Category: LIES & PROPAGANDA - The Greanville Post

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Until recently I had never watched an episode of FX's TV hit THE AMERICANS, which just concluded its sixth and final season. Years ago, when it first came to my attention, I quickly dismissed it as probably yet another typically formulaic and thinly veiled imperialist propaganda platform, another version of Homeland, or the ludicrously chauvinist 24. Well, guess what, The Americans, the brainchild of executive producer Joe Weisberg, himself a former CIA employe, and with a stellar cast that includes Keri Russell, Mathew Rhys, Noah Emmerich, Richard Thomas, Alison Wright, Annet Mahendru (the memorable Russian mole Nina), and, of course the senior KGB "handlers", played with compelling flair by Frank Langella (Gabriel), and the formidable Margo Martindale (Claudia) is a show cut from a different cloth. Its plotlines —while packed with action—are anchored in realistic and absorbing human drama. There's no black and white heroics here, just different shades of gray, and even glimmers of strong idealism—on both sides. For if there's anything that sets this show apart is that, in the midst of the most rabid russophobic climate seen in decades in the US, this show maintains a courageous distance from such malicious caricatures of Russian people and motives. In any event, I am awfully glad that (of all people!) our Paris-based correspondent Ramin Mazaheri tipped us off about this show, praising it as an example of American programming well worth watching. See his own review of the show here: Religion saves ‘The Americans’ – the superb (semi) pro-socialist TV show. Below we try to answer a question that must be on many minds who followed the Jennings' saga. —PG

Ask a Cold War Expert: How Realistic Is The Americans?

By Gwynne Watkins | Vulture.com

THE AMERICANS -- Safe House -- Episode 9 (Airs Wednesday, April 3, 10:00 pm e/p) -- Pictured: (L-R) Matthew Rhys as Philip Jennings, Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings.

Most TV spy shows don't exactly strive for realism, which is one thing that makes The Americans so intriguing. The FX drama, about undercover KGB agents masquerading as American suburbanites, was directly inspired by the Russian spy ring bust of 2010. But instead of crafting a present-day thriller, creators Joe Weisberg (a former CIA operative) and Joel Fields chose to set their show in 1981, placing agents Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) in a minefield of Cold War tensions with nary a cell phone in sight. Unlike, say, Homeland, the show's events feel like they could actually happen in our universe. But did they? To find out how closely Phillip and Elizabeth resemble actual KGB, we spoke with Dr. John Prados, a historian of intelligence and a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.

You told me that you'd seen the pilot. Did you get a chance to watch any more episodes of the show?
Yes. Let's just say it's contrived.

In what way?
In general, spying is boring. And for purposes of drama and what they're doing, The Americans makes it be something different than that. For example, the most prominent real-life Russian illegal of the sort we see on the show was a guy named Rudolph Abel. He was a KGB colonel who was arrested in the late-fifties. And what he did was work in New York as a photographer. I think his apartment was in Brooklyn. And he didn't kill anybody [laughs], he didn't run around plotting this and that. He worked as a photographer and met his agents wherever he was supposed to, and in fact, his whole purpose was to remain anonymous.

Was the use of Russian illegals something that was actually going on in the eighties?
The Russians used illegals in waves. There was that wave in the fifties, and then there was that very recent wave that was uncovered, which presumably began in the eighties. In between the fifties and the eighties, there's no known instance of Russian illegals operating in the United States. Although you never know, because our knowledge of this is entirely dependent on the spies who have been uncovered. So the ones that were successful, we kind of don't know about. [Chuckles.]

You said that spying is boring, but Phillip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time seducing people to get information. Is that something that KGB spies would frequently do?
Actually, KGB officers have often used that tactic against Americans and others who were in Russia. Clayton Lonetree is the most important example; he was an American marine who was guarding the Moscow embassy in the eighties, and he helped the spy who seduced him to bug the building. There's also a famous case of a French ambassador by the name of Maurice DeJean, who was subjected to this when he was in Moscow in the mid-fifties. And the term of art for a woman "dangle" is actually "swallow," as in the bird. So that is a recognized tactic.

