How Long Would the US Navy Survive in a Shooting War?

The US Navy is a huge force but largely based around aircraft carrier groups that modern weaponry may have made obsolete

Marc Hopf | MILITARY Wed, Apr 1, 2015 | Russia Insider

Carriers today may be sunk from air, land or sea. PHOTO: The USS Ronald Reagan leads an attack group in the Pacific Rim, as part of exercises in that region. (Double click image for maximum resolution. All images courtesy of USN.)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merica sees itself as a ruler of the world’s oceans. After all, the country — which spends 10 times more on its military forces than the following nine countries — has by far the biggest naval force.

And as since the Vietnam War they have dealt only with militarily inferior opponents, they are extremely self-confident in their belief that they can defeat everything and everyone. It is not surprising that some young Americans even wear T-shirts with the logo: “United States Navy: The Sea is Ours.”

Perhaps we need to meet this pride and arrogance with some understanding in view of the numerical superiority of the U.S. Navy. In total, it currently has 10 operational aircraft carriers (two in reserve), while Russia and China have only one each.

Aircraft carriers are the great pride of the U.S. Navy and are also perfect to underline visually the claim of the ruler of the seas. They are therefore well liked by U.S. presidents as stages for delivering speeches when the time comes to tell the people that this unique nation has once again won a heroic victory.

What thrilling moments these were (at least for Americans) when George W. Bush landed in a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln (no, not as a pilot) and then, with the words “mission accomplished” and “a job well done,” proclaimed the end of the Iraq war to the people. As we know, the destruction of Iraq was carried out by the Americans under the label of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We may still ask ourselves what it had to do with freedom, but that’s a different story.

In addition to their suitability as impressive orator stages, the aircraft carriers also fulfill, of course, a military purpose. They can be considered as small floating airports, which ship up to 100 fighter jets to the scene of the action. Since they are equipped with the best weapons, radar, and defense systems, until now they have experienced almost no threat, especially since in the past the U.S. Navy parked them preferably off the coasts of defenseless desert states.

But what would it look like if the power of the U.S. Navy met its peer? The title of this article already implies the answer: not so good, and it could be that the patriotic U.S. Navy fans would hide their T-shirts quickly in the closet.

Back in the 70s, Admiral Rickover, the “father of the nuclear navy,” had to answer the question before the U.S. Senate: “How long would our aircraft carriers survive in a battle against the Russian Navy?” His response caused disillusionment: “Two or three days before they sink, maybe a week if they stay in the harbor.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he reason for the greatly reduced lifetime of the aircraft carrier in a battle against the Russians is a deadly danger below the water: modern submarines — especially Russian ones — are so powerful and difficult to locate that they can send large battleships and aircraft carriers to the bottom of the sea in the blink of an eye. The weakness of the U.S. Navy, therefore, is their vulnerability when they compete with an enemy that — using the language of the Americans — dominates the seas below the water surface. Of course, the U.S. military analysts are aware of this weakness, so one wonders why the U.S. Navy still adheres to the doctrine “the bigger the better” and continues to rely on an armada of aircraft carriers and large battleships.

Colonel Douglas McGregor, a decorated combat veteran, author of four books, a PhD and military analyst, gives the answer: “Strategically, it makes no sense, but the construction of large ships, of course, creates a lot of jobs.”

So the threat of Russian submarines, torpedoes and anti-ship missiles is well known by the Americans — a fact which Roger Thompson’s book, Lessons Not Learned: The U.S. Navy’s Status Quo Culture, also points out. A brief excerpt:

As Howard Bloom and Dianne Star Petryk-Bloom advised in 2003, both the Russians and Chinese now have the deadly SS-N-22 Sunburn missile at their disposal. This massive long-range missile, equipped with nuclear or conventional warheads, is extremely difficult to detect or destroy. According to Jane’s Information Group, it is more than capable of destroying any U.S. aircraft carrier. More to the point, Timperlake (a Naval Academy graduate) and Triplett warned that the Sunburn missile is designed to do one thing: kill American aircraft carriers and Aegis-class cruisers.

The SS-N-22 missile skims the surface of the water at two-and-a-half times the speed of sound until just before impact, when it lifts up and then heads straight down into the target’s deck. Its two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead has almost twenty times the explosive power of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The U.S. Navy has no defence against this missile system. As retired Admiral Eric McVadon put it: “It’s enough to make the U.S. 7th (Pacific) Fleet sink twice.”

