poland, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany recently recommended that the EU ban Russian nuclear imports to avoid funding Russia’s military efforts, the Hungarians and French howled and Brussels blinked.

What’s Paris’s brief? Russia buys two-thirds of France’s electrical steam generators. Also, French nuclear fuel fabricator Framatome just struck a major nuclear fuel development cooperation agreement with Rosatom……………………………

The EU, of course, must act by consensus. But what of the United States? There are no Russian-designed reactors in America. Nor is the United States without alternative uranium suppliers in Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan or practical, near-term uranium enrichment options. Yet, Washington pretty much followed the EU’s play book.

Russia provides roughly 15 percent of America’s raw uranium and 28 percent of its enriched uranium. Combined with Russian nuclear sales to the EU, these uranium imports from Russia fatten Rosatom’s coffers by as much as $1 billion a year — easily more than Rosatom spends to maintain Russia’s nuclear weapons complex.

You’d think that this last point would be politically fatal to further imports. Think again. Only days after Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the Nuclear Energy Institute and Duke power lobbied President Biden to keep Russian uranium imports coming. Failing to do so, they claimed, would risk increasing the cost of “zero-carbon” nuclear-supplied electricity. Worse, they insisted, it would jeopardize the future of advanced small modular reactors, most of which favor using special enriched uranium.

Soon after they made this plea, the White House concurred: Biden announced a U.S. embargo on all forms of Russian energy – oil, natural gas, and coal – but not on uranium…………………………….  https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3732521-stop-funding-russias-nuclear-weapons/

November 12, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

How Bill Gates’ TerraPower rips off the American taxpayers

government support adds up to nearly as much as private investments and almost certainly more than Gates has personally invested. In other words, taxpayers have already paid tens of millions of dollars, and could pay far more in the future, for this technology

Beyond Nuclear By M.V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery 14 Nov 22…………………………………………………………………………. Bill Gates and TerraPower

TerraPower was founded in 2006 and Gates continues to serve as Chairman of the Board. The company has funded the development of three different nuclear reactor designs through a mix of venture capitalist investments from fellow billionaires, engineering and manufacturing corporations in the energy and defense sector, and government.

The company has research and development partnerships with several major institutions, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, both of which design and test nuclear weapons.

TerraPower is well-funded. In 2010, the company received $35 million in seed money from venture capital firms to develop the first of its nuclear power plant designs, the “traveling wave” reactor. It has also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investment firm co-founded and co-chaired by Gates.

According to a 2015 TerraPower promotional video, Gates pledged to invest $2 billion into emerging energy technologies, including nuclear technologies produced by TerraPower. And a few years back, Gates promised to invest $1 billion from his personal coffers and raise another $1 billion in private capital to fund TerraPower directly.

Despite these announcements, the exact financial figure Gates has personally invested into TerraPower is not known. In 2019, he declined interview requests by the Washington Post about his investment in the company. TerraPower’s financial records are not publicly available.

But investments by Gates and his friends are not the only source of funding for TerraPower. In 2016, TerraPower received a $40 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), followed by another $80 million in 2020, and $8.5 million in 2022.

In 2021, under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations has set aside $2.5 billion for nuclear projects and some of this funding will subsidize the TerraPower nuclear project slated for development in Wyoming.

As far as we can tell from publicly available data, government support adds up to nearly as much as private investments and almost certainly more than Gates has personally invested. In other words, taxpayers have already paid tens of millions of dollars, and could pay far more in the future, for this technology.

The U.S. taxpayer isn’t the only source of public funding that Bill Gates has tried to leverage. The 1.4 billion people of China came close to ponying up their tax dollars (or renminbis). After a series of visits by Gates to the Middle Kingdom, TerraPower reached an agreement with state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation in 2017 to build an experimental nuclear reactor south of Beijing.

That project would have likely gone forward but was stopped by America’s waning diplomatic and trade relationship with China…………………………….more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/11/13/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/

November 12, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, politics, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

‘Subpoenas’ Served on US Weapons Manufacturers

These four corporations are representative of the modern-day piracy that is the U.S. war industry, a corporate capture of U.S. foreign policy, the Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, and the U.S. economic system. 

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/11/subpoenas-served-us-weapons-manufacturers BRAD WOLF, November 11, 2022

What is it like to be so ashamed of the company for whom you work that you cannot bring yourself to admit you work there? Ashamed of the products they manufacture, the innocent people those products kill, the hundreds of billions of dollars of public taxpayer money squandered in a gluttonous pursuit of profits?

This is life as seen on November 10th, 2022, at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, VA. Members and supporters of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a public tribunal, served “subpoenas” on four United States weapons manufacturers charging them with War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Theft, and Bribery.

The other three corporations served that same day were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Atomics. These four corporations are representative of the modern-day piracy that is the U.S. war industry, a corporate capture of U.S. foreign policy, the Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, and the U.S. economic system.

Raytheon Technologies occupies a towering office building in Arlington, a stone’s throw from the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, two sites commemorating death and the utter failure of war. Though the Raytheon building has its corporate logo plastered in blood-red letters at the top, once inside no sign exists evidencing this corporate war profiteer. No name, no logo, no receptionist. A sad attempt to hide their dealings in the black art of war.

