A series of harsh accusations against Russia was voiced by members of the U.S. Congressional Intelligence committee during a widely-reported hearing a few days ago.   All of the accusations assumed – as proven fact  – that Russia had manipulated the U.S. presidential election to subvert American democracy.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic party member of the committee, led off with statements such as “a foreign adversarial power intervened in an effort to weaken our democracy and to influence the outcome for one candidate and against the other.” He voiced no doubt as to whether this was true, but rather asked,“whether the Russians had the help of US citizens, including people associated with the Trump campaign.”

Remarkably, neither Schiff’s diatribe nor any of the other accusations was accompanied by evidence of any kind, accept for quotes from a previously discredited 25 page report.

It should not require legal training to note that serious allegations against the President of the United States, and against an important foreign leader, require evidence. Common sense should be sufficient.

However, Adam Schiff, the lead speaker in the anti-Russian diatribes in the hearing, is a trained lawyer and former government prosecutor. Presumably he, and other trained lawyers on the Congressional committee are especially able, due to their vocational backgrounds, and law school training, to detect gaps in evidence or the complete absence of evidence.

The fact that trained lawyers did not request evidence for exceedingly serious allegations against the U.S. President and a foreign leader, and did not note its absence, did not happen by chance; it did not slip their minds.  They consciously suppressed the issue of evidence – because none was available – out of a desire to deceive the American people into regarding Russia as their enemy.

If you have a really strong stomach, and can tolerate watching lying vermin like Adam Schiff, who is also a Zioncon, and whose mendacity can land all of humanity and the rest of life on this planet in a pile of radioactive ash, then watch this and really get cracking with some sturdy opposition to these bastards.  Opposing Trump is one thing, but under this phony pretext, and warmongering all the way to our graves? Wake up people. The people who elect this scum should have their heads examined. 

With U.S.-led Nato military forces massed on Russia’s borders, the show in the Congressional intelligence committee had one purpose: To use a concocted story to bamboozle the American people into accepting that Russia is somehow their enemy, and that further aggressive moves which could easily lead to war or even nuclear war, are in order.

The committee members who put on this show are – and I emphasize – political criminal seeking to prepare the American people for yet another foreign war of aggression.  They are enemies of the American people and of the whole world.

 Eric Sommer is an international journalist.  

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is using a three-country trip to Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing this week to line up America’s current allies, Japan and South Korea, behind Washington’s preparations for an economic and potentially military confrontation against North Korea and also China.

Tillerson held talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida yesterday. Today, he lands in South Korea for discussions with Acting President Hwang Kyo Ahn. Tomorrow he will be in China for meetings with President Xi Jinping, State Councilor Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

While Tillerson is couching his public comments in language about responding to North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear weapons tests, the thrust of his tour is to escalate the US pressure on China over its alleged failure to do more to rein in North Korea.

According to US officials, Tillerson will threaten punishing sanctions against Chinese companies accused of trading with North Korea, and categorically reject Chinese calls not to proceed with stationing a US anti-missile system and attack drones in South Korea that could be used in any nuclear war with China.

Tillerson is the second member of Trump’s cabinet to visit Japan. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis went last month, and Vice President Mike Pence is due in April, underscoring the administration’s focus on using North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs as a pretext for targeting China.

Judging from Tillerson’s and other Trump “security” cabinet moves, Trump not only reneged on his promises of reducing tensions around the world but has increased them to unconscionable levels. Hillary would have probably done the same, under different pretexts and with more stylistic finesse, but the project of constant wars which could end on a nuclear war is a proposition emanating from the irredeemably corrupt councils of the US ruling class and its global accomplices.

In Tokyo yesterday, Tillerson called for closer “trilateral cooperation” between Japan, South Korea and the US. It was important to “maintain a strong alliance in which there is no space between us,” he said.

Tillerson’s visit follows a Trump administration review of US strategy toward North Korea. According to media leaks, it was considering “regime change” and military attacks on the North. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump’s national security deputies had discussed both the possibility of pre-emptive US military strikes on North Korea and a reintroduction of nuclear weapons to the South.