The USS George Washington arrives in Busan Operations Base, in South Korea (July 2014).

In addition to this concept-related, almost inevitable weakness of large warships, there is another reason for the vulnerability of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. armed forces in general: their arrogance and the associated underestimation of their opponents. Anyone who underestimates his enemy grows imprudent and holds bad cards in the event of a surprise attack. This happened in 2000, when the American aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk was caught by the Russians on the wrong foot.

Modern submarines — especially Russian ones — are so powerful and difficult to locate that they can send large battleships and aircraft carriers to the bottom of the sea in the blink of an eye…”

Here are some excerpts from Jon Dougherty’s article, “Russian Navy takes Flyover by Surprise” (World Net Daily):

A pair of Russian warplanes that made at least three high-speed passes over a U.S. aircraft carrier stationed in the Sea of Japan in October constituted a much more serious threat than the Pentagon has admitted and were easily in a position to destroy the ship if the planes had had hostile intentions, say Navy personnel.

According to reports, a Russian air force Su-24 “Fencer” accompanied by a Su-27 “Flanker” made unopposed passes over the USS Kitty Hawk on Oct. 9, as the carrier was being refueled.

Russian fighters and reconnaissance planes made a second attempt to get close to the carrier on Nov. 9 — a repeat performance for which the Pentagon, as well as eyewitnesses aboard ship, said the carrier was prepared. But it was the first incident in October that caused alarm.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said during a regularly scheduled press briefing Nov. 30 that the Russian fighters were detected on radar well in advance of their high-speed passes. Naval officers aboard ship who spoke of the incident on the condition of anonymity agreed.

However, at the time the carrier’s combat information center alerted the ship’s commander, Capt. Allen G. Myers, that the Russian fighters were inbound, none of the carrier’s fighters were airborne. The ship carries 85 aircraft, according to Navy figures, and has a crew of over 5,500.

Witnesses said Myers immediately ordered the launch of alert fighters, but the ship’s scheduled fighter squadron was on “Alert-30” status — a minimum launch time of 30 minutes where pilots are “in the ready room” but are not sitting in cockpits waiting to be launched.

Bacon told reporters only that there “may have been a slight delay” in getting the interceptors in the air, explaining that because the Kitty Hawk was taking on fuel, it was not sailing fast enough to launch its aircraft.

One naval officer onboard the ship said, “40 minutes after the CO [commanding officer] called away the alerts,” the Russian planes “made a 500-knot, 200-foot pass directly over the tower” of the carrier.

Before the Kitty Hawk could get a single plane airborne, the Russian fighters made two more passes. Worse, witnesses said, the first plane off the deck was an EA-6B Prowler — a plane used primarily for electronic jamming of an enemy’s radar and air defenses, not a fighter capable of intercepting another warplane.

The EA-6B “ended up in a one-versus-one with a Flanker just in front of the ship,” one witness said. “The Flanker was all over his a…. He was screaming for help when finally an F/A-18 Hornet from our sister squadron got off the deck and made the intercept. It was too late.”

Naval personnel noted that “the entire crew watched overhead as the Russians made a mockery of our feeble attempt of intercepting them.”

The Clinton administration downplayed the incident …. The BBC, however, said that it was evident by the photographs taken by the Russian jets that there was “panic aboard” when the planes made their over-flights.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ur American readers will now perhaps argue that this humiliating incident happened 15 years ago and such a thing is no longer possible nowadays. But most readers of Russia Insider remember the events of April 2014 when the ultra-modern destroyer USS Donald Cook was paralyzed by a single SU-24.

For those readers who unfortunately missed the story, here it is: At the beginning of April last year the Americans sent the USS Donald Cook into the Black Sea, with the permission of Turkey, to protest against the Russian annexation of Crimea (this is incorrect, and actually a US propaganda meme: there was no “annexation”. The people of Crimea freely voted themselves back into the Russian Federation.—Eds.) and to demonstrate their military strength. The destroyer was equipped with the most advanced Aegis Combat System, a naval weapons systems which ensures the detection, tracking and destruction of multiple targets at the same time. In addition, the USS Donald Cook is equipped with four large radars, whose power is comparable to that of several stations. For protection, it carries more than 50 anti-aircraft missiles of various types.

According to the “Montreux Convention,” non-Black Sea state warships are permitted to stay in the Black Sea for no longer than 21 days. The Americans, of course, ignored this rule, and Russia responded by sending an SU-24. The Sukhoi was unarmed but equipped with the latest electronic warfare device, called Khibiny.

