EDITOR—Garland carefully dissects the Russian way of war, its by now irrefutable capacity to out-produce and out-match the West in war materials and military personnel qualifications, and how Moscow is now systematically using its accumulated strategic weight to cause a gigantic tide of collapse—political and military—across Ukraine, leaving the West no real options, except delusions and stubborn propaganda, none of which will deny the facts on the ground imposed by the Red Army. Since the end of WW2 (if not far longer) the West has been plotting the encirclement and downfall of first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Protestations by Russia that this was unacceptable fell on deaf ears. Eventually, after the US coup in Kiev in 2014, the Western alliance showed up literally on Russia’s doorstep, “Moscow’s front yard”, forcing the country, now under Pres. Putin, to rapidly put its economy and military industries on a war footing.
Russia again tried the diplomatic route to no avail until 2021, but in 2022 Pres. Putin, witnessing the way the Kiev regime’s army was shelling the Donbas area with a view to conquering those rebel provinces by force, ordered the SMO into Ukraine. Three or four NATO-trained and supplied armies later, and probably no less than 300,000 to perhaps even 500,000 dead and wounded, plus substantial destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure…
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EDITOR—It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring themselves, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It matters for accountability under international law.
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MATT TAIBBI—We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded. A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
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MATT EHRET—Could the lack of evidence and the long gap in time be related to Gouzenko’s five and a half month stay at Ottawa’s Camp X spy compound under the control of Sir William Stephenson before his defection was made public? Could those apparent 108 documents used by Gouzenko’s dodgy dossier have anything to do with the Camp X Laboratory which specialized in forging letters and other official documents? If you find yourself thinking about the parallels of this story to the more recent case of the Brookings Institute’s Igor Danchenko who was found to be the “source” of the dodgy dossiers used to create RussiaGate by MI6’s Christopher Steele, Richard Dearlove and Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, then don’t be shocked. It means you are using your brain.
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MATT TAIBBI—MSNBC opinion columnist Zeesham Aleem just penned the latest in what’s become a parade of hit pieces from mainstream outlets directed at me and other independent journalists. Even by the low standards of the genre, “How the populist left has become vulnerable to the populist right” is a humorous standout. It argues that after I spent a month detailing how the FBI, DHS, DOD, CIA and other agencies built a system for mass delivery of censorship requests to firms like Twitter and Facebook, I helped fuel a subculture that “could funnel people from leftism to authoritarianism.”
