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War News Stories

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on war from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship
2023-06-22, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-07-03 15:48:20
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/22/ukraine-war-journalists-press-credentials/

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian authorities have threatened, revoked, or denied press credentials of journalists working for half a dozen Ukrainian and foreign news outlets because of their coverage. Veteran war correspondents, for their part, are accusing Ukrainian officials of making reporting on the reality of the war ... nearly impossible. "I've covered four wars, and I've never seen such a chasm between the drama and intensity and historic import of the reality of the conflict on the one hand, and the superficiality and meagerness of its documentation by the press on the other," Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer for the New Yorker, told The Intercept. "It's wild how little of what's happening is being chronicled. And the main reason, though not the only one, is that the Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage." Mogelson added that the restrictions come from military and political brass and run counter to rank-and-file soldiers' desire to share their experiences. "The guys who are actually out doing the killing and dying and enduring the misery of the front are almost always thrilled to have journalists witness what they're going through," he added. Ukrainian journalists have also warned that military handlers' tight oversight of journalists is skewing coverage of the war. The Ukrainian military doesn't have a formal embed system. Most press access consists of short, chaperoned visits to military positions.

Note: The proxy war in Ukraine was designed to serve U.S. military-intelligence interests. Read an excellent analysis by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, who covers what's going on in Ukraine and Russia beyond the official media establishment narrative. For further exploration, read an in-depth report by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who received revealing information from U.S. intelligence sources about how US taxpayer money is being used in this war.


Daniel Ellsberg Wanted Americans To See The Truth About War
2023-06-16, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-07-03 15:45:04
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-dead/

More than 50 years had passed since Ellsberg – risking prison for the rest of his life – had provided the New York Times and other newspapers with 7,000 pages of top-secret documents that quickly became known as the Pentagon Papers. From then on, he continued to speak, write, and protest as a tireless antiwar activist. I asked what the impacts would likely be if pictures of people killed by the U.S. military's bombing campaigns were on the front pages of American newspapers. "I am in favor, unreservedly, of making people aware what the human consequences are of what we're doing – where we are killing people, what the real interests appear to be involved, who is benefiting from this, what are the circumstances of the killing," Ellsberg replied. "I want that to come out. It is not impossible, especially [with] social media, where people can be their own investigative journalists." Ellsberg died today from pancreatic cancer. While he is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the world, he went on for 52 years to expose other types of secrets – including hidden truths about the psychology and culture of U.S. militarism. Ellsberg added, “How much of a role does the media actually play in ... deceiving the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe – that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Note: This article was written by Norman Soloman, longtime political activist and media critic on war coverage. Explore a powerfully written adaptation from Soloman's new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and the war machine from reliable major media sources.


How US And UK Government Propaganda Specialists Collaborated With Nazis In Ukraine
2023-06-20, MintPress News
Posted: 2023-07-03 15:38:08
https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-uk-government-propaganda-specialists-collabo...

A MintPress investigation has found that a host of Western government officials, intelligence agents and assets have been directly involved in intimate collaboration with Nazi groups and individuals since at least 2014. This has included involvement in creating and operating the Nazi-run kill list in Ukraine. While Western media have belatedly been forced to concede that there are Nazi influences in Ukraine, many journalists have insisted that the visible fascist patches on uniforms are only there to troll Russians and that they are insignificant and a gift to Russian propaganda. Still, other journalists admit to asking Ukrainian service members to cover up their Nazi symbols. Last May, The Irish Independent claimed that [former adviser to Ukraine's foreign minister Cormac] Smith is "an unlikely key player in the information war," who "estimates he has given about 100 TV, radio and print interviews with the international media in the past few months to tell Kyiv's side of the story." Smith has a nice line in outrageous propaganda gambits, claiming that Russians are the actual Nazis and that they murder, rape and pillage, including the rape of children. As it turns out, the source of many of the allegations ... was the Ukraine parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova. Last year, it was comprehensively demonstrated that her stories had little evidential basis. She ... admitted to "promoting fake news to persuade Western countries to send more arms and aid." Smith nonetheless carried on making vague allegations of rape for months afterward.

Note: US agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis as spies and informants during the Cold War. Nazi doctors were also used used to teach the CIA mind control methods. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the war machine from reliable major media sources.


“Independent” Ukrainian “Kill List” Actually Run By Kiev, Backed By Washington
2023-05-12, MintPress News
Posted: 2023-07-03 15:36:14
https://www.mintpressnews.com/independent-ukraine-kill-list-actually-run-by-k...

Last year, my name was added to a blacklist published online by the Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation. I joined over ninety others deemed to be “speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda.“ These included Manuel Pineda and Clare Daly, both leftist Members of the European Parliament (MEP); Also counted are ... a slew of rightist MEPs; Ex CIA officer, Ray McGovern; former military and intelligence figures such as Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor. Journalists on the list included Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and Eva Bartlett. The Center for Countering Disinformation ... is an official governmental body created in late March 2021, along with a similar organization, the Center for Strategic Communication, by President Zelensky himself. They [are] related to other blacklisting websites like Myrotvorets (“Peacemaker”), widely seen as a “kill list.” The covert “kill list” website is a product of the Ukraine regime, effectively funded by the CIA (amongst others) and is hosted by NATO. One extraordinary thing is that many American citizens, including ex-military and intelligence operatives, are included, as well as a significant number of citizens of NATO member countries. Perhaps the most remarkable element is that NATO has hosted the site ... on its servers in Brussels. Myrotvorets lists thousands of “saboteurs”, “separatists”, “terrorists” and “traitors”. Sometimes, it has crossed out their photographs once they had been killed, with the label “liquidated”.