A Russian Su-34, fitted with Khibiny ECM packet. (Public domain)

A Russian Su-34, fitted with Khibiny ECM packet on the wingtips. (Public domain)

When the SU-24 approached the destroyer, all radar and control systems, information transfers, etc., of the USS Donald Cook were suddenly paralyzed by Khibiny. In other words, the seemingly superior Aegis system was completely off — like when you turn off your TV with the remote control.

Subsequently, the Sukhoi simulated 12 missile attacks at low altitude on the virtually blind and deaf USS Donald Cook, and we can imagine that the two SU-24 aircraft pilots had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, at this time there was neither John McCain nor NATO Commander Phillip Breedlove on board the ship — they would certainly have received some long-lasting impressions from this demonstration.

After this incident, the USS Donald Cook chose to immediately and at full speed move towards a port in Romania, where 27 shocked crew members asked for dismissal from the service.

This story shows us that Americans still overestimate the capabilities of their armed forces and do not realize (or do not want to admit) that Russia’s military technology is in many areas superior and has an advantage that cannot be offset quickly.

So, as long as a single Russian fighter jet can turn off a complete U.S. warship with the latest warning and fire control systems by just pushing a button, the answer to the question “How long would the U.S. Navy survive?” today is the same as in the old Cold War days.

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What’s Behind Ukraine’s Secret Weapons-Deal with UAE

Eric Zuesse

Kiev's legions being paraded through Donetsk's main thoroughfares, bowed heads in humiliation.

Ukrainian POWs being paraded through Donetsk’s main thoroughfares, bowed heads in humiliation. The US-supported and created Kiev regime has been trying to wage an ethnic-cleansing war against Eastern Ukrainians that reject its neofascist rule, but the campaigns have not fared too well due to lack of morale and superior fighting ability of the newly independent republics. (RIA/Novosti)

[dropcap]U.S.[/dropcap] President Barack Obama apparently is going ahead with his plan for NATO missiles to be placed in Ukraine aimed against Moscow, but found a way to do it that won’t violate the warnings by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin against Washington’s directly supplying those arms to Ukraine (such as is demanded of Obama by congressional Republicans, and even by a few hawkish Democrats — all passionate supporters of Hillary Clinton). Obama’s subordinate (or dependent local leader), the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, is now arranging to receive those weapons via a less direct channel; and this arrangement couldn’t happen if the U.S. White House were opposed to it. The idea might even have originated inside the White House.

On Tuesday, 24 February 2015, in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, Poroshenko placed the finishing touches on the purchase of Western, mainly U.S., weapons, via the UAE, from Western firms such as, perhaps, Lockheed, GE, Krupp, Euromissile, etc., which will be paid for by Western taxpayers, via IMF ‘loans’ to Ukraine, which money comes from taxpayer contributions to the IMF, but which ‘loans’ can never be paid back to the IMF — they’ll inevitably default, because these ‘loans’ are at the very end of the long line of creditors of Ukraine, which is a bankrupt country, having been looted for decades (and especially during the past year) by its aristocrats (called “oligarchs”), who have already spirited tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars off to Western tax-haven countries, so that only Ukraine’s public (who received little if any benefit from those debts of the Ukrainian Government) will pay even the pennies-on-the-dollars that Ukraine’s bondholders will be receiving (and the recipients will be only the holders of the oldest of Ukraine’s bonds, which won’t be the IMF, EU, or U.S., Ukraine’s post-coup ‘lenders’).
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This is called the IMF’s “austerity” program, for looted nations such as Greece and Ukraine, and it holds sacred the thefts by aristocrats, while it transfers all of aristocrats’ losses off onto their respective publics, who (as Ukrainians now will) pay it via their stripped governmental services and hiked taxes; and these poor people then serve aristocrats as virtual slaves (low-wage labor), many of whom thus migrate to wealthier countries, which, in turn, reject the burden of caring for them, thus producing yet more resentments and hatreds against these poor people, regardless of how they behave.

ukraine-Poroshenko-Wikileaks-US-State-Department

Here is the way this Ukrainian arms deal works:

The deal itself was publicly, but only vaguely, announced on Tuesday, the 24th, along with “what Poroshenko described as a ‘very important negotiation about the facilitation of the United Arab Emirates investment in the Ukraine.’ He declined to provide specifics of the deal.” The reason why Arabic royals (in this case the Al Nahyan family that controls Abu Dhabi) are naturals for this — the logical persons to serve as the middle-men to sell Western-made weapons to Russia’s new (since the time of Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup) enemy, Ukraine — is that the U.S. plutocracy has, for at least 70 years, been allied with Sunni aristocracies, against, originally, the Soviet Union, and then Russia. Russia had been the chief supplier of oil and gas to the other Soviet republics; it was and is the local oil-and-gas giant. Whereas Russia’s aristocrats bonded instead with Shia Iran (which alliance was interrupted during 1953-79 by the CIA’s coup there and then the Shah’s ultimate overthrow and then the restoration of Iran’s alliance with Russia), the American aristocrats had bonded with Sunni Saudi Arabia, and with other Arab royals, in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. So, with the exception of Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petreoleum, which bonded with Libya’s pro-Soviet Sunni anti-imperialist and anti-Western Muammar Gaddafi, Western oil companies generally allied with the Saud family, who had allied with the most intensely Sunni clergy of all, who were the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had personally agreed in 1744, with Muhammad bin Saud, that the Sauds and Wahhabs would jointly control the Kingdom and ultimately the world — Wahhabs controlling the laws, and Sauds controlling the military.

In short: America’s plutocracy bonded with Sunni aristocrats, and Russia’s plutocracy bonded with Shia ones. Ukraine has now joined the Sunni alliance, and this is done with Obama’s blessing.

America’s progressives might find it hard to understand, but America’s far-right plutocratic Koch brothers, who are allied with Big Oil on almost everything else, have no part in Big Oil’s alliance with the Sauds, and consequently the Kochs’ Cato Institute actually did an honest analysis of U.S.-Saudi relations, concluding, “The United States should reassess the current Washington-Riyadh axis. The American commitment to the Saudi royal family is a moral blemish and a practical danger. It has already drawn the United States into one conventional war and has helped to make Americans targets for terrorism, which generated far more casualties in one day than did the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, and the Afghanistan campaign (so far) combined.”

Instead, most of America’s aristocrats who are heavily invested in crushing Russia are Democrats, such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. These are the CIA Democrats. Another example of that is (the DailyKos) Markos Moulitsas. Of course, CIA Republicans dominate the anti-Russian campaign, but virtually the entire U.S. plutocracy is either funding it or else doesn’t much care either way about it. None cares about the extermination of the residents in Ukraine’s former Donbass region. This is why the U.S. media are now pouring forth with virtual unanimity against Russia — as if it were Russia that were surrounding NATO, instead of NATO that’s surrounding Russia. Even though Obama’s Ukrainian Government is carrying out an ethnic-cleansing campaign, its victims are being portrayed as if they were ‘terrorists’ and even ‘Russians.’ The victims are just former Ukrainians.

On 11 February 2015, I headlined “Al Qaeda’s Bookkeeper Spills the Beans” and reported that the person who had kept the financial books for Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda during the period leading up to 9/11, and who entered each and every donation into their financial books, including each one of the many multi-million-dollar donations, which poured in from Saudi and other Arab royals, provided sworn testimony recently, in a U.S. prison where he has been held incommunicado for more than a decade in order to protect Saudi and other Sunni royals — testimony that he swore upon the Quran, which he holds dearer than anything else — and, in this sworn testimony he explained in detail the profound interdependency between the Wahhab clergy and the Saud family, and the resulting dependency that Al Qaeda had upon both that clergy and that royal family, so that even the other Sunni royal families (such as in Qatar, Bahrain, and UAE) are beholden to the Saudi royal family and its Wahhabist clerics.

In other words: the U.S. plutocracy’s allliance with the Sauds explains an important part of the reason why the U.S. Government’s explanation of 9/11 is based upon lies.

King Saud, the founder of the Saudi royal mafia. Why American leaders kiss the ass of these medieval bastards is anyone's guess. They could be easily overthrown just like any other nation.

King Saud, the founder of the Saudi royal mafia. Why American leaders kiss the ass of these medieval brutes is anyone’s guess. They could be easily overthrown just like any other nation.