Tillerson’s trip is being conducted against a backdrop of huge annual US-South Korean war games, based on “offensive” scenarios that include the rehearsal of “decapitation raids” by special forces units to assassinate the North Korean leadership. Intent on heightening tensions, the White House has rejected a proposal by China to halt the drills in return for North Korea suspending nuclear and missile activities.

In Tokyo yesterday, Tillerson said the “ever-escalating threat” from North Korea’s nuclear program showed a clear need for a “new approach,” but did not say what the Trump administration planned. Speaking at a joint news conference after talks with Foreign Minister Kishida, he claimed there had been “20 years of failed approach,” including attempts to assist and encourage North Korea “to take a different pathway.”

The Japan Times, citing an anonymous senior Japanese foreign ministry official, reported that Tillerson told Kishida that “all options are on the table” in dealing with North Korea’s military threat. The official said Tillerson offered “several ideas” but denied that specific military options were discussed.

Before Tillerson’s departure from Washington, a Trump administration official underscored the White House’s rejection of China’s objections to the deployment, currently underway, of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile battery in South Korea. “THAAD is non-negotiable,” the official told Reuters. “This is one of those things where Beijing is just going to have to adapt to or live in a perpetual cycle of outrage.”

In media briefings, senior US officials said Tillerson would also tell Beijing that the US was prepared to increase financial penalties against Chinese companies and banks that do business with North Korea.

Penalties have already begun, escalating an offensive that the Obama administration began last year. The Commerce Department last week announced that a Chinese tech firm, ZTE, would pay a $1.2 billion fine for violating sanctions by selling equipment to Iran and North Korea.

Although ZTE agreed to submit to the penalty, such large fines have the potential to damage China’s economy. Last September, the Obama administration set a precedent by targeting a Chinese company, the Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. Ltd, accusing it of money laundering on behalf of Pyongyang.

Korea is only one potential flashpoint. During his congressional confirmation hearings in January, Tillerson set the stage for a possible clash with China, saying it should be barred from artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea.

Publicly, Tillerson’s trip was meant to reassure Japan and South Korea of Washington’s continued commitment to their defence. During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly threatened to pull out US forces unless Japan and South Korea paid more for hosting them.

In Tokyo, Tillerson emphasised the importance of the US-Japan alliance. Speaking before meeting Abe, Tillerson said it was “the cornerstone for stability in Northeast Asia and the Asia Pacific” and “we look forward to strengthening that alliance further.” Abe said Tillerson’s visit to Japan was “timely,” when tension was mounting in the region.

The Japanese government reportedly agreed to expedite scheduling of a Security Consultative Committee—a meeting of the foreign and defense chiefs of both countries—to start considering concrete steps to enhance the alliance as soon as possible.

However, the visit also occurred in the context of steps by Abe’s government to rearm militarily in order to pursue its own imperialist ambitions, while still operating under the umbrella of its strategic alliance with the US. These moves include sending a Japanese guided-missile destroyer to participate in US-South Korean exercises near where four North Korean test missiles landed this month and dispatching a helicopter carrier for three months of operations in the South China Sea and across the Indo-Pacific region.

A hint of the tensions between the US and Japanese governments came in the Tillerson-Kishida press conference when Kishida said “Japan will assume larger roles and responsibilities.” A CBS News correspondent asked the Japanese foreign minister about reports that Abe’s government was considering acquiring its own THAAD system and a pre-emptive strike capacity against missile launches. Kishida said he did not understand the question and declined to allow the reporter to clarify.

On the economic front, the two sides evidently sought to patch up the rift caused by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which had promised greater access to each other’s markets as part of a wider push for a US-led Asia-Pacific economic bloc against China.

Officially, Tillerson and Kishida “affirmed cooperation” through a new bilateral economic dialogue, to be led by US Vice President Pence and Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, who is also finance minister. In reality, the trade war warnings of punitive tariffs issued by the Trump administration, while initially directed against China and Mexico, also threaten major Japanese companies operating in these markets.

 The author is a geopolitical analyst with wsws.org.  