When asked, security guards refused to acknowledge Raytheon was in the building. Of the dozens of employees who passed, none would admit they worked at Raytheon, averting their eyes as they hurried away. When police arrived to escort the Tribunal members and supporters off premises, the police would not acknowledge Raytheon was headquartered there. Just like the employees, they had their orders. Keep quiet, admit nothing.

It was silent as a tomb except for the voices of the Tribunal members speaking the truth about the trail of suffering and death Raytheon and its corporate brethren have left across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and the Palestinian Occupied Territory. Meanwhile, these Merchants of Death have left the United States financially, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.

Raytheon Technologies has a market capitalization of $96 billion. According to Macrotrends, Raytheon Technologies revenue for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $16.951B, a 4.55% increase year-over-year. For 2021 it was $64.388B, a 13.79% increase from 2020, for 2020 was $56.587B, a 24.78% increase from 2019, and for 2019 was $45.349B, a 30.68% increase from 2018. In four years, they have garnered almost a 70% increase in revenue. Marketing death is good for profits if you can live with yourself. Apparently, given their silence, many Raytheon employees struggle with this very issue.

Raytheon builds some of the most destabilizing, destructive, and expensive weapons on earth. The Hypersonic Missile which travels in excess of five times the speed of sound — Mach 5 — covering vast distances in minutes. It is “hard to stop and flies nimbly to avoid detection and dodge defensive countermeasures.” All these are attributes which make the missile so destabilizing to a foreign leader who has only minutes to determine whether they are being attacked with a nuclear weapon.

Raytheon makes the Peregrine Air-to-Air Missile which they claim “increases firepower, penetrates bad weather, and goes the distance.” Add to that their plans to use “high power microwaves” in war and we see the epitome of a Merchant of Death.

Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin are the same. They too revel in blood money as they build for war and drain the U.S. economy. In fact, some $8 trillion in U.S. taxpayer money has been given to U.S. defense contractors over the last twenty years.

The U.S. War Industry plays a key role in fomenting war with their congressional lobbying, not just pushing for weapons contracts but influencing military strategy, thereby exacerbating and prolonging the anguish of civilians bearing the brunt of these wars of choice. On the issue of war in particular, Congress must be answerable to its citizens, not a handful of corporations.

With their silence on November 10, these weapons manufacturers revealed their shame. Their corporate mission statement is “War Begets Profit.” For the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, the mission statement is “Come War Profiteers, Give Account.”  Stand before a Tribunal and be judged.

And so, what is it like to give your talents to a corporation which hides its very existence, to give all your efforts and education and experience in the creation of weapons which kill indiscriminately? Their loss of words, their averting eyes, the damning silence offered in their corporate crypt, is the devastating answer.

November 11, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Pentagon exploits post 9/11 laws to wage ‘secret wars’ worldwide: Report

By abusing ‘security cooperation authorities,’ the US Department of Defense has waged war on dozens of fronts without the need to report to congressional authorities.

 https://thecradle.co/Article/news/18028 ByNews Desk- November 09 2022,

A report released last week by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice details how the US Department of Defense (DoD) has been allowed to covertly deploy troops and wage secret wars over the past two decades in dozens of countries across the globe.

Among the nations in West Asia affected by these so-called ‘security cooperation authorities’ are Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; however, they also include many African and Latin American nations.

Known as ‘security cooperation authorities,’ they were passed by the US Congress in the years following the 11 September attacks, and are a continuation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a piece of legislation that has been stretched by four successive governments.

According to the report, the AUMF covers “a broad assortment of terrorist groups, the full list of which the executive branch long withheld from Congress and still withholds from the public.”

Following in this tradition, the ‘security cooperation authorities’ being abused by the Pentagon are Section 333 and Section 127e of Title 10 of the United States Code (USC).

Section 333 authorizes the US army to “train and equip foreign forces anywhere in the world,” while Section 127e authorizes the Pentagon to “provide support to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and private individuals who are in turn supporting US counterterrorism operations,” with a spending limit of $100,000,000 per fiscal year.

However, thanks to the vague definition of ‘support’ and ‘training’ in the text of these laws, both Section 333 and Section 127e programs have been abused to target “adversarial” groups under a strained interpretation of constitutional self-defense; they have also allowed the US army to develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of – and sometimes alongside – their own.

As a result of this, in dozens of countries, these programs have been used as a springboard for hostilities, with the Pentagon often declining to inform Congress or the US public about their secret operations under the reasoning that the incidents are “too minor to trigger statutory reporting requirements.”

However, thanks to the vague definition of ‘support’ and ‘training’ in the text of these laws, both Section 333 and Section 127e programs have been abused to target “adversarial” groups under a strained interpretation of constitutional self-defense; they have also allowed the US army to develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of – and sometimes alongside – their own.

As a result of this, in dozens of countries, these programs have been used as a springboard for hostilities, with the Pentagon often declining to inform Congress or the US public about their secret operations under the reasoning that the incidents are “too minor to trigger statutory reporting requirements.”

“Researchers and reporters uncovered Section 127e programs not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen,” the report highlights.

Researchers also point out that defense authorities “have given little indication of how [they] interpret Section 333 and 127e.”

Even more concerning, and ignoring the damage caused by these ‘anti-terror’ laws, the US Congress recently expanded the Pentagon’s security cooperation authorities, particularly with Section 1202 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Section 1202 allows the US army to allow “irregular warfare operations” against “rogue states” like Iran or North Korea, or “near-peers,” like Russia and China.

The report comes at a time when the US army and its proxy militias are accused of illegally occupying vast regions of Syria and Yemen, looting oil from the war-torn countries, just over a year after their brutal occupation of Afghanistan ended. Moreover, a former US official on Tuesday revealed that anti-Iran militias are being armed in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), where both the CIA and the Mossad are known to operate.

November 11, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Another US nuclear marketing deal done ay COP27 – $3billion for Romania reactors project

The US Export–Import Bank said it intends to provide USD 3 billion for a project for two additional reactors in Romania’s Cernavodă nuclear power plant.

Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă announced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27 that a third of the required funds for units 3 and 4 in the Cernavodă nuclear power plant would be provided by the United States Export–Import Bank. The preparatory phase will be completed by the end of March, he said.

The US Exim Bank issued letters of intent for USD 50 million for the second phase and USD 3 billion for the construction of the two reactors, the prime minister revealed at the event in Egypt. The plan is to implement the second phase in the third quarter of 2025 and build the units in 2030, Ciucă said…….

The Cernavodă nuclear power plant operates under state-owned Nuclearelectrica. A contract was signed for the preparatory stage last November with Candu Energy, a subsidiary of SNC-Lavalin from Canada, through Romania’s project firm EnergoNuclear.

In addition, Nuclearelectrica intends to deploy US-based NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) technology for a 462 nuclear power plant on the site of a former coal plant.

November 11, 2022 Posted by | marketing, USA | Leave a comment

Concealing US Militarism By Making It Sacred

The depth of the militarization of the United States and the harshness of its wars abroad have been concealed by converting death into something sacred, writes Kelly Denton-Borhaug in an address to U.S. veterans on Veterans Day. 

Consortium News. November 11, 2022 By Kelly Denton-Borhaug
TomDispatch.com

Dear Veterans,
I’m a civilian who, like many Americans, has strong ties to the U.S. Armed Forces. I never considered enlisting, but my father, uncles, cousins, and nephews did.

As a child I baked cookies to send with letters to my cousin Steven who was serving in Vietnam. My family tree includes soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. Some years before my father died, he shared with me his experience of being drafted during the Korean War and, while on leave, traveling to Hiroshima, Japan. There, just a few short years after an American atomic bomb had devastated that city as World War II ended, he was haunted by seeing the dark shadows of the dead cast onto concrete by the nuclear blast.

As Americans, all of us are, in some sense, linked to the violence of war. But most of us have very little understanding of what it means to be touched by war. Still, since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as a scholar of religion, I’ve been trying to understand what I’ve come to call “U.S. war-culture.” For it was in the months after those terrible attacks more than 20 years ago that I awoke to the depth of our culture of war and our society’s pervasive militarization.

“American civilians deceive themselves by insisting that they’re a peaceful nation desiring the well-being of all peoples.”

Eventually, I saw how important truths about our country were concealed when we made the violence of war into something sacred. And most important of all, while trying to come to grips with this dissonant reality, I started listening to you, the veterans of our recent wars, and simply couldn’t stop.

Dismantling the Justifications……………………………………………………

U.S. political leaders annually approve a military budget that’s apocalyptically high (and may reach a trillion dollars a year before the end of this decade). The U.S. spends more on its military than the next nine nations combined to finance the violence of war.

Political leaders in the U.S. and many citizens insist that having such a staggering infrastructure of war is the only way Americans will be secure, while claiming that they’re anything but a warring people. Analysts of war-culture know better. As peace and conflict studies scholar Marc Pilisuk puts it: “Wars are products of a social order that plans for them and then accepts this planning as natural.”     

Learning War Is Like Ingesting Poison

I’ve personally witnessed the confusion and conflicted responses of many veterans to this mystifying distortion of reality. How painful and destabilizing it must be to return from your military deployment to a society that insists on crassly celebrating and glorifying war, while so many of you had no choice but to absorb the terrible knowledge of what an atrocity it is.

“War damages all who wage it,” chaplain Michael Lapsley wrote. “The United States has been infected by endless war.” Veterans viscerally carry the violence of war in their bodies. It’s as if you became “sin-eaters” who had to swallow the evil of the conflicts the United States waged in these years and then live with their consequences inside you…………………………………………

The unimaginable losses to families, communities, infrastructure, and culture in the lands where such conflicts have been fought in this century are invisible to most citizens, while typical Veterans Day commemorations recast you as messianic redemptive figures who “have paid the price for our freedom.”

“War-culture in this country leaves us with a residual collective trauma that weighs us all down and is only made worse by a national blindness to it.”

But to convert war-making into something sacred means fashioning a deceitful myth. Violence is not a harmless tool. It’s not a coat that a person wears and takes off without consequences.

Violence instead brutalizes human beings to their core; chains people to the forces of dehumanization; and, over time, eats away at you like acid dripping into your very soul. That same dehumanization also undermines democracy, something you would never know from the way the United States glorifies its wars as foundational to what it means to be an American.

Silencing and Commodifying Veterans……………………………………………………………………

Addiction to War

More often than not, the invisible wounds of returning veterans are shrouded in silence. For some of you, unbearable pain led to disastrous consequences, including self-harm, loss of relationships, isolation, and self-destructive risk-taking. At least 1-in-3 female members of the armed forces has experienced sexual assault or harassment from fellow service members.