They also assume lots of fake identities. I'd imagine that if people were being planted in the U.S. with the purpose of having them blend in, then the KGB wouldn't be dispatching them to do missions in disguise. Wouldn't those jobs go to other spies?
Yes and no; there are exceptions to every rule. So if you were having a meeting with someone in a place where it was highly monitored and highly secured, you might want to resort to a disguise, simply in order to avoid revealing the cover-legend person at all. Also, there's a conflation between spy and agent here. Phillip and Elizabeth are agents, and I'm using the word agent for a person who is the officer of an intelligence service. And I'm using the word spy for the person who's working for them, the person who's actually getting the material. In the show, a lot of the stuff that the characters are doing would be work that was done by the spies, the assets, not by the agents. Think of it this way: Is it logical that the KGB officer is marching into the Pentagon and photographing documents? No. You've got to recruit a spy, an American who works for the Pentagon who has access to those documents and can photograph them and give you the information. But you don't do it yourself; somebody else does it for you.

The characters on the show are frequently being described in the press as "sleeper agents," but they seem pretty active to me. Is that term a misnomer?
It depends. A sleeper agent is positioned specifically for the purpose of becoming immersed, getting some kind of access, worming their way through the society — as that group was that was uncovered a couple years ago. And your sleeper agent remains a sleeper agent until the time that you activate them. Once you activate them, they're not sleepers anymore — they're active agents. So the characters are sleepers who have been activated.

Has the Russian government historically arranged marriages between spies?
I'm not aware of a previous instance in which the Russians put together a couple, before that most recent spy ring. But clearly it was done in that case.

In episode two, "The Clock," the agents need to bug the Defense secretary's home, so they poison the son of his maid and will only give her the antidote if she plants the bug. Couple of questions about this. First of all, Elizabeth poisons the son by pricking him with a needle that pops out of her umbrella. One Vulture commenter mentioned that the KGB has actually done this?
Yes, a Bulgarian by the name of Georgi Markov was poisoned by an umbrella, I think using ricin, in London in the late-seventies. So yes, I'm sure that's where they got that idea.

They poisoned him with ricin? You don't watch Breaking Bad, do you?
No, what is that?

Never mind. Are there any other inventive espionage poisoning tactics we might see in future episodes?
Well, the other interesting one would be the Russian defector from the SVR, which is the current Russian service — Litvinenko — in London several years ago, with a radioactive material. Polonium, I believe. And that happened in a bar just by sort of scattering the materials around where this person would touch it and it would be absorbed into his skin.

Whoa. Wouldn't that have poisoned everyone else in the bar?
As far as I know, he was the only victim. [Editor's note: It was later discovered that the polonium was planted in his tea, and other people in the restaurant have since experienced side effects of radiation.]

In terms of the poison in episode two, would the Russians have had some kind of proprietary poison where only they would have had the antidote?
Well, probably! Intelligence services put lots of research into exotic chemicals and poisons and whatnot, and often the object is specifically to come up with something only they have the antidote for. But, in Markov's case, nobody knew what was wrong with him, so they couldn't instantly come up with the antidote. So that was almost the same as being in the situation where only you have the antidote, because you know what the poison is, whereas a doctor or nurse or EMT coming onto this situation cold would have no idea what's going on.

In episode four, which takes place immediately after Reagan was shot by Hinckley, the KGB begins preparation for guerilla warfare. Elizabeth has to dig up some buried explosives. Is that an eventuality that Russian agents would be prepared for on U.S. soil? I found that idea startling.
There's a term of art, it's called "stay-behind network," and it is something that you prepare in advance for a warfare situation. This was something that the CIA did in Western Europe, in the expectation that if there was a war, Russian armies would overrun Western Europe and therefore Western Europe would be occupied, and therefore only assets that were ready before the fact with caches of buried explosives and weapons and whatnot would be available for use. So, I think the general idea is coming from that. However, an operation in the U.S. has a different character. The mechanism by which Russians get stuff into the United States is the diplomatic pouch, which uses diplomatic and embassy channels. In addition to that, Russian diplomats, including their spies, are highly regulated in terms of where they can go in the U.S. and what they can do. So, during that period of the sixties through the eighties, there were very tight restrictions on where Russians were allowed to go. Like, you can go on I-95 from Washington to New York, but you can't go more than five miles off the road. And there was a list of cities that were places they were allowed to go to, stuff like that. My point being that it would be extremely difficult for KGB to have planted caches of weapons anywhere that agents could get to them.

Tell me about the technology that would have been used by spies during this particular period. The Internet has warped our perception of how easy it is to communicate and exchange information over long distances. How would these pieces of information travel quickly from Russia to the agents to the spies?
That's a good question. I would say probably that information could nottravel that quickly.

They use radios a lot on the show.
Yeah, and radios are inherently insecure. I mean, another big focus of research and development in the intelligence business is, in fact, on communications. The CIA, we developed high-speed burst transmittersthat were highly directional, to bounce beams off satellites and move information back and forth to agents in Russia. The Russian resources in that area were less sophisticated. They had their own set of communications devices, some of them very good, but their constellation of satellites was less ample than the American and didn't afford 24-7 coverage of the whole world. So there would have been windows in which communication was possible and other times when it was not.

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

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By Craig Murray
Source: The author's website
Dateline: Mar 16 2018

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the “Novichok” programme a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilisers. This substance is a “novichok” in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China.To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days. The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation “of a type developed by Russia” was used by Theresa May in parliament, used by the UK at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, “of a type developed by Russia” is the precise phrase used in the joint communique issued by the UK, USA, France and Germany yesterday:

This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand. She volunteered the comparison to what is happening now, particularly at Porton Down, with no prompting from me.

Meanwhile, you can rest assured that none of the major news organisations in the West will be beating a path to the author's door, seeking more information, or putting him in front of the cameras. Such is the travesty of corporate media "journalism" in our epoch of totalitarian hypocrisy.—The Editor

Separately I have written to the media office at OPCW to ask them to confirm that there has never been any physical evidence of the existence of Russian Novichoks, and the programme of inspection and destruction of Russian chemical weapons was completed last year.

Did you know these interesting facts?

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray with his book, Murder in Samarkand in London Monday July 17, 2006. (AP Photo/Simon Dawson)

OPCW inspectors have had full access to all known Russian chemical weapons facilities for over a decade – including those identified by the “Novichok” alleged whistleblower Mirzayanov – and last year OPCW inspectors completed the destruction of the last of 40,000 tonnes of Russian chemical weapons

By contrast the programme of destruction of US chemical weapons stocks still has five years to run.

Israel has extensive stocks of chemical weapons but has always refused to declare any of them to the OPCW. Israel is not a state party to the Chemical Weapons Convention nor a member of the OPCW. Israel signed in 1993 but refused to ratify as this would mean inspection and destruction of its chemical weapons. Israel undoubtedly has as much technical capacity as any state to synthesise “Novichoks”.

Until this week, the near universal belief among chemical weapons experts, and the official position of the OPCW, was that “Novichoks” were at most a theoretical research programme which the Russians had never succeeded in actually synthesising and manufacturing. That is why they are not on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons.

Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesised a “Novichok”. Hence “Of a type developed by Russia”. Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars.

UPDATE

This post prompted another old colleague to get in touch. On the bright side, the FCO have persuaded Boris he has to let the OPCW investigate a sample. But not just yet. The expectation is the inquiry committee will be chaired by a Chinese delegate. The Boris plan is to get the OPCW also to sign up to the “as developed by Russia” formula, and diplomacy to this end is being undertaken in Beijing right now.

I don’t suppose there is any sign of the BBC doing any actual journalism on this?

—CM

PS/ Read the first report on this topic below.

The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin. Given Dr Black’s publication, it is plain that claim cannot be true.