A little-noticed news story in Al-Monitor, on 27 January 2015, from Bruce Reidel, reported that, “Feb. 14 marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the US alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 14, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with King Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud in Egypt and the two forged a partnership that has endured despite occasional severe strains for the last 70 years.” Reidel went on:

“The meeting was a closely held secret for security reasons. Only a handful on each side knew it was coming. FDR and Ibn Saud met on the USS Quincy, a cruiser, in the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal, as World War II was coming to an end. FDR arrived from the Yalta summit with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt’s health was very poor; he had only weeks to live. Ibn Saud had come from Jeddah on an American destroyer, the USS Murphy, with an entourage of bodyguards, cooks, slaves, an astrologer, a fortune-teller and other retainers and some sheep. The king only reluctantly agreed to leave his wives behind in Jeddah. It was his first trip outside the Arabian Peninsula aside from a brief visit to Basra in Iraq. The two agreed to work together to ensure stability in the post-war Middle East. The United States would ensure security for the kingdom, and the Saudis would ensure access to their oil fields. The United States acquired use of Dhahran air base for operations in the Middle East. US oil companies were already operating in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia declared war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan two weeks later, securing a seat in the United Nations.”

Barack Obama wants to continue the program that George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and G.W. Bush, worked on before him, to surround Russia with NATO missiles. The takeover of Ukraine, and the enlistment of the Arabic oil sheikhs in assisting further to turn the screws against Russia, are key components in doing that: crushing Russia’s resistance to American domination.

Whereas, for FDR, the alliance with Sunni Islam was purely anti-communist, against the Soviet Union, the U.S. Presidents after 1980 were and are anti-Russian, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. The U.S. plutocracy intend to dominate the plutocracy in every other nation, and Russia is the only militarily powerful nation that is opposed to being controlled by this global Empire. Consequently, President Obama, who is an agent for America’s plutocracy, wants to cripple if not destroy Russia. And this is why, in his National Security Strategy 2015, 17 of the 18 times he uses the term ‘aggression’ are applying it against Russia. Russia’s President Putin would have to be an idiot not to recognize that today’s United States (its plutocracy, not the American public, who are quite different) is extremely hostile.

ObamaAsksCongresstoStrikeISIL

Obama asking Congress for more powers to strike ISIL, the US government’s own Frankenstein creation. Taxpayers dollars at work. Enjoy. (RT.com)

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia could be the bulwark that, along with the rest of Europe and America, could restrain Islamic extremism; but, since America’s plutocracy is primarily concerned with crushing Russia, Islamic terrorism will probably only continue to grow.

Furthermore, events such as 9/11 are necessary for the Arabic aristocrats in order for them to keep their clerics with them and thereby control their own nation’s public.

So: the U.S. ends up being allied with Islamic terrorists, while accusing Russia of backing ‘terrorists’ in the former Ukraine, whose only crime is that they don’t want to be slaughtered.

On 12 February 2015, was issued a “Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Ukraine,” which opened: “Ms. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), statement today in Brussels, Belgium: ‘I am pleased to announce that the IMF team working in Kiev has reached a staff-level agreement with the Ukrainian government on a new economic reform program that would be supported by an Extended Fund Facility of SDR 12.35 billion (about $17.5 billion, €15.5 billion) from the IMF, as well as by additional resources from the international community.” Violating even the IMF’s own prohibitions against pouring loans into a nation that’s at war, the IMF was here making clear that they were 100% behind Obama’s Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. This is where the money will come from to finance Ukraine’s acquisition of more weapons to exterminate or else drive out the residents in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President that Obama overthrew.

It’s ongoing mass-murder on the installment plan, with the IMF providing most of the funds.

Because the loaned money is going to pay the ethnic-cleansing campaign, it’s not going toward the needs of the Ukrainian people. This is extreme austerity, and it started immediately, a day after the day, 26 February 2014, when Arseniy Yatsenyuk became appointed to run the country, as he had been selected to do by Victoria Nuland of Obama’s State Department 22 days prior. As Kommersant reported, on 6 March 2014: “the strategy of the government was approved in Parliament on 27 February and on 3 March the Ministry of Finance sent an action plan for approval to the Ministry of Economic Development. The document is striking in its scale. … ‘Under the Knife’ go social costs. Already in March, the payment of pensions will be reduced to only 50% of the designated pension amounts.” But an uproar held that up. However, now it’s being done.

On December 11th: “Cabinet wants to reduce schooling to 9 years [from 12 years], to reduce the cost of the budget Finance Ministry proposes to amend the legislation governing the humanitarian sphere, the sphere of public administration, pensions, social security, the work of the prosecution and the army.”

On December 19th: “Education Minister Sergey Kvit noted that the department, which he heads, will never agree to such a proposal.”

On December 24th: “Education Minister Sergei quits.”