PATRICE GREANVILLE

This is what passes today for “the left” in the United States: making pleas to “salvage” the honor of a shameless war criminal and Wall Street shill. 

An appeal landed in my mailbox yesterday from I suppose the editors of Mother Jones or their marketing machine in conjunction with an outfit called Citizens United. The letter blares across the page something that can only be of interest to people suffering from a bizarre sense of priority, abysmal ignorance or clinical stupidity:
Donald Trump just SLANDERED President Obama!

The implication is that we should urgently do something about this. Aux armes!

Further, in what we must accept as a compelling supporting rationale for action, the authors of the appeal, proving they do come from Lalaland, offer this laughable argument:

“Donald Trump is wrong!!! President Obama has always been on our side. He’s been fighting to overturn Citizens United since Day One.

By the standards of silliness this marks a new low; by the standards of left thinking, such as it is practiced in the US, it confirms the irrelevancy of this “new”, thoroughly bourgeois identity politics “left” to the problems really threatening humanity. By the standards of honesty, well, it does not qualify in that category, but let’s just say it is yet another contorted effort at bashing Trump. Which would be alright—considering the man offers any serious critic a multitude of valid grounds on which to oppose him— if these guardians of political correctness and truth also looked homeward for many of the curses besetting the nation. 

The fact that these liberal champions refuse to recognize the horrid, smoothly hypocritical track record of the Democrats (their darling Obama and the abjectly corrupt Clintons, in particular), and their favorite party’s drive to war, in lockstep with their new pals, the CIA and the resilient Neocon vermin, a posture which now almost guarantees some sort of nuclear confrontation with Russia or China in the near horizon (with unthinkable consequences for this planet as we know it lest we quickly correct course), says all you need to know about the degeneracy of the so-called left in the United States and in the West, in general. The traditional “left” in the US (always basically a bunch of centrist liberals since the radical left was reduced to ashes by unrelenting campaigns of anticommunism endorsed by the very same liberals) is so wanting these days in essential morality that now even voices that just a few years ago would have been categorized as unqualifiedly on the Right—and therefore by the left’s own reckoning “on the wrong side of history”, are about the only ones saying and doing things that are desperately needed.

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Marine Le Pen: Leader of France’s chief new ultranationalist party. Guilty of improper thinking.

Like opposing imperialist wars, for example. Do you see any of the legendary voices on the mainstream “left” uttering a single word of opposition to the dishonest campaign to demonize Russia? Instead, they are busily criminalizing any kind of contact with Russian diplomats or politicians that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions. So, nope. They are not there. Quite the opposite. Which leaves us as I say with the likes of Ron and Rand Paul and other libertarians, or the new French right champion, ultranationalist Marine Le Pen (already in the CIA crosshairs), doing wittingly or unwittingly what the left should be doing. Incidentally, Le Pen’s banishment from polite society is predicated on her opposition to the EU’s slavish attachment to Washington’s push to war with Russia, and her impatience with NATO.  I suppose that were France’s WW2 iconic hero Gen. Charles de Gaulle alive, he too would be promptly consigned to the netherworld of political undesirables since, as a recalcitrant nationalist and one suspicious of Anglo-American intrigues and treacheries, he held almost exactly the same views as Le Pen. This all by itself shows how much the world has changed.

The question arises: Has humanity —with the help of the lying, escapist mainstream media — really forgotten how to use its imagination? Sure, capitalism with its endless economic-insecurity distractions and malignantly convoluted superficial politics does consume a great deal of a person’s psychic space. This certainly stunts the imagination, especially in a culture that boasts a long history of proud anti-intellectualism. But still.

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Not too long ago, when some sanity and probity still held sway and when the collapse of liberaloid values was not yet total, most people in these formations clearly understood that the first and foremost duty of a progressive was to avoid wars at all costs, particularly a terminal, horrid war between the nuclear superpowers. This was and is the ultimate sin, the ultimate obscenity. Besides being the most elementary proof of common sense. Avoiding the Doomsday scenario was seen as imperative. People openly pushing for such confrontational policies would have lost much if not all political traction and even the presstitutes would have filed some demurring comment. Some on the liberal left might have even risen to denounce such dangerous warmongering.