The world’s international chemical weapons experts share Dr Black’s opinion. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a UN body based in the Hague. In 2013 this was the report of its Scientific Advisory Board, which included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative:

[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to “Novichoks”. The name “Novichok” is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of “Novichoks”. (OPCW, 2013)

OPCW: Report of the Scientific Advisory Board on developments in science and technology for the Third Review Conference 27 March 2013

Indeed the OPCW was so sceptical of the viability of “novichoks” that it decided – with US and UK agreement – not to add them nor their alleged precursors to its banned list. In short, the scientific community broadly accepts Mirzayanov was working on “novichoks” but doubts he succeeded.

Given that the OPCW has taken the view the evidence for the existence of “Novichoks” is dubious, if the UK actually has a sample of one it is extremely important the UK presents that sample to the OPCW. Indeed the UK has a binding treaty obligation to present that sample to OPCW. Russa has – unreported by the corporate media – entered a demand at the OPCW that Britain submit a sample of the Salisbury material for international analysis.

Yet Britain refuses to submit it to the OPCW.

Why?

A second part of May’s accusation is that “Novichoks” could only be made in certain military installations. But that is also demonstrably untrue. If they exist at all, Novichoks were allegedly designed to be able to be made at bench level in any commercial chemical facility – that was a major point of them. The only real evidence for the existence of Novichoks was the testimony of the ex-Soviet scientist Mizayanov. And this is what Mirzayanov actually wrote.

One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides.

Vil S. Mirzayanov, “Dismantling the Soviet/Russian Chemical Weapons Complex: An Insider’s View,” in Amy E. Smithson, Dr. Vil S. Mirzayanov, Gen Roland Lajoie, and Michael Krepon, Chemical Weapons Disarmament in Russia: Problems and Prospects, Stimson Report No. 17, October 1995, p. 21.

It is a scientific impossibility for Porton Down to have been able to test for Russian novichoks if they have never possessed a Russian sample to compare them to. They can analyse a sample as conforming to a Mirzayanov formula, but as he published those to the world twenty years ago, that is no proof of Russian origin. If Porton Down can synthesise it, so can many others, not just the Russians.

And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.

To summarise:

1) Porton Down has acknowledged in publications it has never seen any Russian “novichoks”. The UK government has absolutely no “fingerprint” information such as impurities that can safely attribute this substance to Russia.
2) Until now, neither Porton Down nor the world’s experts at the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were convinced “Novichoks” even exist.
3) The UK is refusing to provide a sample to the OPCW.
4) “Novichoks” were specifically designed to be able to be manufactured from common ingredients on any scientific bench. The Americans dismantled and studied the facility that allegedly developed them. It is completely untrue only the Russians could make them, if anybody can.
5) The “Novichok” programme was in Uzbekistan not in Russia. Its legacy was inherited by the Americans during their alliance with Karimov, not by the Russians.

With a great many thanks to sources who cannot be named at this moment.

Please Also Read My follow-up to this article: “Bothered by Midgies”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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NYTimes bloviator Friedman: Pseudo journalism elevated to a noxious art. “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy,”

Baseless accusations persist, scoundrel media-led propaganda war on Trump for the wrong reasons. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman produces pseudo-journalism, the real thing absent in his commentaries. They’re shallow, deceptive, arrogant, disinformation rubbish – material no responsible editors would publish. The Times features it. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” he roared in his latest column. How possible when no democracy exists!

Friedman: “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy,” adding:

“(E)ither Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin – so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections – over the explicit findings of Trump’s own CIA, NSA and FBI chiefs.”

“Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief…Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.”

All of the above is disgraceful rubbish, not a shred of evidence suggesting any of it.

Trump’s sex life is his own business, no one else’s. It’s unrelated to affairs of state.

Until elected president, women didn’t publicly accuse him of sexual misconduct. Why not earlier as a private citizen?

Numerous US leaders and other politicians had extra-marital affairs. The issue is between them and their spouses, no one else.

Nothing suggests Russia has compromising information about Trump in Moscow or anywhere else.

America’s intelligence community chiefs lied, claiming Russian interference in America’s electoral process, failing to provide evidence proving it because none exists – no evidence, no wrongdoing, no probable cause to suggest it.

False accusations and allegations reflect malicious slander – what responsible media would denounce.

Not the Times and other media scoundrels, jumping on any chance to denigrate Trump for defeating their favorite Hillary, along with continuing a disgraceful Russophobic campaign.

Nothing supports Friedman suggesting Trump’s hiding something threatening.

Accusing him of being criminally incompetent to be commander in chief ignores war crimes committed by most US presidents, notably the Clintons, Bush/Cheney, Obama and Trump.

The Times, Friedman, and other media scoundrels suppress this information, what’s most important to report.

The Russian Federation never “acted in a hostile manner” against America or any other country. Washington and its rogue allies do it repeatedly – ignored by media scoundrels, falsely blaming Moscow for their crimes. Friedman is an embarrassment to journalism the way it’s supposed to be – his columns filled with disgraceful rubbish. They’re painful reading for anyone wasting time on them, including media critics, commenting on his trash to expose it.

“The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office,” he roared, adding “(t)his is code red.”

No intelligent news, information and analysis consumers would waste time on his columns – except to denounce them as malicious disinformation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN LENDMAN was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. His new site is at http://stephenlendman.org

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Dateline Feb 11, 2018
espite all efforts of the paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making love not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US regime is furious and pulling out all the hate stops to tarnish North Korea, and try and put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. While not exactly an anti-colonial attack dog, South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle either.

A departure from the colonialist script: South Korean President Moon Jae-in speaks during the opening ceremony of the 132nd IOC session ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Gangneung, South Korea, Monday, February 5, 2018.

Every four years the US regime uses the Olympics as an opportunity to rain chaos and hate during the Olympics’ historical tradition of bringing the world’s best athletes together in celebration of world unity, human dignity, fraternity among all nations and the possibilities when nations come together in peace.

Happiness, unity and peace are a threat to the paranoid US regime, which is dedicated to war, death, and chaos. Like a drone hurling bombs at wedding parties and funerals, the unpredictable US regime tries to sabotage anything good and decent that might come from a peaceful gathering of nations. Such a large gathering during the Olympics of world leaders, athletes and people of the world sets off the military-industrial-complex’s algorithm of a meeting of high profile targets in need of a signature strike.

As Obama said, “I have two words for you, Predator Drone; you won’t even see it coming”. It worked for Obama during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. From the time of the announcement in July of 2007, for almost eight years until 2014, Russia was preparing for the celebration of its emergence like a phoenix from the ashes of chaos sown by US infiltrators of neoliberalism, looting of state enterprises, and imposing austerity on Russian citizens during the decade of the 1990’s.

The US economic advisors to Russia’s drunken and abjectly corrupt president Boris Yeltsin led Russia down a yellow brick road they said would lead to a golden transformation from communism to a Western style capitalism, with consumerist abundance for all. When the neoliberal transformation turned into a train wreck the US Nobel Prize winning economists said it was just a temporary hard landing. The savage free marketism orgy went on for over a decade, during which most Russians saw their economic and social security vanish, their lifespan index plummet, criminality fester in every nook and cranny of society, and their national sovereignty reduced to that of a humiliated vassal state at the mercy of the Washington plutocracy. By the turn of the millennium, the Russian people had had enough of US-style voodoo economics and elected Vladimir Putin as their leader. Putin told the US thank you very much and showed the esteemed economic shamans the exit door and kicked them out. The US would never forgive Putin and they would do everything they could to shun, vilify and regime-change him.