Pensions are now set to be halved, even in the greatly depreciated Ukrainian currency; and public schooling is to be reduced to only 9 years. All of that IMF (and U.S., and EU) money goes instead to pay to mass-murder the residents in Ukraine’s former Donbass region, the area shown on this map in which the residents voted 90% for Viktor Yanukovych, whom Obama overthrew, and where all of the residents are officially ’terrorists.’ The phrase for that used to be: “free-fire zone.” Obama wants the residents exterminated, and the IMF and EU are going along with that.

The circuitous way in which Ukraine will be buying its weapons is designed to avoid triggering a declaration of war by Vladimir Putin, or else to make non-obvious to the public why he would be justified in doing so.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] 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. [/box]

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State Dept. spox flops on question of NATO exercises near Russian border

Published on Mar 20, 2015

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia using Vietnamese air bases to refuel bomber aircraft raises tensions with the West, yet there is nothing wrong with US and NATO drills near the Russian border, according to State Department spokesperson Jeff Rathke.

RT’s Gayane Chichakyan and the AP’s Matt Lee questioned Rathke, the director of the agency’s Officer of Press Relations, during Friday’s daily press briefing, asking whether the US and NATO’s ongoing military exercises in Estonia could be interpreted as potentially provocative. When pressed to explain the seeming contradiction in the government’s views, the spokesman struggled with an answer.

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The Taste of Immorality and Fear in the Western Political Cocktail

By Alevtina Rea

“How ’bout a shot of truth in that denial cocktail?”
– Jennifer Salaiz

Reprinted from the original in Cyrano’s Journal, March 1, 2015 (posted by Rowan Wolf). Cyrano’s Journal Today is a fraternal site. / (Photo by Duncan C / flickr.)

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]estern politicians’ numerous efforts to subjugate, vilify or de-humanize Russia and its president, as well as to make Russia ignore its own national interests, have failed miserably. What is even worse, their inept political moves have caused a lot of grief to Ukraine in general. Western political arrogance, clumsiness and incompetence is a painful burden to regular Ukrainians whose lives are gradually turning into a nightmare. The minimum wage in Ukraine has just hit another anti-record – it is $46 per month. “Even in such poor countries like Bangladesh, Ghana and Zambia, working people earn at least $4 more. The residents of Lesotho, Gambia and Chad are even better off – their minimum salary reaches $51,” says one of the Ukrainian publications, quoted by TASS. To put things in perspective – just at the beginning of 2014, pre-Maidan, the minimum wage was $440. The “European Dream,” they say? Be very careful what you wish for!

Being in denial is not pretty, especially in denial of fatal mistakes, and there are plenty of deniers among the western political elite. For example, it seems that former U.S. presidential and national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is besieged by paranoid nightmares. He is certain that Russia will invade Latvia and Estonia and consequently he is quick to “assume” a role of savior for these two former Soviet states. He is convinced that it is necessary to place small (and not “provocative”) U.S. or NATO units on the border with Russia, the sooner the better. As to Ukraine, Mr. Brzezinski is of a strong opinion that the United States should provide arms to Ukraine. This suggestion overlooks the fact that Ukrainian government forces are responsible for unleashing the bloody mess in Donetsk that resulted in more than 5,400 deaths – with more than 3,000 civilians being killed.

As a client state, Ukraine has been under the umbrella of the U.S. all along. Despite the “guidance,” the Kiev authorities haven’t fared too well. In fact, they are being beaten in quite humiliating fashion by the Novorossiyan army. They constantly beg their masters for additional military and financial support. Perhaps, as Putin said on February 17, “The Ukrainian army is ashamed to lose to yesterday’s miners and tractor drivers.” To boost the Kiev authorities’ drooping spirit, as of February 11, NATO foreign experts arrived in Ukraine in order to train the National Guard militants as well as the instructors of Ukrainian military training centers. The focus on the National Guard is astonishing (but actually not surprising, considering who Washington supports), to say the least. After all, its members are the ones who sport the Nazi symbols; who burned and clubbed to death the Odessa innocents in the Trade Union House on May 2, 2014; who tortured anyone daring even to think about Novorossiya or Russia. They are also the ones who almost universally follow the racist Nazi ideology. Did Uncle Sam fall in love with the swastika? One wonders.

Being heteronomous by nature, British politicians are also too eager to prove their loyalty to Uncle Sam. On February 13 London sent 20 armored cars of Saxon to be used in the Ukrainian assault on Novorossiya. The irony is that these armored cars are obsolete, too heavy, discarded by the UK military itself – in short, useless. Moreover, the Kiev junta had to pay money for these behemoths used in the 1980s. It seems that the West holds them for patsies after all. Nevertheless, the Ambassador of the United Kingdom in Kiev, Simon Smith, said that Britain intends to continue to support the Ukrainian army.

Another ex-politician is following the overly aggressive trend. Former Polish Defense Minister Romuald Sheremet’ev believes that Russia intends to attack Poland to revive the empire from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Never mind that he lies about the widely known Russian call to build – together with the European Union – a common economic space, from Lisbon to Vladivostok, and that the development of such a space was also welcomed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. His reality is of a different kind, engendered by fear and panic. The West’s politicians are of a strange mold – they tend to create a frightening environment to manipulate their respective citizens, but then, at the end, they end up believing their own lies, thereby scaring themselves!

At the other side of the spectrum, there are some useful idiots such as Jen Psaki, U.S. State Department spokeswoman. Always upbeat and seemingly unperturbed, notwithstanding the stupid rubbish that issues from her mouth, Psaki is a darling of Russian journalists and public, for she provides ample opportunities to mock and marvel at inept U.S. politics in Ukraine in general, and toward Russia in particular. Perhaps, she herself has no idea what kind of joy she brings to all the Russians politicians, media reps, and just regular folks. As Observer News noted, since the Kiev coup last February, “Jen Psaki has catapulted to rock star fame, and so too in Russia was born a new term – ‘psaking,’ which in local political newspeak means to state confidently unchecked facts, mixed with an official propaganda line and one’s own ignorance.” Oh, Jen – given her upcoming re-assignment starting April 1, she will be greatly missed as a source of entertainment. And what a suitable day for her departure too – the April Fools Day, here we come!

Unfortunately, the opportunities for amusement in politics are rare — especially given the dismal background of the US Ukrainian political puppets who literally threaten to burn down the Crimea with all its inhabitants; or who promise to organize a victory parade on Red Square, or, unashamedly, gloat over the Donetsk region’s children living in basements and not attending schools. To assuage their own fears and insecurities, the biggest Russophobic politicians in Ukraine call for building a wall, a la Israel style, to physically separate their country from their eastern neighbor, as well as, perhaps, to present themselves before the Ukrainian public as so-called defenders of the homeland. In December last year, Yatsenyuk said that Kiev will need 8 billion hryvnia (more than $520 million) and four years for the project, nicknamed “The Wall.” Who could possibly understand Ukrainian politicians? With their economy in shambles, there is not enough money for their own citizens (e.g., IMF-imposed austerity made gas prices jump 280 percent), but they squander money for useless projects such as this one, or, even worse, for squalid military assaults on the civilians of Novorossiya.

As to the futile effort of U.S. puppets to subjugate eastern Ukraine, many in the West blame Russia for supplying weapons to the Novorossiyan army. First, there is no official proof of this claim. Even modern technology has failed to record any photos of regular Russian army units in Ukraine (though fake ones have been produced). Second, Russia has no need to supply weapons. Who needs the official suppliers when there is a plenty of weaponry abandoned by the Ukrainian army and National Guard? They were faithful suppliers of ammunition to Donetsk and Lugansk defenders all along. For example, just recently, the army of the Donetsk People’s Republic found in good condition and added to their own inventory: “28 tanks, 63 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 145 cars, 16 anti-aircraft ZSU-23-2, and 13 artillery pieces and mortars.” According to the Deputy Army Commander, Edward Basurin, the Donetsk Army also received about 1,000 units of small arms, 39 warehouses with ammunition, and two train cars with weapons, all left behind by the Ukrainian armed forces, reports TASS. On top of that, there was another unexpected “gift” – a U.S. armored Humvee, in great condition. This armored car has a high impenetrability, and is well-suited for off-road conditions and also for air mobile operations, as it is transportable and droppable by parachute. Thanks to Uncle Sam, it will now be used to defend Novorossiya.