This was the basic consensus for generations, ever since atomic weapons came to occupy center stage in world politics.

Even the ever supremacist, devious, and savagely capitalist United States agreed with its nemesis, the Soviet Union, to lower the threat of an Armageddon by signing treaties of weapons parity and reduction in nuclear arsenals, thereby at least assuring a balance of terror: the aptly labeled Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), a concept promulgated and observed even by reactionaries like Ronald Reagan. Apparently it worked.

The importance of this glimmer of sanity in the engulfing madness cannot be overestimated. But the dark forces never give up and in the intervening years the Anglo-American establishment quietly retired the MAD principle, reinstating the far more dangerous and de-stabilzing “first strike” principle.  Meanwhile, nuclear weapons have become even more potent, and there’s now almost open acknowledgement by the Pentagon that DU (depleted uranium) munitions, warheads and other forms of “tactical nukes” are standard choices for field commanders. The Middle East, of course, has been the testing lab, with Iraq, Syria and other victim nations subjected to what many suspect is an international crime of truly horrifying and unprecedented dimensions.

The problem with the development and use of tactical nuclear weapons in the modern battlefield (besides the abject cowardly criminality involved in using such weapons against weaker nations)  is that when used by a superpower on another superpower’s troops or “prime assets”, things can get rapidly out of control. A shooting war is no moment for cool heads to prevail, especially in utterly brainwashed and self-righteous chauvinist nations like America, where the public has been systematically denied access to truth in these essential matters. In America, for most people, the first realization that a war had begun would be a huge flash and thunder and then—well nothing. Utter pulverization. In other words, for most Americans the final war and their own death sentences would come as total surprise. In Russia at least the public is well aware of where the world stands, and some, many I hazard, perfectly understand the context and support their leaders’ struggles to maintain the peace. That said, if attacked by the US and the rest of the NATO mafia, Russia will not back down. It will respond with devastating efficiency. After all, last time Russia was attacked it lost 27 million lives, the equivalent in those days of the whole population of New York, California and Texas combined. This is something the American mind, still obsessed with less than 3,000 casualties on 9/11, can’t begin to wrap its jingoist mind around. So there will not be a repetition of Barbarossa no matter how much the despicable, overwhelmingly Zionist US Neocons push and huff to make it happen. Prominent, highly respectable Russians residing in the US, filed a letter of warning to the American people. The media naturally chose to ignore the document entirely.

The Russians’ warning packed a sobering sentence. It should be obligatory reading:

If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States  will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead. ⁽¹⁾

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he dream of nuclear supremacy, the longed for “pre-emptive strike”, the ability to deal Russia a disabling blow, with a “tolerable” level of retaliation, say only 50 to 75 million dead in the US, is talked about seriously in high military policy precincts. The submerged crime that such a war would be provoked and waged to secure not US national security but decisive advantage for its ruling class of billionaires and associated cliques of privileged rulers around the world, is never discussed. How could it? This truly insane posture has also been official Pentagon policy since at least 2006 when some people began to believe the US had attained nuclear supremacy over Russia and China. A paper filed in 2006 by two analysts with Foreign Affairs, a blue-ribbon establishment think tank, summed up the situation rather nicely:

(The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy | By Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press* | Foreign Affairs | March/April 2006)

 Goes without saying that enormous, obscene sums are being dedicated by the US to achieve this “nuclear supremacy”, all, as previously stated, under an almost complete news blackout about the subject. Problem is, the Russians and the Chinese are not exactly pikers, and Russia’s nothing short of astonishing rebirth as a first class world power, its Phoenix-like re-emergence from the Western-inspired Yeltsin putrefaction, has created new realities to factor in. Western leadership, of course, we see from their actions, continues to ignore them. And yet, as even some Western news sources have indicated, the Russian nuclear defence/deterrent force is something that should compel attention and respect. Ponder:

Russia Unveils RS-28 Sarmat ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile

Russia has declassified the first image of its new thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.

Satan 2 missile: Good bye to all that. Just one can wipe out all of Texas or France. An image of an RS-28 Sarmat missile. Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau.