US National Security Advisor John Bolton Backs Terrorists

Talk surrounding US President Donald Trump’s move to appoint John Bolton as his new National Security Advisor has focused on Bolton’s role in promoting the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the profound contrast his appointment signifies in light of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promises to “drain the swamp.”

However, Bolton’s appointment carries with it greater implications both to those apparently criticizing him as well as those attempting to promote him. Bolton has – for years – lobbied for a terrorist organization guilty of kidnapping and killing both US service members as well as US civilian contractors, along with an untold number of Iranian civilians and politicians in a campaign of terror that has stretched over several decades and continues today.

Worst of all, the terrorist organization Bolton lobbied for was literally listed on the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list during his lobbying activities – in direct violation of US counter-terrorism laws.

That organization – Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and its political front, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) – has since been delisted as of 2012. However, the organization was delisted not because it has fully given up armed terrorism, but because the US has planned since at least as early as 2009 – according to Washington’s own policy papers – to use MEK as armed proxies against the nation of Iran.

MEK are Terrorists, Even According to Their US Sponsors 

Despite claims by a growing army of MEK advocates spanning various social media platforms, MEK is without doubt a dangerous terrorist organization. Even those seeking to sponsor MEK as a militant proxy against Iran have admitted as much.

In the 2009 Brookings Institution policy paper, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran,” US policymakers openly admitted MEK’s candidacy as a US proxy (emphasis added):

Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium. 

Brookings policymakers also openly acknowledged that MEK was without doubt a terrorist organization (emphasis added):

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread. Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.”

It should be noted that Brookings’ mention of MEK was made under a chapter titled, “INSPIRING AN INSURGENCY Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups,” indicating that groups being considered for US sponsorship would undoubtedly be armed and carry out a campaign of violence – if not terrorism, then the full-scale military operations similar US-sponsored militant groups have been carrying out in Syria.

Brookings recommendation that MEK be removed “from the list of foreign terrorist organizations” would eventually be fully realized by 2012 – spearheaded by lobbyists led by prominent US politicians and policymakers including US National Security Advisor John Bolton.

MEK’s Decades of Terrorism and its Future Terrorism

MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a 2011 report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of another lobbying firm – Akin Gump – in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror.

The report would state:

The State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2009 document says that the MEK killed the deputy chief of the US Military Mission in Tehran in 1973, two members of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group in 1975, and two employees of Rockwell International in 1976, and that it claimed responsibility for killing an American Texaco executive in 1979. 

MEK’s violent past of armed terrorism, coupled with admissions by the US that it seeks to use MEK as an armed proxy against Iran calls into question the US State Department’s decision

Regarding that decision,  the US State Department’s 2012 statement titled, “Delisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq” would claim:

With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

The Secretary’s decision today took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.

The US State Department admits that the organization carried out terrorism in the past and continues today with abuses toward its own members. And as US policymakers within the pages of Brookings papers admit, the entire campaign aimed at delisting MEK in the first place was to legitimize the organization’s use as a militant proxy against Iran – a role that will most certainly violate MEK’s supposed “renunciation of violence” and contravene the grounds upon which MEK was delisted as a terrorist organization by the US State Department in the first place.

John Bolton’s Advocacy of Terrorists 

Considering the undeniable terrorist nature of MEK past, present, and Washington’s own admitted plans for its terrorist future, the troubling nature of John Bolton’s advocacy for the group comes into full focus. This is particularly so within the context of Bolton’s new role as National Security Advisor.

Bolton’s role in lobbying for MEK and NCIR has been promoted most prominently by his own supporters among the US media. Right-leaning CNS – for example – in an article titled, “Senior US, Saudi Figures Call for Tehran Regime to be Overthrown,” would admit:

Bolton, who has attended the annual NCRI event for a decade, cited Iran’s military intervention in Syria, in maneuvering in Iraq, and its support for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and for Houthi militia in Yemen.

The same article would note however, that:

Supporters view the NCRI and affiliated People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (MEK) as a viable opposition to the clerical rulers in Tehran, and praise it for exposing the regime’s covert nuclear programs.

Detractors view with suspicion its history of support for the regime of Saddam Hussein, and what critics have described as cult-like behavior.

The MEK was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. until 2012, when the Obama administration delisted it, citing a renunciation of violence and “the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade.”

Foreign Policy would also expose Bolton’s lobbying efforts. In FP’s 2011 article titled, “MEK rally planned for Friday at State Department,” it would include mention of a full-paged ad taken out in the Washington Post. The ad included a letter to then US President Barack Obama which stated:

We are writing to you with urgency to underline the need for an immediate decision to remove Iran’s opposition group the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO). 

The 2011 ad was signed by John Bolton along with other prominent US politicians including Howard Dean, Rudy Guiliani, and Tom Ridge.

Since MEK has only been removed from the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list since 2012, CNS, Foreign Policy, and the lobbying efforts of Bolton himself serves as evidence that Bolton provided support and lobbying services to what was a listed terrorist organization in blatant violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – providing material support to terrorists.

Bolton’s speeches openly supporting MEK prior to 2012 are easily found online. One published in 2010 features Bolton speaking in Paris openly advocating not only the US removing MEK from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, but also lobbying for US support to be provided to MEK and others in what he called the “Iranian opposition.” Since the 2012 delisting, Bolton has continued attending MEK events and advocating both support for MEK and openly calling for the US-led overthrow of the Iranian government.

While some have attempted to defend Bolton and others lobbying for MEK claiming that MEK could not have been removed from the State Department’s list even if it was no longer a threat to the US without the aid of lobbying – it should be remembered that the job of adding or removing terrorist organizations from the State Department’s list is the responsibility of the Bureau of Counterterrorism in the State Department – not political lobbyists.

The State Department itself notes on its website that:

The Bureau of Counterterrorism in the State Department (CT) continually monitors the activities of terrorist groups active around the world to identify potential targets for designation. When reviewing potential targets, CT looks not only at the actual terrorist attacks that a group has carried out, but also at whether the group has engaged in planning and preparations for possible future acts of terrorism or retains the capability and intent to carry out such acts.

Clearly – however – the presence of immense lobbying campaigns like those led by Bolton on behalf of MEK indicates that the State Department’s list is dictated by political motivations, money, and lobbying, not independent analysis provided by US security and intelligence professionals either in the US State Department or elsewhere within the US government.

Furthermore, it is clear by the US State Department’s own criteria that MEK is still very much a foreign terrorist organization. According to its own criteria, any organization that is even planning or preparing for possible future acts of terrorism, must be included on the list. US policymakers and even John Bolton himself have openly stated that MEK will be used as an armed proxy against Iran.

A Terrorist Collaborator Advising on US National Security

A National Security Advisor openly guilty of violating US anti-terrorism laws having provided material support to a US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization for years illustrates just how profoundly compromised US institutions are and reflects an agenda that not only exclusively serves special interests – but does so at the cost of the American people’s actual security.

The position of National Security Advisor – officially known as “the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs” – is described by the US White House’s official website as part of the National Security Council as follows:

The National Security Council (NSC) is the President’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. Since its inception under President Truman, the Council’s function has been to advise and assist the President on national security and foreign policies. The Council also serves as the President’s principal arm for coordinating these policies among various government agencies.

A National Security Council that includes lobbyists representing terrorist organizations with American blood on their hands constitutes not only a dire threat to actual US national security, but global security as well.

MEK terrorists backed by a nation possessing nuclear weapons and a history of provoking wars through fabricated evidence and staged incidents ensures that America’s foreign policy will continue to pursue destructive wars abroad at the cost of US treasure and blood and the resources and lives of nations the US sets its industrialized military aggression upon.