Well, perhaps the good thing is that at least some Western politicians have started to wake up from the anti-Russian miasma. Just last Friday, commenting on the report of the House of Lords, British Lord Peter Truscott said, “Russia’s position has been completely ignored, there was no mutual communication [with Russia], and that was a mistake.” According to published report, EU leaders expressed “catastrophic misunderstanding” of the situation, which was the cause of the Ukrainian crisis. At this point, however, British Lords have no sway over western politics, and business as usual is the main agenda of the day as far as Russophobia is concerned. In brief, under the empty slogans of democracy and freedom, the West has effaced the reality on the ground and subrogated its own, false and murderous, version of it. However, the issue here is not democracy or freedom, as the West claims, but the question of immorality. To use Paulo Freire’s words, “human interests are abandoned whenever they threaten the values of the market… and go against the interests of the western elite, whether geopolitical or financial.“Allowing concrete situations of misery to persist is “immoral.” And what has transpired in Ukraine since the February 2014 coup – instigated, supported and maintained by the West and spearheaded by the U.S. – is the sheer misery and degradation of human beings. By any account, that is, immoral!

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The Greek Tragedy: Some things not to forget, which the new Greek leaders have not.

Costa Gavras’s Z, with Yves Montand in the role of a martyred leader of the left, gave the world the anatomy of a CIA-supported right-wing coup, this time in his homeland in Greece. The film remains highly relevant to this day, since US criminality, if anything, is now even more outrageous.

By William Blum

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merican historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Still from Z (Costa Gavras, 1968)

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.

Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.

I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.

The Twilight Zone of the US State Department

“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop … the Twilight Zone.” (American Television series, 1959-1965)

State Department Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015. Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, questioned by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Psaki: Current designated liar for the Washington mafia.

Lee: President Maduro [of Venezuela] last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. (sic) Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We have seen many times that the Venezuelan Government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan Government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

Lee: Sorry. The US has – whoa, whoa, whoa – the US has a longstanding practice of not promoting – What did you say? How longstanding is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a longstanding practice.

Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history –

Lee: Not in this case.

Psaki: – is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

Lee: In this specific case.

Psaki: Correct.

Lee: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime, even – (laughter)

Psaki: The last 21 years. (Laughter.)

Lee: Well done. Touché. But I mean, does “longstanding” mean 10 years in this case? I mean, what is –

Psaki: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.

Lee: I understand, but you said it’s a longstanding US practice, and I’m not so sure – it depends on what your definition of “longstanding” is.

Psaki: We will – okay.

Lee: Recently in Kyiv, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government at the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and you supported it. The constitution was –

Psaki: That is also ludicrous, I would say.

Lee: – not observed.

Psaki: That is not accurate, nor is it with the history of the facts that happened at the time.

Lee: The history of the facts. How was it constitutional?

Psaki: Well, I don’t think I need to go through the history here, but since you gave me the opportunity –- as you know, the former leader of Ukraine left of his own accord.

………………..

Leaving the Twilight Zone … The former Ukrainian leader ran for his life from those who had staged the coup, including a mob of vicious US-supported neo-Nazis.

If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki, tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War. None of the attempts were democratic, constitutional, peaceful, or legal; well, a few were non-violent.

The ideology of the American media is that it believes that it doesn’t have any ideology

So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.

In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.

Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

CBS’ pathetic Pelley. A clueless presenter.

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?

For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”

I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the [putative] systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Cuba made simple

“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation – unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.”

Aha! So that’s the problem, according to a Washington Post columnist – Cuba is not a democracy! That would explain why the United States does not maintain an embargo against Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt and other distinguished pillars of freedom. The mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship. Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for blindly following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. (They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries). Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have the Koch Brothers to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.

Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba not a democracy because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement two years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.

Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.

The Ministry of Propaganda has a new Commissar

Last month Andrew Lack became chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US government-supported international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. In a New York Times interview, Mr. Lack was moved to allow the following to escape his mouth: “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

So … this former president of NBC News conflates Russia Today (RT) with the two most despicable groups of “human beings” on the planet. Do mainstream media executives sometimes wonder why so many of their audience have drifted to alternative media, like, for example, RT?

Those of you who have not yet discovered RT, I suggest you go to RT.com to see whether it’s available in your city. And there are no commercials.

It should be noted that the Times interviewer, Ron Nixon, expressed no surprise at Lack’s remark.

Notes

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, chapters 3 and 35
“Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt”, Spiegel Online (Germany), February 8, 2010. Google “Goldman Sachs” Greece for other references.
U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015
Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List
CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002
ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002
“60 Minutes II”, February 26, 2003
Washington Post, March 1, 2003
“60 Minutes”, January 27, 2008
Democracy Now!, February 12, 2015, Wright statement made February 10
Al Kamen, Washington Post, February 18, 2015
Huffington Post, May 3, 2012
New York Times, January 21, 2015

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

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