During the years while Vladimir Putin was engineering a recovery of Russia’s economy, the US’s Obama regime was spending $5 billion plotting a coup d’etat in Ukraine. The coup was timed for when Russia would be overjoyed celebrating the Sochi Olympics. To prepare the US public for a resumption of a US-led Cold War the international cartel of Western propaganda organs, led by the New York Times and the Guardian, began laying the groundwork of anti-Russian propaganda. The propandists led a vilification project portraying Vladimir Putin as a thuggish, homophobic killer of journalists, a ruthless operator who invaded Georgia, and is an evil dictator. While the Russians and the rest of the world celebrated the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, US backed fascists instigated a violent overthrow of Russia’s neighbor and historical cousin country Ukraine (in fact Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilization), the original rus, and its democratically elected government.

The US in its ruthless pettiness always looks for an opportunity to rain on the parade of some other country that it wants to punish for not being one of its lackeys, or for not showing sufficient deference to the global hegemon. For the 2018 Winter Olympics the US planned to ramp up tensions and impose more economy killer-sanctions on North Korea in order to put an even brighter contrasting glow to the US dominated Western-style capitalist South Korean so-called miracle economy.

In 2017 the US regime got a sneaking suspicion that things were not going as planned. The feisty South Korean people said they had had enough of the US backed corrupt puppet president Park Geun-hye, granddaughter of the despotic US-backed dictator Park Chung-hee (1963 to 1979). In late 2016 the South Korean people began mass protests holding candlelight vigils demanding the resignation of Park Geun-hye.

Trump and Pence—two moral and intellectual imbeciles, two turds catapulted to the summit of US power— vividly personify the bankruptcy of US politics and the emptiness of its claims to be a real democracy.

Candlelight vigils have become a tradition of South Korean protesters since the 2002 killing of a South Korean girl by US occupation soldiers. When the soldiers were being court martialed by the US military, the South Korean people held candlelight vigils demanding justice. They didn’t get it. The soldiers were found not guilty (surprise!), but the non-violent candlelight vigils continued as a traditional form of protest whenever the South Koreans demonstrated against injustice, US arrogance, and political corruption.

The candlelight vigils against Park Geun-hye continued and grew in 2017 until the South Korean parliament caved in to the demonstrators and impeached Park for corruption and influence peddling. Park Geun-hye is now in prison, where her grandfather should have once been too, if an assassin’s bullet had not found him first in 1979. Her grandfather had also been a collaborator during Korea’s humiliation of Japanese colonialism. Collaboration and corruption do run in the family, but these dynastic vices are virtues in the eyes of the Americans who instinctively seek out the most corrupt to use as their local shills.

In May 2017 elections that followed Park’s ouster the South Korean people, especially the younger generation, said they had had enough of US instigated animosity between them and their Northern brothers and sisters. Moon Jae-in ran an elections campaign on a platform of anti-cronyism with South Korea’s giant industrial monopolies, increased social programs for the people and a Sunshine Policy 2.0 similar to that of President Kim Dae-jung (1998 to 2008). Moon won a landslide victory on his platform of peace and social justice for the people.

The US regime has been sulking, plotting and hyperventilating with sarcasm, saber rattling and retaliation against both South Korea and North Korea for resuming a warming of relations that started in the early 21^st century under Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Sunshine Policy in 2000. Before Moon could even take office in May, the US regime humiliated him and caused him to lose face by putting THAAD missiles in South Korea. Thousands of South Koreans protested against the THAAD’s, but since the US has military operational (colonial) control in South Korea the peoples’ protests were disregarded. Instead the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rained on the Sunshine before it even dawned. In April 2017 Reuters reported:

“[Tillerson] expected to discuss tougher sanctions [with Congress], which US officials say could include oil embargo, banning North Korean airlines, intercepting cargo ships, and punishing Chinese and other banks for doing business with Pyongyang…all options are on the table.”

For months the US regime has been raising the volume of the rhetoric against North Korea, threatening war, installing THAAD missiles, shipping more nukes to Guam, threatening a first strike nuclear attack, conspiring with military allies, and tightening the screws of killer economic sanctions. All options are on the table except the diplomatic option. The US refuses to sit at the same table with Koreans.

The proponents of economic sanctions claim that they are a non-violent means of coercion. That is not true. Economic sanctions are war by other means. Any coercion of one country against another is aggression, especially if that country is acting within it legal rights as a sovereign nation. North Korea has broken no international law and it has as much right as South Korea, Japan and the US to have nuclear power for electricity, to test missiles and to even have a nuclear arms program for self-defense and to possess nuclear bombs.

North Korea has not committed aggression against any other country or threatened to attack anyone except in self-defense. The US, its allies and the UN have overstepped their bounds in punishing North Korea for what they have every legal right to do. If the US is so concerned about nuclear proliferation, then they should start living up to their own obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and go talk to their friends Pakistan, India, and Israel too.

In the 21^st century economic sanctions, embargos, blockades, call them whatever; they are weapons of mass destruction that kill civilians and non-combatants indiscriminately. Economic sanctions kill by restricting the imports of food, medicine, fuel and other essentials. Economic sanctions deny the victim the ability to export its products in exchange for hard currency, puts a freeze on their foreign assets, and makes international transactions nearly impossible.

Killer economic sanctions strangle the ability of a country to sustain the civilian infrastructure necessary for the health and life of their citizens. Even when economic sanctions are so-called “smart sanctions” that target limited sections of a victim’s economy and individuals, all economic sanctions have the effect of intimidating other countries from all economic activity for fear of inadvertently violating the sanctions or just angering a muscular US foreign policy attitude that has hundreds of ways of retaliating against those that have displeased it. Economic killer-sanctions are a weapon that a strong country can use against a weak country to try to force a change in its behavior, as if a domineering parent were disciplining a naughty child. That is not how grown up diplomacy is supposed to work.

North Korea has proven that the US propaganda is a lie that North Koreans refuse to sit at the diplomatic table. The North Koreans have offered time and again to negotiate with the US, it has offered to suspend its nuclear program in return for acts of goodwill by the US in return, and North Korea has even offered multiple times to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice, but not a final peace.

North Korea and South Korea are meeting, talking and marching under a unified flag at the Olympics. The US is throwing a tantrum and accusing Kim Jong-un’s extended olive branch as a dirty trick to divide South Korea from its master, the US. The US regime is berating its South Korean underlings as being weak, off the colonial leash, and going it alone without its US paternalistic protection.

Good for South Korea. They deserve the liberation and independence the US promised them in 1945. South Korea had been under the boot of Japanese subjugation from 1905 to 1945. Since 1945 the South has been under the subjugation of the US boot. North Korea has been independent since the Russians left in 1948. They are nobody’s puppet and they want to go their own way. They want to be Koreans and not Western clones. That is their right. They deserve respect. We can start by using their correct name which is The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK).

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About the author

David William Pear, currently serving as a senior contributing editor, is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. He is also a regular columnist and commenter on OpedNews. His articles have been published by The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Russia Insider, Pravda and many other progressive publications. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, St Pete for Peace, CodePink and International Solidarity Movement. In February of 2015 he was part of a people-to-people delegation to Cuba with CodePink. In November of 2015 he was a delegate with CodePink to Palestine to show solidarity with Palestinians. In 2016 David spent 10 weeks in Palestine with the Palestinian non-violent resistance group International Solidarity Movement (ISM). David frequently makes extended trips to Russia as a private citizen. After retiring from finance in 2009, David earned a certification as an Emergency Medical Technician. David is a Vietnam veteran having served as a member of the 5th Special Forces Group as a combat advisor to the Army of the Republic of (South) Viet Nam. David resides with his wife and three cats in Clearwater Beach, Florida.

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David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University to receive his Certified Financial Planner certification. He also attended courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for his certification as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA). He has volunteered for public health service, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, emergency medicine and needs of the homeless. His hobbies include boating, fishing and motorcycle touring. He is also a licensed skydiver (USPA-inactive).

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Newsmedia effectively ban reporting corruptness of newsmedia — even of media that stand on the opposite side of the political divide.

The ‘news’media in the U.S. and allied countries never report the corruption (including lying) perpetrated by any except the very few non-mainstream media that are authentically pro-democracy (or “anti-Establishment” or “anti-elitist” — which doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “anti-elite”) in those countries — and these few pro-democracy sites are the least-corrupt newsmedia, the few ones that are careful to report only truths — no lies, no propaganda at all. They do it even if all the others call such news sites ‘fake news’ — because they are committed, above all, to conveying the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Each of the mainstream ‘news’media is funded by (and advertises) the corporations of billionaires and centi-millionaires (the people who control all of the large corporations and virtually all of the media). These people’s corporations advertise in, and donate to those media, and those mega-business-owners don’t want the public to know that all of the mainstream (and many even of the non-mainstream) ‘news’media are actually propaganda-agencies for what those super-rich [folks] want to happen (their governmental agendas). They not only advertise so that you will buy their products and services, but also report — and exclude from reporting — so that you will vote for their politicians who will impose their governmental agenda in this ‘democracy’, and will vote against their opponents. This is the governmental control-system (which is proven and explained — and shown to function in the U.S.A., by that link to ‘democracy’).

A good example of this phenomenon is the way that the Nunes Memo (about ‘Russiagate’ & Trump), which was released on Friday February 3rd, has been covered in all of the ’news’media.

On the Democratic Party side, which is funded by billionaires who control the Democratic Party and who own Democratic Party ‘news’media, there have been efforts to discredit, or else to minimize the significance of, what the Memo said.

On the Republican Party side, which is funded by billionaires who control the Republican Party and who own Republican Party ‘news’media, there have been efforts to credit, and also to maximize the significance of, what the Memo said.

It’s a Republican memo, so that’s understandable on strictly partisan grounds. If either of those Parties represented the public instead of the billionaires who fund them, then there would be a possibility of overcoming the ugly reality that’s documented in that link about our ‘democracy’ — and actually having a democratic government instead of our existing dictatorship — but unfortunately, neither Party does represent the public (which is why what was reported in that link to ‘democracy’ happened to be the case).

However, when I emailed on February 2nd, to all major and many minor ’news’media in the U.S. and its allied countries, submitting to them a news-report exposing the corruptness of one particular major U.S. ’news’medium’s news-story on the significance of what the Memo said, no mainstream U.S.-and-allied ’news’medium published it, and only two non-mainstream ones did: washingtonsblog, and RINF.

Although I hadn’t seen this tweet from the head of Judicial Watch, I had just explained the basic reasoning that stood behind it — so, here’s the significance of the Nunes Memo, in a nutshell (and my article, which was published only by washingtonsblog and RINF, provides the actual case):

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/959481196446183426?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Fdeep-state-death-spiral-dems-in-denial-over-damning-fisa-memo%2F

Tom Fitton, President, Judicial Watch

Memo: No FISA warrant without [Steele] Dossier. Which means no Russia collusion story without Dossier. Which means no Mueller special counsel without Dossier paid for by Clinton/DNC. Shut it down.

9:38 AM – 2 Feb 2018

This happens to be in line with the Republican PR campaign on the matter, but even Republican ‘news’-sites refused to publish the article I wrote, because it exposed the fraudulence of a certain Democratic news-site — and this is unfortunately a journalistic no-no.

In other words: Not only do ‘news’-sites not expose journalistic wrongdoing that’s on their own political side, but they also hide the journalistic wrongdoing that’s on the opposite side of the political divide. Both sides actually work together, to fool the public in ways that are acceptable to — or even required by — the billionaires. This is the phenomenon that’s documented, in that link to ‘democracy’ — documented actually to exist in the U.S., and to control the U.S. Government.

Unless the journalistic taboo of hiding from the public the lies (including all of the easily preventable false and misleading assertions) that are published by other ‘news’media — thereby leaving such lies to pile up in basically the way that please all billionaires (and centi-millionaires) of all political parties — ends, there is no hope for democracy. Not even a hope. There is just the extension of the present real nightmare, into the future.

About the author

ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

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