More than 17 of you veterans take your own lives every day. And you live with all of this, while so much of the rest of the nation fails to muster the will to see you, hear you, or face honestly the American addiction to war.

The truths about war that you might tell us are generally rejected and invalidated, cementing you into a heavy block of silence. Military chaplain Sean Levine describes how the U.S. must “deny the trauma of its warriors lest that trauma radically redefine our understanding of war.” He continues, “Blind patriotism has done inestimable damage to the souls of thousands of our returning warriors.”


If we civilians paid attention to your honesty, we would find ourselves slammed headlong into a conflict with a national culture that glorifies war, conceals the political and material interests of the titans of weaponry and war production, and successfully distracts us from the depth of its destruction.

We civilians are complicit and so lurch away from facing the inevitable revulsion, sorrow, mourning, and guilt that always accompany the reality of war.

An Alternative for Veterans Day  

Honestly, the only way forward is for you to tell — and us to compassionately take in — the unadulterated stories of war. ……………………..  https://consortiumnews.com/2022/11/11/concealing-us-militarism-by-making-it-sacred/

November 11, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

On Nuclear Treaty, at Least, Biden Aims for Fresh START With Russia

Washington and Moscow look set to keep New START alive with working-level talks, despite historic tensions.

Foreign Policy, By Robbie Gramer, a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. 11 Nov 22

The Biden administration has announced that it will restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia, even as tensions spike over the latter’s war in Ukraine, coupled with the threat of Moscow using nuclear weapons.

The talks are expected to take place in Cairo in the near future, current and former U.S. officials said, and represent the first move by both sides to revive their mutual arms control agenda since U.S. President Joe Biden first halted dialogue after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February…………………………………

The existing arms reduction treaty, New START, caps the number of intercontinental-range nuclear weapons in both Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals and allows each side to conduct on-site weapons facility inspections in the other country. This allows experts from each country to visit the other country’s weapons sites to view the number of nuclear weapons, launch vehicles, and other details to confirm that both sides are adhering to the treaty. The treaty allows up to 18 on-site inspections per year.

It is the last remaining arms control treaty in place between Russia and the United States, which respectively have the first- and second-largest nuclear arsenals in the world. Under the terms of the treaty, which was first signed in 2010, both countries agreed to cap the number of nuclear warheads they could deploy on delivery systems to 1,550…………………..

Reviving the New START talks has been a quiet goal of the White House and State Department since at least this summer, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter, and scheduling a new meeting with the Russians on the issue has been in the works for months. Rose Gottemoeller, a former NATO deputy secretary-general and top U.S. arms control envoy who helped negotiate New START in 2009-10, welcomed the move and said the latest nuclear discussions shouldn’t be seen as any sort of concession to Russia.

“We don’t always get to choose with whom we negotiate, but if we’ve got an issue that’s in our national security interest, we have to work it,” said Gottemoeller, now a scholar at Stanford University. “We’ve achieved agreements with the Russians during some very dark hours in our bilateral relationship in the past.” …………….. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/10/nuclear-talks-russia-us-biden-putin-new-start-treaty/

November 11, 2022 Posted by | politics international, Russia, USA | Leave a comment

U.S. House Intelligence Committee questioned about alleged surveillance of WikiLeaks founder

A Spanish judge has asked the US House Intelligence Committee to provide information regarding the alleged surveillance of Julian Assange and his visitors during his seven-year-long stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London

El Pais, JOSÉ MARÍA IRUJO, Madrid – NOV 05, 2022  Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s National High Court has filed a request for judicial assistance with the United States House Intelligence Committee. He is asking the committee – charged with overseeing the US intelligence community – to provide his office with information pertaining to a Spanish firm that may have surveilled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

While Assange was protected by the Ecuadorian embassy in London – in an attempt to avoid extradition to the United States to face charges over leaking thousands of classified documents – he was allegedly subjected to espionage by the Spanish security firm Undercover Global SL. Pedraz has pointed out that the CIA may have been a possible recipient of the material that was collected on Assange.

In October of 2021, Adam Schiff – a Democratic congressman and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee – demanded that all American security agencies inform him about espionage activity that took place concerning Assange during his seven-year-long stay (2012-19) in the Ecuadorian embassy, before he was turned over to British police. Schiff’s initiative came after Yahoo News published a report, in which unnamed former US officials acknowledged the existence of a plan to kidnap Assange from the embassy in 2017. They also claimed that US spies had been monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel.

Undercover Global SL is a Cádiz-based security firm, owned by retired Spanish military officer David Morales. It was hired by the Ecuadorian embassy to the United Kingdom to provide security.

An investigation by EL PAÍS revealed that, in 2019, Morales and his employees may have recorded several months worth of private conversations between Assange and his lawyers, while spying on dozens of his visitors, including medical personnel, politicians and journalists.

The publication in this newspaper of the audios and videos of the alleged espionage led to the arrest of Morales. Since 2019, Spain’s National High Court has been investigating him for crimes against privacy and for violating the confidentiality of attorney-client privilege. Morales is currently out on bail……………………….

In his formal legal request for information, Pedraz describes, in detail, the espionage to which he believes Assange was subjected to at the Ecuadorian embassy. He notes that some of the alleged victims of espionage include former US congressman Dana Rohrabacher and former-president Correa.

Pedraz has also previously requested the testimony of Mike Pompeo. A Trump appointee, Pompeo was the Director of the CIA from 2017 until 2018, before being appointed Secretary of State. William Evanina’s testimony has also been requested: he was the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center from 2014 until 2021, serving under a portion of the Obama administration and the entirety of the Trump administration.

This is not the first time that the National High Court of Spain has requested judicial assistance from the US government to investigate this case. Retired judge José de la Mata – Pedraz’s predecessor – previously asked American authorities to provide him with the IP addresses from which the UC Global SL server had been accessed. But the US Justice Department demanded that De la Mata first reveal the identities of the whistleblowers within UC Global SL, who gave him the details about the alleged espionage……………….

Pedraz continues to ask US authorities for the same data and testimonies that De la Mata requested. He has explained to the House Intelligence Committee that, after three years of investigations, all signs point to US intelligence agencies having been the recipients of whatever UC Global SL gathered while surveilling Assange.

This past August, a group of US citizens who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy sued former CIA director Mike Pompeo for alleged espionage. The lawsuit was filed by lawyers Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, as well as journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, both specialists in national security issues.

The suit claims that all four plaintiffs – along with dozens of other individuals – were spied on while visiting Assange during Pompeo’s tenure at the CIA. It cites statements made by Pompeo, in which he said that the WikiLeaks founder was a “target.”

The lawyers and journalists suing Pompeo believe that the CIA hired David Morales and his company to spy on Assange, his communications and his visitors, in order to learn his defense strategy in the face of the US extradition request. https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-11-05/house-intelligence-committee-questioned-about-alleged-surveillance-of-wikileaks-founder.html

November 9, 2022 Posted by | election USA 2020, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

How the CIA Front group National Endowment for Democracy Laid Foundations for Ukraine War

In the hours following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NED hurried to remove any and all trace of its funding for organizations in Ukraine from its website.

A search of the NED grants database today for Ukraine returns “no results,” but a snapshot of the page captured February 25th reveals that since 2014, a total of 334 projects in the country have been awarded a staggering $22.4 million. By NED President Duane Wilson’s reckoning, Kiev is the organization’s fourth-largest funding recipient worldwide.

NED’s expurgation of records exposing its role in fomenting and precipitating the horror now unfolding in southeast Ukraine not only protects de facto CIA agents on the ground. It also reinforces and legitimizes the Biden administration’s fraudulent narrative, endlessly and uncritically reiterated in Western media, that Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked and groundless.

Substack, Kit Klarenberg, Jul 2, 22

Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups.

In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support opposition groups, activist movements and media outlets overseas that would engage in propaganda and political activism to disrupt, destabilize, and ultimately displace ‘enemy’ regimes. Subterfuge with a human face, to coin a phrase.

Underlining the Endowment’s insidious true nature, in a 1991 Washington Post article boasting of its prowess in overthrowing Communism in Eastern Europe, senior NED official Allen Weinstein acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

It Begins…

Fast forward to September 2013, and Carl Gershman, NED chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad – the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states – away from Moscow’s orbit.

Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

Writing in Consortium News not long before that fateful day, investigative legend Robert Parry recorded how, over the previous year, NED had funded 65 projects in Ukraine totaling over $20 million. This amounted to what the late journalist dubbed “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

NED’s pivotal role in unseating Yanukovych can thus be considered beyond dispute, an unambiguous matter of record – yet not only is this never acknowledged in the mainstream press, but Western journalists aggressively rubbish the idea, viciously attacking those few who dare challenge the established orthodoxy of US innocence.

As if to assist in this deceit, NED has removed many entries from its website in the years since the coup, which amply underline its role in Yanukovych’s overthrow.

Read more: How the CIA Front group National Endowment for Democracy Laid Foundations for Ukraine War

For example, on February 3rd 2014, less than three weeks before police withdrew from Kiev, effectively handing the city to armed protesters and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country, NED convened an event, Ukraine’s lessons learned: from the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.

It was led by Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who at the time was finishing up an NED-sponsored Reagan–Fascell Democracy Fellowship in Washington DC.

Alongside him was Nadia Diuk, NED’s then-senior adviser for Europe and Eurasia, and graduate of St. Antony’s College Oxford, a renowned recruiting pool for British intelligence founded by former spies. Just before her death in January 2019, she was bestowed the Order of Princess Olga, one of Kiev’s highest honors, a particularly palpable example of the intimate, enduring ties between NED and the Ukrainian government.

While the event’s online listing remains extant today, linked supporting documents – including Powerpoint slides that accompanied Leshchenko’s talk, and a summary of “event highlights” – have been deleted.

What prompted the purge isn’t clear, although it could well be significant that Leshchenko’s oratory offered a very clear blueprint for guaranteeing the failure of 2004’s Orange Revolution – another NED-orchestrated putsch – wasn’t repeated, and the country remained captured by Western financial, political and ideological interests post-Maidan. It was a roadmap NED subsequently followed to the letter.

Along the way, Leshchenko highlighted the importance of funding NGOs, exploiting the internet and social media as “alternative [sources] of information,” and the danger of “unreformed state television.”

So it was that on March 19th, representatives of the far-right Svoboda party – which has been linked to a false flag massacre of protesters on February 20th, an event that made the downfall of Yanukovych’s government a fait accompli – broke into the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of Ukraine’s state broadcaster, and beat him over the head until he signed a resignation letter.

That shocking incident, motivated by the station broadcasting a Kremlin ceremony at which Vladimir Putin signed a bill formalizing Crimea as part of Russia, was one of many livestreamed by protesters that traveled far and wide online.

Panteleymonov’s savage defenestration notwithstanding, much of this livestreamed output served to present foreign audiences with a highly romantic narrative of the demonstrations, and their participants, which bore no relation to reality.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

Writing in NED’s quarterly academic publication Journal of Democracy in July that year, Leshchenko discussed in detail the media’s fundamental role in the Maidan coup’s success, drawing particular attention to the work of “online journalist” Mustafa Nayyem.

Nayyem personally kickstarted the protests the previous November, rallying hundreds of his Facebook followers to protest in Kiev’s Independence – now Maidan – Square, after Yanukovych scrapped the Ukrainian-European Association Agreement in favor of a more agreeable deal with Moscow.

Nayyem was no ordinary “online journalist”. He had by that point worked alongside Leshchenko for many years at Ukrainska Pravda, an opposition media outlet funded by NED, and also USAID, another CIA front, which likewise played a key role in the Maidan coup.

This may account for why, in October 2012, Nayyem was one of six Ukrainians whisked to Washington DC by Meridian International, a State Department-connected organization that identifies and grooms future overseas leaders, to “observe and experience” that year’s Presidential election………………………………………….

only 40 – 45 percent of Ukrainians were in favor of European integration, Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated mass support for the uprising.

In fact, “quite large majorities” opposed “takeover of regional governments by the opposition,” and the population remained bitterly divided on the future of Ukraine, Darden and Way wrote. Such hostility stemmed from “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism,” rife among demonstrators, “not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.”

…….. “Anti-Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians. Electoral support for these views and for the political parties who espouse them has always been limited,” Darden and Way concluded. “Their presence and influence in the protest movement far outstrip their role in Ukrainian politics and their support barely extends geographically beyond a few Western provinces.”

‘Pro-Ukrainian Agenda’……………………………. an objective analysis of what actually happened and why, in which NED is completely central. Still, the organization didn’t need to rely purely on Leshchenko to keep the Minsk Accords moribund. Its extensive network of assets in the country, and Washington’s dark alliance with Ukraine’s far-right, was more than sufficient to ensure that Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular mission of restoring relations with Russia would and could never be fulfilled.

‘In Solidarity’

In the hours following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NED hurried to remove any and all trace of its funding for organizations in Ukraine from its website.

A search of the NED grants database today for Ukraine returns “no results,” but a snapshot of the page captured February 25th reveals that since 2014, a total of 334 projects in the country have been awarded a staggering $22.4 million. By NED President Duane Wilson’s reckoning, Kiev is the organization’s fourth-largest funding recipient worldwide.


An archive of NED funding in Ukraine over 2021 – which has now been replaced with a statement “in solidarity” with Kiev – offers extensive detail on the precise projects backed by the CIA front over that fateful 12-month period.

It points to a preponderant focus on purported Russian misdeeds in eastern Ukraine. One grant, of $58,000, was provided to the NGO Truth Hounds to “monitor, document, and spotlight human rights violations” and “war crimes” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Another, of $48,000, was provided to Ukraine’s War Childhood Museum to “educate the Ukrainian public about the consequences of the war through a series of public events.” Yet another received by charity East-SOS aimed to “raise public awareness” of “Russia’s policies of persecution and colonization in the region, and document illustrative cases,” its findings circulated to the UN Human Rights Council, European Courts of Human Rights, and International Court of Justice.

There was no suggestion this wellspring would be used to document any abuses by Ukrainian government forces. UN research indicates 2018 – 2021, over 80 percent of civilian casualties were recorded on the Donbas side. Meanwhile, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reports show that shelling of civilian areas in the breakaway regions intensified dramatically in the weeks leading up to February 24th, potentially the precursor of a full-blown military offensive.

As such, NED’s expurgation of records exposing its role in fomenting and precipitating the horror now unfolding in southeast Ukraine not only protects de facto CIA agents on the ground. It also reinforces and legitimizes the Biden administration’s fraudulent narrative, endlessly and uncritically reiterated in Western media, that Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked and groundless.

Ukrainians now live with the mephitic legacy of that reckless, unadmitted meddling in the most brutal manner imaginable. They may well do for many years to come. Meanwhile, the men and women who orchestrated it rest comfortably in Washington DC, insulated from any scrutiny or consequence whatsoever, every day cooking up fresh schemes to undermine and topple troublesome foreign leaders, hailed as champions of liberty by the mainstream press every step of the way.  https://kitklarenberg.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-coup-how-cia-front-laid

November 9, 2022 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Russia, U.S. Eye Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks in Coming Weeks – Kommersant

 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/11/08/russia-us-eye-nuclear-arms-reduction-talks-in-coming-weeks-kommersant-a79313 9 Nov 22, Russia and the United States are discussing resuming nuclear arms reduction negotiations in the coming weeks in the first face-to-face contact since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the Kommersant business daily reported Tuesday, citing three unnamed sources.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) talks could take place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, instead of their traditional venue of Geneva, in late November or early December, Kommersant reported.

The report follows weeks of concern over a possible Russian nuclear escalation in Ukraine fueled by President Vladimir Putin’s thinly veiled threats. Moscow later tamped down its rhetoric following reported talks with U.S. officials.

The last remaining arms reduction pact between the Cold War foes, New START is one of the few areas where Moscow and Washington have said they were open to cooperation despite tensions over the invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions.

According to Kommersant, Washington is expected to raise the resumption of on-site inspections under New START.

Moscow formally suspended physical inspections by the U.S. in August 2022 after President Joe Biden called on Russia and China to demonstrate their commitment to limiting nuclear weapons. 

Russia’s Foreign Ministry indicated at the time that Western sanctions, visa restrictions and airspace closures over the war in Ukraine made it difficult for Moscow to carry out inspections on U.S. soil.

According to Kommersant, Russia and the U.S. have continued to hold remote discussions on New START in lieu of in-person talks.

At one of these remote talks last month, Kommersant reported that Moscow accused Washington of skirting the treaty’s terms by withholding weapons and sites that Russia suspects are still nuclear-capable despite their announced conversions and reclassifications.

Moscow and Washington last year extended New START, which caps the number of deployable nuclear warheads at 1,550, until Feb. 5, 2026.

November 9, 2022 Posted by | politics international, Russia, USA | Leave a comment

Maryland Nuclear Engineer and Wife Sentenced for Espionage-Related Offenses

A Maryland man and his wife were sentenced today for conspiracy to communicate Restricted Data related to the design of nuclear-powered warships.

USA Department of Justice, 9 Nov 22.

Jonathan Toebbe, 44, of Annapolis, was sentenced today to 232 months, over 19 years, of incarceration. His wife, Diana Toebbe, 46, was sentenced to 262 months, more than 21 years, of incarceration. The Toebbes pleaded guilty to the conspiracy in August 2022.

…………………………………. According to court documents, at the time of his arrest, Jonathan Toebbe was an employee of the Department of the Navy who served as a nuclear engineer and was assigned to the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, also known as Naval Reactors. He held an active national security clearance through the Department of Defense, giving him access to “Restricted Data” within the meaning of the Atomic Energy Act. Restricted Data concerns design, manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons, or production of Special Nuclear Material (SNM), or use of SNM in the production of energy – such as naval reactors. Jonathan Toebbe worked with and had access to information concerning naval nuclear propulsion including information related to military sensitive design elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of the reactors for nuclear powered warships.

According to court documents, Jonathan Toebbe sent a package to a foreign government, listing a return address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, containing a sample of Restricted Data and instructions for establishing a covert relationship to purchase additional Restricted Data. Jonathan Toebbe began corresponding via encrypted email with an individual whom he believed to be a representative of the foreign government. The individual was really an undercover FBI agent. Jonathan Toebbe continued this correspondence for several months, which led to an agreement to sell Restricted Data in exchange for thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.


On June 8, 2021, the undercover agent sent $10,000 in cryptocurrency to Jonathan Toebbe as “good faith” payment. Shortly afterwards, on June 26, Jonathan Toebbe serviced a dead drop by placing an SD card, which was concealed within half a peanut butter sandwich and contained military sensitive design elements relating to submarine nuclear reactors, at a pre-arranged location. After retrieving the SD card, the undercover agent sent Jonathan Toebbe a $20,000 cryptocurrency payment. In return, Jonathan Toebbe emailed the undercover agent a decryption key for the SD Card. A review of the SD card revealed that it contained Restricted Data related to submarine nuclear reactors. On Aug. 28, 2021, Jonathan Toebbe made another “dead drop” of an SD card in eastern Virginia, this time concealing the card in a chewing gum package. After making a payment to Jonathan Toebbe of $70,000 in cryptocurrency, the FBI received a decryption key for the card. It, too, contained Restricted Data related to submarine nuclear reactors. The FBI arrested Jonathan Toebbe and his wife on Oct. 9, 2021 after he placed yet another SD card at a pre-arranged “dead drop” at a second location in West Virginia.

The FBI and NCIS are investigating the case……. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-nuclear-engineer-and-wife-sentenced-espionage-related-offenses

November 9, 2022 Posted by | legal, USA | Leave a comment

U.S. long-range missile launch in the Arctic: “We are intentionally trying to be provocative”

 https://archive.ph/ft7i8 Stars and Stripes November 9, 2022

‘Unconventional’ delivery of US airpower in Arctic tailored to serve notice to Russia

U.S. special operations forces flying over the Arctic on Wednesday rolled a long-range missile out the back of a C-130 aircraft, dropping it by parachute before it blasted toward its target in the distance.

The operation marked the first-ever demonstration in Europe of Rapid Dragon, an experimental program that uses standard air drop procedures to launch air-to-surface cruise missiles.

“It puts this thing within range of Russia. We are intentionally trying to be provocative without being escalatory,” Special Operations Command Europe’s Lt. Col. Lawrence Melnicoff told Stars and Stripes….

The missile launch, carried out inside the Arctic Circle at Norway’s Andoya Space Range, also showcases how allies can muscle up by mixing and matching weapons systems in new ways, Melnicoff said.

It was the culmination of the Stuttgart-based SOCEUR’s demonstration of American and allied units’ ability to rapidly mobilize and deliver long-range precision fire over great distances.

…This is the first time Rapid Dragon, a precision munitions capability for medium-sized or larger cargo aircraft that allows U.S. and NATO forces a flexible rapid response option, has been employed in the U.S. European Command theater.

The Norway exercise coincided with drills in Poland and Romania. They’re all part of U.S. European Command’s Atreus program, which aims to expand military options for allies.

Similar missions have been held in the Baltics and Romania involving aircraft loaded with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, which are flown to landing zones and offloaded for quick-strike targeting.

November 9, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

U.S. uses COP27 to market nuclear power to Romania, offering over $3 billion funding

Romania Secures $3 Bn US Funding For Nuclear Power

 https://www.barrons.com/news/romania-secures-3-bn-us-funding-for-nuclear-power-01668020107 By AFP – Agence France Presse, November 9, 2022,

Romania announced Wednesday that the United States will provide funding worth more than $3 billion for the construction of two new nuclear reactors in the eastern European country, which is expected to commence early next year.

The funding will be granted by the Washington-based Export-Import Bank (EXIM), an export credit agency, enabling Romania to cover “about a third of the amount necessary for the construction of two reactors” at the Cernavoda plant, Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said.

The rest of the needed funding will come from other financing, Ciuca added, without giving further details.

Cernavoda is Romania’s only nuclear power plant, which has been operational since the 1990s. Two reactors with a total a capacity of 1,400 MW, it covers approximately one fifth of the country’s electricity needs.

Ciuca hailed the deal signed during the UN climate summit COP27 in Egypt as “an important step” towards the country’s “energy independence” amid global energy uncertainty aggravated by the war in Ukraine.

The construction of two additional nuclear reactors at Cernavoda is slated to start “in March/April 2023” and is expected to be completed in 2030, he added.

EXIM finances exports of US goods and services, but it was not immediately clear which US firm or firms would construct the reactors.

Six European companies — GDF Suez, Iberdrola, CEZ, RWE, Enel and ArcelorMittal — had initially committed to the project in 2008, before pulling out one after another due to uncertainties surrounding the future of the plant.

Bucharest also broke a financing agreement with the China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) group in 2020, against a backdrop of growing mistrust of Chinese investments in Europe.

November 9, 2022 Posted by | marketing, USA | Leave a comment

What Could Nuclear War Mean For Wyoming? Pretty Much The Worst Parts Of The Bible

  Cowboy State Daily November 9, 2022  By Kevin Killough, State Energy Reporter
Kevin@CowboyStateDaily.com

The last time Americans gave any serious consideration to the prospect of nuclear war, Rocky Balboa was fighting in the fourth installment of the Rocky movie franchise, beating the steroid-injecting Russian heavyweight Ivan Drago.

If the situation in Ukraine escalates, there’s a real concern the world could face a nuclear war. If that terrible situation were to arise, what would happen to Wyoming? 

According to modeling by NUKEMAP, a direct hit to Cheyenne — the Cowboy State’s most likely target in a nuclear exchange — would result in more than 30,000 instant deaths. 

…………………………………………………. According to NUKEMAP, 31,260 people die instantly. Another 26,390 are hurt, most of which would be severe, including third-degree burns.

A crater 1,000 feet wide and 230 feet deep would open up beneath the blast on land that once held the Capitol. The fireball would be about 2,400 feet wide, which would engulf most of downtown Cheyenne. An area 1.5 miles wide would be hit with radiation doses that would be lethal within a month for anyone in the zone. 

That zone would go nearly as far as Dell Range Boulevard. About 15% of those who survive in the zone would likely die of cancer eventually. 

The zone that would produce third-degree burns would go about 3 miles in all directions. The fallout corridor, in which people would get severe radiation exposure — potentially lethal over time — would go nearly as far as Casper. 

The mushroom cloud would rise 10 miles over Cheyenne and be more than 12 miles wide. 

By most estimates, the Red Desert would be the safest area from the impacts of nuclear blasts and the subsequent fallout. 

………………. besides eliminating Americans, bombing population centers destroys the nation’s infrastructure. That means no electricity, no internet and no basic services, such as clean drinking water and medical care. 

Wyoming would have a lot of coal mines and farms, and if it did get passed over by the bombs, survivors may have a safe zone from which America would rebuild. 

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a senior fellow for Defense Priorities, a military think tank, told Reason that Biden’s stated policy to help Ukraine no matter what until Russia withdraws to its former borders risks dragging the United States into a very high nuclear risk. …………

November 9, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Azov Nazi speaks to school kids across America

 http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2022/11/azov-nazi-speaks-to-school-kids-across.html Bruce Gagnon, 7 Nov 22, I know this is hard to imagine – to believe. An Azov death squad member – a Nazi being paraded across the US to speak to school students. As we like to say – this takes the cake!

And to top it off he gets interviewed on MSNBC TV. The so-called ‘liberal’ channel.

This is how the minds of American youth are being contaminated with trash – filth – pure evil.

This is how fascism is being introduced to young people across our land.

This is a total disgrace.

This is being supported/organized by the neo-con run Democratic Party that a high percentage of American ‘peaceniks’ will be voting for on November 8.

Can we say that most Americans are blind and confused? Yes for sure.

This makes me sick.

Remember WW II Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism – the ‘wedding of corporations and government’. 

This is what we have in the USA today.

November 7, 2022 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

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