John Bolton – however – is not the architect of the policy he has advocated for well over a decade. He is simply fulfilling what US policymakers themselves have meted out in the pages of US policy papers for just as long. These policymakers – in turn – are funded by American arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates, financial institutions, and other immense corporate-financier special interests.

The Brookings Institution whose 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia?” spelled out verbatim the steps Bolton has since undertaken with his lobbying efforts, has a long list of such corporate-financier interests underwriting and directing its work.

While exposing John Bolton’s complicity in the material support of egregious terrorists and his efforts to use them as armed proxies against Iran in a war he has attempted to promote and instigate for years is important, it is equally important to expose, confront, isolate, and extinguish the influence of the corporate-financier interests that have underwritten and directed Bolton’s efforts and the efforts of countless others working to drag the United States, its allies, and the rest of the planet into another destructive conflict.Understanding that efforts to remove MEK from the US State Department’s  Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and prepare them for their role as armed proxies against Iran transcended the administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump exposes the continuity of agenda – regardless of who occupies the White House or US Congress – advanced by these unelected corporate-financier interests.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Trump Agrees to Meet Kim: How Stupid Can You Get?

So who is patronising who by acknowledging the other’s existence?

Does Trump Actually Think He Is Honouring Him?

What can be said of the forthcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.. There was a time when most of the world would have agreed with this assessment, as little irritants like North Korea are generally beneath the personal attention of people like the President of the Unites States. They may talk about them a lot, but would never condescend to meeting them, and thus granting them a respectability they are not believed to possess.

But we are no longer in a world where Sadat and Begin, who would never have met on their own initiative, were both cowed into meeting Jimmy Carter at Camp David. The leader of a small and poor has now forced the President of the United States, the embodiment of all evil in North Korean eyes, to meet him. Everyone says North Korea’s nuclear threats have no scientific basis, so they are therefore nothing more than words, but here is the US president running to Kim Jong-un because he is worried about what he says is impossible being committed by someone he says isn’t capable.

Nor is this just about Kim. The US won the Cold War long ago, though you wouldn’t know it from its desperation to pander to still-Communist China. But here is the last state to practice repressive theoretical socialism, a country which cannot survive according to any accepted economic model, forcing its way into the Club of Nations instead of withering up and dying.

North Koreans have had to pay a heavy price for the country’s nuclear ambitions, with poverty and deprivation widespread and contact with the outside world strictly regulated. But now The Great Leader can say that these ambitions are forcing the evil West to take North Korea seriously, exactly as he said they would, and are therefore part of a justified national crusade, a victory every North Korean has played a part in winning.

So who is patronising who by agreeing to this meeting? It is obviously important to regulate the use of nuclear weapons, particularly when a particular country is threatening to use them to cause maximum harm and gain maximum publicity. But who except North Korea has anything to gain by treating it as part of the exclusive Nuclear Club, the modern equivalent of the ancients assemblages of Great Kings?

Weapons of mass distraction

Sovereign states are theoretically equal, as each runs their own affairs. But everyone has always known that isn’t true in practice. So the more important ones create exclusive clubs, which few states can join, to set themselves apart from others, and thus obtain and project the influence they want before someone else does the same to them.

Within living memory many such clubs have existed. It used to be that only states with overseas empires were taken seriously, until those states started granting their colonies independence and said that those who held onto them could not be taken seriously. After the Iron Curtain was torn down the EU and NATO became similar clubs, demanding that prospective new members accept certain economic and political orthodoxies, which were not necessarily relevant or desirable, in order to be taken seriously.

But the Nuclear Club is the most exclusive of all. Partly this is to justify the unjustifiable: not only the Japanese are still living with the consequences of the H-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally ended World War Two. So their use has to be presented as a positive thing, or at least a necessary evil, which should only be entrusted to the best and most respected of states.

Countries are not allowed to join the Nuclear Club because they have nuclear weapons, but because the other members trust them to do so in what they feel is a responsible way. Part of the rationale for the “War on Terrorism” is that terrorists might get hold of nuclear weapons. This would be a bad thing in the case of those terrorist groups, but not in other cases, because terrorists aren’t respectable enough, even if they end up creating countries through their terrorism.

The same terrorists may have no interest in deploying these weapons, and in that they share the alleged position of the countries which have them. But if they want to possess them for their security this is a bad thing, despite the fact the other countries which possess them say this is the only reason they also have them.

The Nuclear Club is not about controlling deadly weapons but demarcating who the most important countries are, and inventing rules about what this entitles them to do to others. North Korea, the great unreformed pariah, would never be allowed to join the Nuclear Club because no other member sees that as a good thing. Even if it had more deployable, effective warheads and rockets than the rest of the world put together, which it may need to have before long, it would never be an acceptable member for political reasons.

It is known that seven other countries have conducted successful nuclear tests and currently possess nuclear arsenals: the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Can anyone seriously imagine that any of these countries, from their various political standpoints, would countenance treating North Korea as a political equal?

It has long been assumed that Israel also possesses nuclear weapons, as it has the expertise to produce them if it wants. But it refuses to confirm or deny this, and therefore cannot join the Nuclear Club. This should make Israel the greatest pariah state of them all, as its nuclear activities cannot be regulated, and it would be easiest place geographically from which to supply the terrorists we hear about in the news with nuclear material.

But Israel is politically acceptable to most members of the nuclear club, and the US in particular. So North Korea is the threat and Israel is not. This demonstrates what North Korea itself wants these weapons for, and what the other countries know they want them for. By agreeing to meet Kim Jong-un Trump has given North Korea the credibility to play a direct role in regional affairs like Russia ad China: just what the West has always tried to prevent happening, and just when the long years of isolation have practically ruined the country.

On with the show

The announcement of the Trump-Kim meeting, and subsequent attempts to try and pretend it might not happen, suggested to observers that few people even in the White House knew anything about it until they also heard the press conference. This would be typical Trump: grandstanding without consulting anyone, believing himself to be above the issues ordinary mortals have to take seriously.

But even before this announcement Trump had shown no talent for diplomacy. People always say they want politicians who say what they think instead of accepting compromise after compromise. But few expected the wild amalgam of falsehoods and egotistical drivel Trump has inflicted on the world since his unexpected elevation to the Oval Office.

Trump has done more to harm the office he holds than notorious figures such as Warren Harding, Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon ever did. It will not be the President of the United States who meets Kim Jong-un, but Donald Trump. No one will believe he is capable of finding a diplomatic solution to the threats posed by North Korea’s nuclear programme, although he will be very good at making a noise, generating photo opportunities and alienating his allies by subscribing them to his own stupidity.

Compared with Trump, Kim Jong-un is a statesman. He and his country have the same talent for falsehood and self-promotion, but until now without the economic or political success to go with it. Now all the sacrifices his country has made, which were imposed by Kim and his predecessors, can be presented as part of a great and successful plan to make North Korea a great nation, which only the Great Leader could have made possible. Suffering will be turned into a virtue, and the US will appear to have been converted to the North Korean cause, not the other way round.

Will any of this make the world safe? It is very unlikely. North Korea won’t give up the weapons which prove it is one of the world’s best countries. Other countries, who have supported the other nuclear powers until now, will observe what North Korea has achieved and want to make the same giant geopolitical leap.

The best friends of the current nuclear powers, whether Western or Eastern in orientation, might even be offered these weapons to buy their eternal loyalty, much as France was. If not, they will join the growing list of countries who want “defence agreements” with Israel, but never see any Israeli troops on their soil when the going gets tough.

If the US wants to stop Kim Jong-un using nuclear weapons it has plenty of its own it could use. It doesn’t fire them because everyone else would turn against it. No one knows how many people would be left after a nuclear apocalypse, but North Korea is one of the many countries which were prised out of the Soviet orbit and handed to the Chinese on a plate. There are so many Chinese that some of them will still be around, and better positioned geopolitically than the US which fired the weapons which murdered millions of people.

Trump has no levers to prevent North Korea doing exactly what it wants. If he had stuck with sanctions and negative propaganda North Korea would have had nothing left but weapons the US says it can’t use. Now Kim has been given everything by an opponent apparently incapable of understanding the depths of his own incompetence. Whatever else Kim Jong-un is, he isn’t stupid, and he knows he could have Trump for breakfast literally as well as figuratively if he chose.

The moon has a dark side

US allies have once again been placed in an ambiguous position by the President of the United States. Theoretically they support the idea of negotiated settlements of any problem. However they can see what harm this meeting will do, if it does indeed take place, so will only go along with it reluctantly.

Trump was elected on the promise of new hope and a new way of doing things. This is a noble ambition, and it is refreshing that US electors had it. But all he has done is expose the fundamental weakness of the Western position on anything, and turn those same hopes and dreams into dust every time he opens his mouth.

The West believes negotiation works because it thinks everyone who takes part in civilised discussion will ultimately agree to common rules invented by the West. For example, it enjoins countries to “jaw, jaw, not war, war” as if the two things are mutually exclusive. Time and again countries allegedly negotiating an end to conflict have remained actively involved in that conflict, or seized opportunities presented by the existence of negotiations to further their interests by the military route. But that is against the rules, so somehow it will magically stop one day, in Western thinking.

If the West doesn’t like a country, it attacks it for not obeying those rules. North Korea doesn’t obey any of them, and has intention of doing so. If it enters negotiations that will not change. It has negotiated on different issues before, and nothing has changed. Having got to table by pursuing this policy it is not going to stop now, however much the West may hope its rules are universally respected.

The West is right to assume that most people in nuclear-armed countries who don’t respect Western rules of conduct would rather their countries were more Western in approach. But you achieve that by contrasting two realities, and making the policy decision to give the better option to those who want it.

If you give your opponents every excuse to declare their policies a success, particularly when their people have suffered much to make them a success, you throw away every possibility you had to change things. Trump, the isolationist, may not care about this. But millions of people who can’t impeach him will have every reason to care a great deal if this meeting goes ahead.

 Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

EX-CIA Chief John Brennan Describes Trump as a National Security Risk

Trump is… ‘Unstable, inept, inexperienced, and also unethical’ ~ John Brennan

Well the gloves have certainly come off now. No former top security government official has even made such damning statements about a sitting president as ex-CIA head John Brennan did last week. And this was not a Trump-style off-the-cuff tweet, but an MSNBC feature news interview.

Brennan would have certainly prepped his own kitchen cabinet for feedback before taking such a major step. The unsaid was that he was literally hanging a target on Trump, that he must be removed from office as a security risk.

Ex-CIA directors have a small circle they hang out with to discuss current events, so what Brennan said here is not just his opinion. He made this big splash by putting it out so publicly, indicating that there is a following in the US top Intelligence echelons who feel this way.

It comes as no surprise to us at Veterans Today, as oldtimers in the Intel community from the Cold War days were in shock when Trump won the election, since he had no experience in government, military, or geopolitical affairs. We assumed he would make up for that by faking it, which he has done all his life, having started by building his real estate business with the help of the New York Italian mob and his “fixer” lawyer, Roy Cohn.

Brennan did not literally call the President a national security risk. Saying that would have undermined his point, making him look vindictive. Sometimes you can have more impact with the public by taking them 98% of the way there, and letting them figure out the last two percent.

There are many Republicans in Congress who feel exactly the same way, but have to bite their tongue to maintain their fragile hold on majority power, with the Democrats eager to begin getting back in control in the midterm elections, and where Trump and his chaos problems might possibly help them.

Brennan and his fellow sympathizers have been careful in their timing to make such a criticism of a sitting president. If anything, they are experienced at knowing when to strike when it can have the most effect.

And Trump was on one hell of a roller coaster ride last week. Russia-Gate is morphing into Ivanka-Gate, with Special Prosecutor Mueller’s investigation looking at both daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner for profiteering off of their White House positions.

The Kushner family has needed to roll over a huge amount of debt on their real estate properties this year, and have $850 million in refinancing deals after meetings said to have taken place in Jared’s office in the White House.

Other presidential relatives have used a White House family relationship to boost their businesses, but not doing it at the White House site. One of the most famous was Lyndon Johnson’s huckster younger brother, “Sam Houston” Johnson, who was a constant problem looking for money and favors all the time.

One night he called the White House to contact Bill Gulley, the military affairs liaison and legendary White House fixer. Sam was having a party on a big yacht in the New York Harbor and wanted the port lights turned off for better mood-lighting. Such was a typical request from the pestering brother.

Gulley had a job where saying no was never an option, so he called the harbor master and, on presidential authority, asked for the lights to be turned off. In the morning, all hell broke loose as it turned out that the yacht was actually one being held in a customs seizure, and it had “escaped” during the night in the blackout, and inquiries were being made as to White House involvement.

It seems LBJ-brother Sam had taken a contract to get the boat out of US jurisdiction to make some quick money and he did. This is not a tall tale, as I have Bill Gulley’s wonderful book in my library.

Mueller got General Flynn to take a plea because Flynn was stupid enough to bring his son in to the influence-peddling business with him from his modest former occupation. Mueller had put a prosecutor on Flynn with a long record of going after family members with felony charges to get the principle to plead.

It did not take long for the dot connectors to suspect that the same route might be happening with the Trump family. There have been more than a few rumors going around that Trump’s aggressive foreign policy has been used to shake down a number of foreign entities.

They would include those looking to buy weapons technology and nuclear technology, or whoever might think it was a good idea to partner with the Trump sons in large real estate business deals. Saudi Arabia rolled out the carpet not only for Trump, but also for Ivanka.

The flip side of that is when funding the right business deals might get Daddy Trump off someone’s back. More than a few people think Trump would not be above this, thinking that with all the presidential power at his disposal, no one could lay a glove on him.

But the irony in this story is what we say in the southern US, “the pot calling the kettle black”. While many of us would agree that Trump is certainly a national security risk, Brennan is not squeaky clean by any means. He was a national security risk to millions of innocent civilians for his overseeing much of the US proxy terror war, where the CIA was in it up to its eyeballs.

The arms running is well known within the community and even documented, particularly the Soviet-era arms that came out of the Balkans, and especially from Ukraine where everything was for sale.

Many describe what Obama and Brennan inflicted upon the world as an ongoing 9-11, with victim countries that could only wish they had just 3000 dead. Vietnam Veterans who served honorably, even if unhappily, are appalled at what they are seeing now in America’s forays abroad, to the point where they don’t encourage young family members to go into the military.

For instance, in Iraq and Syria, the US military handled the logistics work supporting the terrorists, which provided cover for the US moving forces into both countries to fight the same terrorism that it and the Gulf States had created.

The military people who did the dirty work in these wars have a big surprise waiting for them, as older veterans fully aware of what they did are not going to be honoring them for aiding and abetting a terror proxy war.

Yet, these people will probably not care, as we see them eventually going into the private contract mercenary business that is growing, and laughing all the way to the bank with the big money to be made there. It is an industry known for being able to create work when business is slow. We are seeing multi- national corporations, even the big tech companies, building their own paramilitary branches, like Google for example.

All this silly aggressiveness has many traditional security senior people concerned about the lack of accountability. The public seems to not care a bit as long as their family members don’t come home in body bags. No politician is running for office with a platform of standing against the US using proxy terrorism as a regime-change tool.

The US has openly declared that, in pursuit of its unipolar, full-spectrum global dominance plans, no previous agreements that it has signed will impede its goals. It has gone from the fairy tale of spreading freedom and democracy to “join the team or be put on the target list”. However, that does not give me a warm fuzzy patriotic feeling in my tummy.

I am embarrassed by these deceptive foreign policies, as I come from an old military family going back to the American Revolution, with many honored with burial in national cemeteries; and I recently buried my mother in Arlington National Cemetery.

Mother was a WWII widow at 16 years, and is now buried 100 yards away from my brother, an Army Ranger Colonel, who died of Agent Orange exposure complications in 2005, from his one year in the Vietnam Conflict. We never wanted to be a part of the nonsense we are seeing play out on the current geopolitical stage.

Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

What Does Pompeo’s Rise Mean for the Middle East?

Replacement of Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo in the US government doesn’t simply mean a simple replacement of one secretary of state with another; it illustrates, in significant ways, a subtle yet certain change in the US policy with regard to the geopolitics of the Middle East, where the US is not just having to face a crisis of ‘terrorism’, but the emergence of a new coalition of states (Russia, Syria, Turkey and Iran) which does has the capacity to drive the US out of the region. To a considerable extent, we have already seen how this coalition, although it had to—and continues to—negotiate a number of policy and tactical differences, has already done that. But bringing the US back in the Syrian game isn’t the only objective Pompeo might be working on as the new secretary; there is a lot that will happen, including in Syria, Iran and the larger geopolitics of the region.

If the past is any guide to the future, Pompeo is one who had voted against the Iran nuke deal back in 2015, calling it “an unconscionable arrangement that increases the risk to Kansans and all Americans. The Iranian regime is intent on the destruction of our country. Why the President does not understand is unfathomable.”

Now, the US president Trump has promised to walk out of the Iran deal by May if European allies fail to “fix” it. Therefore, while Tillerson believed that the US must not scrap the deal, Pompeo would least hesitate to support the president in withdrawing from the deal and leaving it for the rest to manage it and allowing the United States a major lee-way to keep poking. In fact, just after Trump had won election, Pompeo tweeted that he looked forward to “rolling back” the nuclear deal, which he called “disastrous”, thus forecasting that the very first casualty of his appointment might possibly be the hard-earned Iran deal

Therefore, were the US to withdraw from the deal, it might allow the hardliners in Iran to stage a comeback to power and push for nuclearization—something that might also give the Saudis an excuse to advance their own nuclear programme. It might also excite the Israelis into launching a direct air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities and thus open the gates for a much bigger and a lot more devastating war in the Middle East than we have so far seen.

There is hardly any doubt that one of the cardinal objectives now of the US policy in Syria is to drive the Iranians out of the country as a means to roll back the influence Iran has gained through its success in not only battling out the Islamic State but also in defeating the US war of ‘regime change’ on Syria. Pompeo appears to be the right choice for the US president to deliver yet another of his election campaign promises and thus make America ‘great again.’

But rolling Iran back out of Syria requires, first and foremost, a change of regime in Syria. Pompeo, as can be expected, does want this to happen—and his firmest statement on Syria came in an interview at the Aspen Institute back in January 2017, when he said, “It is difficult to imagine a stable Syria that still has Assad in power.” He added that it is “unlikely” that American interests will be “well served” if the Syrian president remains in power.

That explains why we shall see a surge in the US’ direct and indirect military activity in Syria, where not only is Assad strong and regaining control on the lost territory, but where Turkey, too, has started to cause the US a lot of damage by hitting the US backed militias, demanding, what Pompeo would call, a stronger response than has been the case.

Therefore, what comes after Tillerson’s departure is not only a heightened crisis and danger of direct confrontation, but also new wars as well. And, it isn’t just Pompeo who would help the Trump administration do that. There are others coming as well.

The US president is surrounding himself with people, who are known hawks, and who, the President of the US seems to think, would help him ‘make American great again.’ The next on the list of replacements is possibly the current National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster. According to the Western media’s own reports, the former UN Ambassador John Bolton, who is an established hawk on foreign policy and still thinks that Iraq war was a good idea, has been visiting the White House as of lately, giving his “job interview.” And, according to the Republicans, “he is an increasingly likely candidate to replace McMaster, whose long-winded lectures Trump has grumbled about.”

Bolton’s known anti-Russia, anti-Iran and anti-Syrian views make him the worst option for this position in the Trump administration. To him, meeting with Russian leadership is nothing short of watching a person lie in your face.

Therefore, possible induction of John Bolton, following the (yet to be ratified) induction of Mike Pompeo in the White House does mean that the US policy is shifting to a confrontation mode vis-à-vis its chief rivals in the Middle East. What the Russians, the Iranians, the Syrians and even the Turks should, therefore, expect is not a simple negotiated way out of the war in Syria; it is just the exact opposite of it that is most likely to happen.

With the US making these changes, it seems that they are not averse to turning the already highly precarious situation to the worst possible scenario.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

US Teens: Fighting for their Lives

The most remarkable thing about the rally in Washington D.C. organized by students who survived the shooting at a Florida high school five weeks ago was its professionalism. Maybe they had coaches, but they could not have taught them their passion and determination. Even eleven year old participants were at ease at the microphone in front of a crowd estimated by the usually skeptical press at close to a million. (Unexplained is MSNBC’s claim that people marched against guns in cities around the world.)

As in every political rally in the US today, music played a big role, with well-known singers performing and egging on the crowd’s commitment to change. Raised clenched fists were ubiquitous, and recent polls show that socialism is making a comeback among American youth. The sixties missed their mark, perhaps because Black Lives Matter was still in the distant future, opposition to the Vietnam War dominating the headlines. (Although school shootings affect all communities, Black Americans are the most often victims of gun violence, and they figured prominently in the event.)

Whatever the explanation for the sixties failure to breach the barriers against socialist thought, America’s politicians now see the writing on the wall: change is coming and it is not likely to stop with a revolution in gun laws. (This makes the New Yorker’s decision to feature a dozen teen-age gun enthusiasts all the more shocking, but the US’s most sophisticated weekly often allows sophistication to win out over intelligence…)

The least we can expect from this movement, whose rallying cry today was ‘register and vote’, is that, together with the Me Too movement that is propelling female candidates, it will help the Democratic Party take back congress in the mid-term elections. The question is whether President Trump’s appointment of a rabid war-monger, Robert Bolton, as his National Security Advisor, leaving his own party aghast, will allow the country to indulge in peacetime elections in the fall. Since this appointment does not require the assent of Congress, the best we can hope for is that Trump intends it either as a distraction from testimonies by women with whom he had extra-marital affairs, or as a bargaining chip against impeachment for collusion with Russia.

On the other hand, the president’s recent career advice for students was ‘Don’t run for president’. Maybe I was not so far out on a limb when I wrote that he might resign in order to avoid the latter.

Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.

Why a Russia-based Security Firm Fell Victim of US Sanctions

Last December, Donald Trump signed a decree banning the use of Kaspersky Lab software within US government agencies. This latest iteration of anti-Russian sanctions demanded all individuals employed by Washington to wipe the world-renowned anti-virus s software off their computers within the next 90 days since the moment of signing.

However, as latest IT news show, Kaspersky Lab that received recognition for its achievements in the fight against all sorts of malware was not thrown out of the door for some sort of misbehavior or dubious activities, but as a part of ongoing Russophobic propaganda efforts we’ve been witnessing lately in the West. It’s also clear that Washington couldn’t care less about the efforts that Kaspersky Lab was taking in countering high-profile cyber-espionage and government-sponsored malicious activities in the Internet that American intelligence agencies have been engaged in a long while.

Such conclusions can be made based on the conclusions of the recently held Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit (SAS), where Kaspersky Lab experts blew the lid off about the sophisticated spy-ware program known as Slingshot. It turned out that this malware has been operational since 2012, but it took IT security firms years to spot it. And it was the Russian-based company Kaspersky Lab that exposed this spy-ware of designed by US intelligence agencies to establish total surveillance over the Internet, as it’s been noted by the The Times.

According to this British publication, Kaspersky Lab, which was deprived of the right to sell its products in American markets, uncovered this malicious software, which allows US agencies to access routers to monitor user activity across the web.

Originally, Slingshot was created by the US military to track radical Islamists who would use Internet cafes across the Middle East and North Africa to coordinate their activities. This malware was deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Turkey and Yemen and, according to some experts, and over just six years of Slingshot getting operational a great many of both individuals and government agencies suffered across the Middle East and Africa.

This Slingshot spy-ware is similar to the program created by the NSA for establishing total surveillance in the Western segment of the Internet. Experts from CyberScoop, while citing anonymous US intelligence agents (both retired and acting), report that Slingshot is a special operation launched by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is a component of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Researchers also agree that the algorithms used by Slingshot are similar to those used by such hacker groups as Longhorn and The Lamberts affiliated with the CIA and the NSA, developed with the tools of the two above mentioned groups that were disclosed by WikiLeaks.

CyberScoop experts and their sources believe that Kaspersky Lab couldn’t know for sure, but was suspecting that one of the countries of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States was behind developing Slingshot.

According to cyber security experts, Slingshot is an extremely complex platform for attacks that one couldn’t develop without investing huge amount of efforts, time and money. According to those same analysts, the complexity of Slingshot makes even Project Sauron and Regin pale in comparison, which means that government-sponsored hackers could only develop something like this.

According to the statement released by Kaspersky Lab:

While analysing an incident which involved a suspected keylogger, we identified a malicious library able to interact with a virtual file system, which is usually the sign of an advanced APT actor. This turned out to be a malicious loader internally named ‘Slingshot’, part of a new, and highly sophisticated attack platform that rivals Project Sauron and Regin in complexity.

The initial loader replaces the victim´s legitimate Windows library ‘scesrv.dll’ with a malicious one of exactly the same size. Not only that, it interacts with several other modules including a ring-0 loader, kernel-mode network sniffer, own base-independent packer, and virtual filesystem, among others.

While for most victims the infection vector for Slingshot remains unknown, we were able to find several cases where the attackers got access to Mikrotik routers and placed a component downloaded by Winbox Loader, a management suite for Mikrotik routers. In turn, this infected the administrator of the router.

What is clear that this malware is aimed at hijacking all sorts of sensible information information, including network traffic, screenshots and passwords, while monitoring its own invisibility. Re-flashing firmware doesn’t help the user to get rid of this malware, since Slingshot is capable of self-copying and employing all sorts of tricks to stay operational that haven’t been fully explored. To divert the attention of anti-virus software, Slingshot independently initiates security checks, which has been allowing it to mask its presence from 2012 on.

In recent years, Slingshot has been actively used by US intelligence agencies to establish total control over the Internet by spying after US citizens and abroad, including among Washington’s “allies.”

And given that it was Kaspersky Lab that was able to track the elaborated spy-ware that took Washington a long time to develop, it’s no wonder that Trump decided to put an end to the operations of of this Russian-based company in the United States, trying to carry on its lies about “Russian hackers” that nobody has ever seen or tracked, while carrying America’s criminal cyber espionage activities at the highest level.

Vladimir Platov, an expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Mueller and Trump, Why Russia Didn’t Do It

Analysis of the Mueller investigation has shown what too many of us have known all along. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is just another “useful idiot.” His Russia investigation is simply a coverup of the real rigging of the American election, the backstory now going public, Facebook, Google, Mark Zuckerberg, Cambridge Analytica and the mobsters they represent.

The suspicions were already there. Mueller’s history has been clear, he is a political fixer like Pompeo at the CIA, now elevated to Secretary of State, and the rest of the gang. What we see is simple, back to the ever so right quote Lenin:

“If you want to control the opposition is to lead it yourself.”

We saw it all early on, the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google and Twitter and their ties to the lie machines created in Macedonia, now “forgotten” and the think tanks that run Washington, all financed by the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli-American gambling boss.

Now we know they not only kept files on 50 million Americans through Facebook, using the data there to profile fears and emotions, targeting and manipulating millions but when Google added their incredible mass of data, billions of illegally read emails and more, the American people became little more than pawns.

Again we reiterate, Russia didn’t do it. It was the tech companies, all working as is now being made public, for Israeli intelligence and the mob. From the Daily Beast, March 20, 2018 by Jamie Ross:

“Facebook has been plunged into crisis over the allegations that Cambridge Analytica misused data from more than 50 million people to help elect Donald Trump. Nearly $40 billion was wiped off Facebook’s market value Monday, an emergency meeting is due to be held Tuesday morning, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized for remaining silent during what some analysts are describing as a threat to the company’s existence.

Zuckerberg has been summoned to the British parliament to give evidence about the how it handles people’s personal data. The head of a British inquiry into ‘fake news,’ Damian Collins, has accused Facebook of previously ‘misleading’ a parliament committee, adding: ‘It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process.’”

What is being left out is more telling, that Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, has long openly worked for Israeli intelligence and that evidence now exists that Israel not only ran the program to rig the American election, as many believe it did in both 2000 and 2004, leading to the destruction of Iraq, but that it did so again in 2016.

Few note the real policies of former Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama, the even handedness in the Middle East and their use of leverage against Israel. Obama never accepted wild claims made against Syria as Trump has and never attacked Damscus. Evidence of Israel’s role in gas attacks in Syria was overwhelming even though Russia was blocked from presenting same to the United Nations time and time again.

But then we hypothesize, what are we speaking of when we talk of Israel? This is where so many back off as anyone who questions Israel is smeared as an “anti-Semite” though the Likudist extremists who run that nation are mostly former Russian gangsters and enemies of Russia’s current leadership.

The reason for what appears to be Israeli animosity toward Russia in reality originated when Putin cleaned out the oligarchs that looted Russia for two decades, plunging that nation into poverty and then fleeing to Tel Aviv or New York with endless billions of ill gotten gains. This is real history, not the history written down in books or reported in fake news.

More on happenings in London as reported by Jamie Ross:

“As anger grew toward Cambridge Analytica on Monday after Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast a report showing company executives boasting about their extreme propaganda strategies, including filming opponents in compromising situations with Ukrainian sex workers, authorities in the U.K. and the U.S. also questioned whether Facebook mishandled the alleged breach and it’s now facing damaging investigations that will further tarnish its brand.

Britain’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, confirmed she was applying to the courts for a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s London offices and said Tuesday morning that she has been left frustrated by the company’s reluctance to cooperate with her investigation.

Fears have also been raised that the investigation may have been compromised by the presence of cybersecurity consultants from Stroz Friedberg—the company hired by Facebook to audit Cambridge Analytica on its behalf—who were in the London offices on Monday evening, until they were asked to leave by the information commissioner.

Asked if there was a risk of Cambridge Analytica or Facebook destroying evidence, Denham said on Sky News: “As this point we’re not satisfied with the cooperation we’re getting from Cambridge Analytica, so the next step is for us to apply to the court and to do an audit to get some answers as to whether data was misused and shared inappropriately.”

British Parliament Culture Committee Chairman Damian Collins said: ‘This is a matter for the authorities. Facebook sent in data analysts and lawyers who they appointed. What they intended to do there, who knows? The concern would have been, were they removing information or evidence which could have been vital to the investigation? It’s right they stood down but it’s astonishing they were there in the first place.’”

The issue now is one of accepting what is happening for all to see rather than absorbing the fake narrative sold the world. For those unaware, it isn’t just millions of Americans but government officials as well, who form their opinions and prejudices against nations, races of people, religions and even ideas themselves, from fictional television shows like Homeland, whose writers and producers are in actuality as complicit in psychological warfare as those who run Cambridge Analytical, Google or Facebook, the groups now under the public microscope.

As for Mueller and his investigation, it is pure theatre. As for Trump, more theatre as well, a buffoon long shown to be a mob asset, now wielding nukes and threatening the world, holding it hostage to his bad brain chemistry and his criminal handlers.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Let’s Call to End War Profiteering in Yemen

Coming March 26, 2018 Saudi Arabia will have been at war with impoverished Yemen for a punitive 3 years.

Three years of an implacable and murderous military campaign that witnessed the death of over 15,000 people – of which mostly unarmed civilians; saw the destruction of civilian infrastructures to the point where Yemen’s health and sanitation systems have all but collapsed; and architected a humanitarian blockade that led to a grand famine and the spread of diseases.

Yemen’s 26 million people are in a race against time for powers greater and richer than their own seek to impose their will, and their design onto a nation whose only ambition has been to stand free, sovereign and independent.

Yemen has become a terrible statistic – one of death, misery, hopelessness and devastation.

Yemen one would argue exists beyond all manners of contention … when an entire nation sits on the verge of famine, plagued by pestilence, it skies darkened by warplanes, politics quickly becomes irrelevant. And yet, politics we have been told has demanded that more violence still be spent on a people whose lives are but hanging by a thin thread.

When the infamous 1 percent discharges lead and chemicals onto the weakest of the weak, one wonders what point exactly that 1 percent is trying to impress on those it labelled as enemies beside absolute devastation. It seems western liberalism has found its match in the towering ambition of Saudi Arabia’s reactionary theocracy.

For western capitals to argue in the one breath human rights, democracy-building and nation-wasting by military desolation is a paradox we have all learn to dissociate from.

But guilt cannot be rationalised by arguing sociopolitical cognitive dissonance – not if we consider the implications of our disinterest. When hunger becomes a reasonable assymmetrical weapon of war, and political self-determination the privilege of an elite, we might as well consider hanging Democracy and Civil Liberties on the public square and be done with it.

What value can we put on Freedom if we are not committed to it on principle?

If controversy indeed exists, it has more to do with survival than political preferences, or even ideological inclinations. Political debates have become a luxury Yemenis have lost all taste for … it is death after all which has breached the sanctity of their homes.

Death still, that threatens to steal the very future a people once imagined to be its own to formulate.

Yemen’s war, if once a complicated affair of overlapping and contradictory ambitions, has been reduced to a very simple reality indeed. Millions stand to die … No! millions will die unless war is brought to an end.

The only question left to ask really is: how long before we intervene in favour of peace? If yesterday should have been our first choice, several tomorrows away will do little by way of assuaging our collective guilt.

World Health Organization established that of the 1 million people affected by cholera 600,000 are children.

When it comes to Yemen numbers and statistics are euphemisms hiding an unpalatable reality.

And so it goes: over 2 million children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and will not live to see their next birthday, 100,000s have been made homeless, over 15,000 have been killed, 10,000s have been injured with no hope of adequate medical care and millions of civilians are awaiting death by starvation, diseases or war.

Add to the above a widespread propensity to redact mathematics to better manage public opinion, readers will … I hope, grasp that Yemen’s plight is one of despair beyond despair itself.

“The situation in Yemen – today, right now, to the population of the country – looks like the apocalypse,” Mark Lowcock, the head of the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told media in early 2018.

To put it bluntly we all have been lied to. Yemen’s war is not a military exercise aiming to restore constitutional legitimacy; civilian casualties are not involuntary victims of war – they are the targets.

Saudi Arabia we ought to learn is not at war with Yemen but rather its people. Saudi Arabia in all its theocratic might intends to make Yemenis bow to its will just as if they were its subjects.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia you see is not like any other … the kingdom is a breathing institutional anachronism which firmly belongs to the past. Unless of course we regard feudal tribalism and theocratic absolutism as desirable traits in a system of governance. Don’t answer that …

Saudi Arabia is in the business of allegiance and obedience under threat of death, not so much Freedom.

Peace we have been told is a complicated affair … Let’s not reinvent the wheel shall we and let’s begin where it mostly hurts – rather literally in fact.

Let’s start with the proverbial elephant in the room and call for our glorious and liberal western democracies to call back their hounds and stop all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia.

If the kingdom had less lead to dispense maybe Yemen would have enough of a breath left in its beaten and starved body to formulate a peace plan.

Peace is really not THAT complicated! But it will certainly cost war profiteers millions of dollars in lost revenues.

For weapons to be laid down and guns to be silenced, weapon sales need to be halted.

If indeed it would be folly to consider arming criminals in our streets for it would put the innocent in harm’s way, then it stands to reason to refrain from arming those who have no qualms targeting women and children to score military points.

Most western nations, might it be Canada, the United Nations, France or even Germany prohibit the sale of arms to countries with a persistent record of serious human rights violations or war crimes.

And yet those same governments have sanctioned the sale of weapons of war to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – a country which holds an abysmal human rights track record, and proved feral in its military ways.

The onus is now on those governments to abide by their respective rule of law and hold those principles they say to represent and carry.

If the old adage still holds that:He who kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed the whole of humanity … what should we say of silence?

Catherine Shakdam is the Director of Programs of the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies and a political analyst specializing in radical movements, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

A New State-Destroying Epidemic is Sweeping the US

Today we’re witnessing an unprecedented epidemic going rampant across the United States, and in spite of what Judge Robert Mueller and his Russophobe friends may tell you, it has nothing to do with Russia.

An ever increasing number of Americans are getting addicted to opioid drugs and officials have so far failed to somehow address this situation. According to official reports, more than 150 people die from drug overdose on the daily basis, which is means that drugs claim more lives each year than gun-related violence and road accidents. As for those who are behind this 21st curse that is plaguing America, one can find all sorts of practitioners and Big Pharma companies that believe that believe it’s okay to go around handing prescriptions for powerful painkillers to pretty much anyone, which exposes law-abiding citizens to drugs, making them addicted.

The estimated economic losses that the United States suffered in 2015 alone due to the extensive use of opioids, according to the Council of Economic Advisors, reached 504 billion dollars. The long list of problems associated with their extensive use of opioids that are medical drugs that are structurally similar to morphine has already affected the lives of 2.4 million Americans.

A special commission that was summoned to assist Donald Trump in evaluating how grave the situation with drug use in the US has recently become came to a conclusion that the US healthcare system is at fault. According to the preliminary report that this commission drafted, every three weeks the US loses as many people as it lost in the course of the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, it was pointed out that strong painkillers are being prescribed to drug addicts for bribes or under the influence of various advertising campaigns about “effective and safe” drugs developed by the Big Pharma. Often those who are trying to get rid of their addiction are being screwed by insurance companies that may allow a person to spend thousands of dollars on painkillers, but would not cover a couple visits to an expert narcologist.

It’s clear that over the last two decades Americans haven’t started to experience more pain, yet the number of prescribed painkillers to them has quadrupled. In fact, they use well over 80% of all the legally manufactured opioids in the world.

Furthermore, almost half of young people who inject heroin claim they abused prescription opioids before turning to heroin, according to three separate studies cited by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

In Arizona alone the number of newborns suffering from drug withdrawal syndromes in just four years. This results in newborn babies coming into the world suffering from excruciating opioid withdrawal pains due to the rising rates of heroin and painkiller abuse nationwide. Among the short-term symptoms that those minors suffer include seizures, trouble feeding, excessive crying, diarrhea and rapid breathing. Yet, even the bitter suffering of their newborn kids and rising overdose death rates are not preventing Americans from using more prescription painkillers than ever before.

The Daily Caller would state that (emphasis added):

Arizona is not the only state experiencing rising rates of NAS related to opioids. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services revealed the rate of babies born exposed to opioids more than quadrupled over the past decade. In Missouri an increase of 538 percent since 2006. Ohio is also experiencing rising levels of NAS, which are especially high in the Cincinnati region. Officials at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center report a 14-fold increase in the number of newborns suffering from heroin or other opioid related withdrawals since 2009 at hospitals in the Greater Cincinnati area.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 52,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2015 alone. That is an average of one death every ten minutes. Approximately nearly two-thirds of the fatal overdoses were from opioids, including prescription painkillers and heroin. Although the absolute death toll from opioids is greatest in big cities like Chicago and Baltimore, the devastation is most concentrated in rural areas. Among the victims one could find a lot of white middle-class men and women from suburbs and rural towns.

There’s no doubt that the opioid epidemic has its roots in the explosive growth of prescription painkillers. Between 1991 and 2011, the number of opioid prescriptions supplied by American retail pharmacies increased from 76 million to 219 million prescriptions. However, as the number of prescriptions kept growing, so was the potency of drugs Americans were taking. In 2002 one in six users took a pill more powerful than morphine, but this figure reached one in three users by 2012.

In early 2017, in an address to a joint session of Congress, the sitting US president vowed to end America’s “terrible drug epidemic”. By August, he was forced to admit that America is facing an unprecedented drug crisis. However, last October Trump reported no improvement of the catastrophic situation, while declaring a state of emergency in the US healthcare system.

By why Mr Trump’s pledge to end the scourge of opioid abuse in America hasn’t brought any visible results? That’s going to be the topic of yet another study of this author, as it is those who are profiting from this epidemics that are to be examined. And we are not talking about drug lords, but about respected members of society who sacrificed the health and lives of their fellow-citizens for a chance of obtaining super-profits.

Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” 

US is Stepping on the Cuban Rake Again

The relations with the Republic of Cuba have long been one of the most painful problems of the United States. Even after the withdrawal of its main ally – the USSR – from the global stage, all the US attempts to get Cuba under its influence have failed. Lately, Cuba has acquired a new strong ally – China.

The deterioration of the US-Cuban relations occurred in the middle of the 20th century due to a number of mistakes made by the US leadership. In the 19th century, America helped Cuba in its struggle for independence from Spain. Since that time, it has considered this small island state as a part of its area of influence ignoring construction of mutually beneficial cooperation. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new leader of the Republic of Cuba Fidel Castro visited the USA. However, the American President of that time Dwight Eisenhower refused to meet. Such neglect on the part of the American leadership accelerated the downfall of the US-Cuban relations and promoted the strengthening of cooperation between Cuba and the USSR.

Soon, expulsion of the American capital from the Island of Freedom began. Many companies, banks, and factories owned by the US citizens were nationalized.

Instead of taking attempts on establishing friendly relations, America responded by strong economic and political pressure. In 1960, America stopped the oil supply to Cuba and imports of the Cuban sugar. It was a strong blow for the Cuban economy. However, the Soviet Union came for assistance. In 1961, Fidel Castro announced the socialist orientation of the Cuba, after which America ruptured diplomatic relations with it. In early 1962, Washington imposed a ban on trade with Cuba for all American companies.

Very soon America paid a heavy price for underestimation of the new Cuban leadership and for its habit of solving issues by force. In autumn 1962, the Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads were located on the Island of Freedom, after which the Cuban missile crisis broke out putting the USA on the verge of a nuclear war with the USSR. Perhaps, it was the time when the USA felt sorry for its policy towards Republic of Cuba. The isle of Cuba is located 180 km away from the US coast, and missiles located there could easily reach Washington and many other strategic facilities in America.

Fortunately, military clash was prevented. Nonetheless, the opposition between the USA and Cuba continued even after the USSR breakup.

Some thaw in relations was reached during the presidency of Barack Obama (2008-2016). The weakening of the US economic sanctions against Cuba started in early 2015. The diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed in July 2015. A number of trade barriers were lifted in 2015-2016. Certain categories of the US citizens were allowed to visit Cuba. The air service between the countries was also resumed.

However, these insignificant achievements were brought to naught after the acting US President Donald J. Trump moved to the Office. Prior to his election in November 2016, Trump stated that America made too many concessions for the Republic of Cuba to the detriment of its own interests. Donald Trump also announced his intention to cancel the decision of Barack Obama if the Cuban leadership failed to meet a number of US requirements.

In June 2017, Donald Trump announced cancelation of the US-Cuban agreement on normalization of relations due to the violation of the human rights in the Republic of Cuba. He demanded the Cuban government to elaborate a new agreement that meets the US interests. The Republic of Cuba flatly refused.

In November 2017, the US Treasury Department announced new sanctions against Cuba. The American citizens are prohibited to carry out financial transactions with institutions related to the Cuban security agencies and make private educational visits to Cuba.

The story of the 1960s, when the rough US policy pushed Cuba away and contributed to the development of relations with the USSR, is apparently repeating. The difference is that now the leader of the communist world is the People’s Republic of China.

China has long been a reliable partner for Cuba. Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize China as a country in 1960 and established diplomatic relations with it.

In 2008, China’s leader Hu Jintao declared that the Communist Party of China intended to keep friendship with Cuba and support it in building socialism and confronting the United States.

Now the economic and political interaction between Cuba and China is experiencing a period of the rapid development. In 2015, the Chinese imports to Cuba reached a record level of $1.9 billion. Cuba buys Chinese automobile and agricultural equipment, household appliances, PCs, and many other goods. China’s business is rapidly developing on the Island of Freedom. In early 2017, the media reported China’s intention to invest about $500 million in the new resort close to Havana. The Chinese Haier factory producing computer hardware launched its work in Cuba in 2017. In early 2018, the Chinese-Cuban projects in the sphere of renewable energy resources have started, and China is planning to give a loan worth $120 million to Cuba for this purpose. China has already became Cuba’s main creditor.

The growing presence of China in close proximity to the US territory causes anxiety of many American politicians, but Trump’s administration stubbornly continues its policy. As it was a half the century ago, it results in a number of unpleasant consequences for America.

As mentioned above, the isles of the Republic of Cuba are in close proximity to the USA. Therefore, the deployment of the nuclear weapon in Cuba was important for the USSR under its project of containment their possible enemy – the USA.

In addition, the importance of Cuba’s location is not only in the proximity to the USA but to the Panama Canal as well. This Canal that separates the two American continents and unites the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans has huge importance for the global trade. About 5% of the cargo shipping on the planet passes through it.

As you know, the main task for the Chinese foreign policy now is the implementation of the project the One Belt – One Road (OBOR), under which China and its partners intend to create a global transport system. While speaking about the OBOR, they usually mean the merger of the Eurasian and African countries in one transport network. In fact, this project does not have restrictions, and the Latin American states also perfectly fit into it. Cuba is not the only country where China expands its presence. China is working actively with all the states and pushing out America from them at the same time. Even now China is the main trade partner of Brazil, Peru, and Chile – the most economically developed countries of South America. It also develops cooperation with Mexico. Every year, China’s influence is also growing in Panama, through which territory the Panama Canal flows.

However, Cuba has particular importance as a possible stronghold of China in the Caribbean Sea. If China, as the USSR back in the day receives permission from the Cuban authorities to deploy its armed forces on the island, it will be able to ensure the safety of navigation through the Panama Canal and control all shipping in the Caribbean Sea. This fact will finally turn China in the prime force in Latin America and put an end to the US domination in this region.

Dmitry Bokarev, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Exposing and Stopping the Danger of US “Soft Power”

US soft power is included in US policy papers and promoted by US politicians and diplomats on a regular basis. It is also included as the admitted purpose of US, UK and European international programmes like Chevening and Fulbright scholarships.

Foreign Affairs magazine, published by big-business-funded US policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, would reveal in a review of Joseph Nye’s book, “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics,” that (my emphasis):

…the term “soft power” — the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion — is now widely invoked in foreign policy debates.

The United States can dominate others, but it has also excelled in projecting soft power, with the help of its companies, foundations, universities, churches, and other institutions of civil society; U.S. culture, ideals, and values have been extraordinarily important in helping Washington attract partners and supporters.

And in reality, US domination and its soft power work together to create what is modern day empire and the foundation of US global hegemony.

The United States’ many organisations, from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to its Young Leaders Initiatives targeting the Americas (Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative/YLAI), Africa (Young African Leaders Initiative/YALI) and Southeast Asia (Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative/YSELAI), all seek to indoctrinate and co-opt the populations of targeted nations to serve the interests of Wall Street and Washington rather than their own.

While the US does this often under the guise of promoting “democracy,” it is clearly engaged in precisely the opposite. While democracy is generally understood as a process of self-determination, through US soft power, the process is co-opted and abused to allow Wall Street and Washington to determine the policies and direction a targeted nation takes rather than its own people.

Often times victims of US soft power are youths who are indoctrinated in university programmes or targeted by US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). They believe they have arrived at their conclusions and adopted their personal set of principles on their own, unaware of the amount of time, money and energy invested in ensuring they adopt a worldview and a set of political proclivities that serve US interests rather than those of their own nation, people and those of the individuals themselves.

The use of soft power is not new. It is a practice as old as empire itself.

The ancient Romans engaged in sophisticated cultural colonisation we could easily describe as soft power.

Ancient Roman historian Tacitus (c. AD 56 – after 117) would adeptly describe the systematic manner in which Rome pacified foreign peoples and the manner in which it would extend its sociocultural and institutional influence over conquered lands.

In chapter 21 of his book Agricola, named so after his father-in-law whose methods of conquest were the subject of the text, Tacitus would explain (my emphasis):

His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.

In a very similar manner, youths today in nations targeted by US soft power describe the notions of “democracy” and “human rights’ as well as Western-style neo-liberal politics and institutions as “civilisation.” They often seek out every opportunity to disparage the culture and institutions of their own nation, describing them as backwards and demanding they be promptly replaced with new notions and institutions modelled after or directly beholden to those in the US and Europe.

We can see across the whole of Asia this full process of soft power coming to fruition. Years and millions of dollars spent in infiltrating universities, indoctrinating youths through programmes like YSEALI or the British Chevening scholarships and funding and directing fronts posing as NGOs has led to the creation of entire political parties contesting power, comprised of indoctrinated youths beholden both to the notions of Western culture and institutions as well as the money and technical support nations like the US and UK directly provide these parties.

Hong Kong’s “Demosisto” political party is made up entirely of youths and NGO representatives that have been created and funded for years by the US, UK and various other European interests.

Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy has the top echelons of its party run by former journalists, activists and politicians cultivated, funded and trained by US-funded programmes for decades. This includes the current minister of information, Pe Myint.

Case Study: Thailand

The recently formed “Future Forward” opposition party headed by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, the heir of a multi-million dollar auto-parts business, has overtly advertised itself as an amalgamation of Western-style neo-liberal political ideology.

While the supposed “founders” of the party appear to fully represent various social issues, the immense amount of money needed to perform “Future Forward’s” campaigning indicates the true founders (and financial sponsors) have chosen to remain behind the scenes.

Reuters in its article, “Thai auto heir launches new party, promises to heal political rift,” would admit:

Thanathorn introduced other party co-founders on Thursday, including a filmmaker and a number of activists involved in LGBT and environment causes, among other issues. 



Party co-founder Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, a law lecturer at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said the party hopes to transcend Thailand’s political divide, a sentiment echoed by the student-led groups that have held anti-junta protests across Bangkok in recent weeks. 



But some say the party might find it difficult to appeal to grassroots voters. 



“Will they, academics and NGOs … be able to connect with grassroots people, which is a large part of the electoral base?,” asked one Twitter user.

To create that electoral base, the US is currently funding programmes inside Thailand specifically to infiltrate and co-opt local, regional and national concerns. Everything from environmental issues regarding the building of dams and power plants to women’s rights and access to education have been used as vectors by US-funded organisations seeking to co-opt and knit together various genuine individual pragmatic causes into a singular, national political clearinghouse.

Part of this singular front’s responsibilities will be to serve as a voting bloc to place parties like “Future Forward” into power.

NED and YSEALI are two examples of how single US organisations are targeting and cultivating youths much in the way Tacitus described in Agricola. These individuals are cultivated to be “leaders” who then create their own organisations (often US funded) to begin recruiting and indoctrinating additional members.

Like a pyramid scheme, the efforts’ structure enables the US to recruit and indoctrinate Thais faster than any single US organisation could do on its own. While programmes like YSEALI boast of thousands of leaders who undoubtedly have infected thousands more with US-funded indoctrination, its still isn’t likely enough to create a voting bloc big enough to place “Future Forward” into power.

But it doesn’t need to be. The US is still depending on existing political machines of politicians like US proxy Thaksin Shinawatra to create the support needed to propel “Future Forward” and other parties like it politically.

Future Forward: The Evolution of a US Proxy  

While Reuters admits that Future Forward has been accused of ties to US proxy Thaksin Shinawatra, the article fails to mention the substantial evidence those making the accusations are citing.

Piyabutr, mentioned by Reuters as the party’s co-founder, had previously abused his academic credentials to organise and host an indoor event for Thaksin Shinawatra’s United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) also known as red shirts. The event held at Thammasat University, included Thaksin Shinawatra’s lobbyist Robert Amsterdam given a front row seat during the proceedings.

The red shirts are Shinawatra’s street front whose reputation had become a political liability after back-to-back riots and deadly armed violence the front carried out in 2009-2010.

Piyabutr and fellow academics endeavoured to rehabilitate the UDD’s public image by transforming it into a more academic movement, papering over the crass populism and demagoguery used to create it in the first place. While the “red shirt” street front is still used to give emerging successors to Shinawatra’s political machinery the numbers they need at public events, protests and rallies, this new, more academic face is what is being presented to the public, and the world.

Soft Power’s Final Destination: Consume All, Including Allies  

The US will continue attempting to create a voting bloc independent of traditional political figures like Thaksin Shinawatra and his own networks of patronage. While Thaksin Shinawatra has been a loyal servant of US interests for years, the US would prefer a political party and a voting bloc it controls entirely on its own. By Shinawatra supporting the creation of parties like “Future Forward” he is in reality sealing his own political fate.

Special interests sponsoring “Future Forward’s” political activities are also creating a monster that will eventually consume them both politically and economically in the future. As demonstrated in nations around the world subjected to the full cycle of US meddling, co-opting, infiltration and domination, even those special interests that eagerly assisted US ambitions find themselves unwelcomed competitors once the US finally succeeds.

Those who believe they can “ride the tiger” of US hegemony into power often find themselves the target of the very domestic networks of agitators and activists they helped the US create.

Protecting Against US Soft Power 

Clearly, the soft power process has nothing to do with any genuine interpretation of democracy. It is simply using democratic themes and procedures to lend legitimacy to what is modern day imperialism and the very sort of soft power employed by the Romans against the ancient world centuries ago.

Thailand and other nations targeted by US soft power can only defend themselves by being able to both effectively expose US soft power methods, and by countering them through the work of indigenous institutions and genuine NGOs filling Thailand’s political, activist, educational, information and economic space sufficiently enough so that no room remains for foreign-funded alternatives.

As to why the US is so interested in co-opting and controlling Thailand politically, the answer lies in Washington’s larger Asia-Pacific agenda which includes the encirclement and containment of China with nations that do business with and are entirely under the influence of Washington. A political party run by the products of decades of US cultural colonisation and soft power efforts taking office in Thailand would directly serve Washington’s wider regional ambitions and augment its efforts to co-opt and control Thailand’s Southeast Asian neighbours as well.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.