Note: This article was written by sociology professor and investigative researcher David Miller, who is widely known for his writings on propaganda, lobbying, and media issues. Tune into an entertaining yet revealing video from The Jimmy Dore Show to further explore interesting perspectives about the Ukrainian "Kill List."


The uncounted: how millions died unseen in America’s post-9/11 wars
2023-05-21, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2023-06-18 22:45:52
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/21/the-uncounted-how-milli...

How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health, published by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, focuses on what [author Stephanie Savell] terms “indirect deaths” – caused not by outright violence but by consequent, ensuing economic collapse, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, destruction of public health services, environmental contamination and continuing trauma, including mental health problems, domestic and sexual abuse and displacement. Calculated this way, the total number of deaths that occurred as a result of post-9/11 warfare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia rises dramatically from an upper estimate of 937,000 to at least 4.5 million, of which up to 3.6 million were “indirect deaths”. Such deaths grow in scale over time. In Afghanistan, where the war ignited by the 2001 US-led invasion ended in 2021, the indirect death toll and related health problems are still rising. Experts suggest “a reasonable, conservative average estimate for any contemporary conflict is a ratio of four indirect deaths for every one direct death”, Savell says. The poorer the population, the higher the resulting indirect mortality when conflict erupts. Savell does not attempt to apportion blame between various actors, although the US, which launched the “global war on terror” in 2001, bears heavy responsibility. An estimated 38 million people have been displaced since 2001.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


Ukraine war: The deadly landmines killing hundreds
2023-04-11, BBC News
Posted: 2023-06-18 22:44:23
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65204053

Across Ukraine's vast expanse, there are thought to be 174,000 square kilometres which are contaminated by landmines. It is an area of land larger than England, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. In the war-scarred Kharkiv region, warning signs occasionally appear next to brown, barren fields which were once front lines. Even more infrequent is the sight of demining teams sweeping their metal detectors across small, taped-off areas. A literal scratching of the surface. More landmines have been found in the Kharkiv region than anywhere else in Ukraine. The Russians deployed landmines to both defend their positions and slow the Ukrainians. After leaving in a rush, a lethal footprint was left behind. In the small town of Balakliya, on a patch of land next to an apartment block, Oleksandr Remenets' team have already found six anti-personnel mines. They'd earlier uncovered around 200 nearby. "My family calls me every morning to tell me to watch where I tread," he says. "One of our guys lost his foot last year." The day after we spoke, another member of his team was wounded by a mine. Since September, 121 civilians have been injured in the Kharkiv region alone, according to the State Emergency Service. 29 were killed. More than 55,000 explosives have been found in the area. So-called butterfly mines [are] the most common in the area. They're only three to four inches wide, propeller shaped, and are scattered from a rocket. They're banned by international law. That hasn't stopped them from being used in this war.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


Survivors of Kissinger's Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings
2023-05-23, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-06-13 00:15:38
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/henry-kissinger-cambodia-bombing-survivors/

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ... bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger's tenure in the White House. "You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present," said Greg Grandin, author of "Kissinger's Shadow." "The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war." Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That's up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger – who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America – has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and war from reliable major media sources.


The Taliban Is Fighting Iran With American Weapons
2023-06-01, Vice
Posted: 2023-06-13 00:06:44
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvvgk/the-taliban-is-fighting-iran-with-amer...

The Taliban clashed with Iranian border guards over the weekend, and it used American equipment to do it. Videos of the skirmish are all over social media, and they show Afghanistan fighters using a mix of old Soviet gear and U.S. weapons from the War on Terror. On Telegram, videos from the advocacy group HalVash showed U.S. armored Humvees rolling down a road. One dramatic video ... showed a Humvee with an M240 machine gun in the back. Taken from the point of view of the man behind the gun, the shot lingers on the spent ammunition littering the top of the Humvee. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a U.S. agency that tracked waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan, America spent around $18.6 billion equipping the Afghan National. Much of that equipment is now in the hands of the Taliban. The Pentagon has said it left behind about $7.12 billion worth of military equipment, and it's had a hard time keeping track of it all in the wake of its withdrawal. The U.S. would frequently ship guns and equipment into the country only to have it go missing later. Shipping containers filled with small arms would sit unattended for years. The Taliban has much of it now. After the collapse, a Taliban official told AL Jazeera that it had taken more than 300,000 light arms, 26,000 heavy weapons, and around 61,000 military vehicles when it took over the country. He said the plan was to use these weapons and the Soviet-era armor to create a "grand army."

Note: Read how the U.S. documented 12 years of failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan involving billions of dollars wasted and thousands of lives lost. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Ukraine War Is Shaking Up Global Arms Industry
2023-04-16, LA Progressive (A popular Los Angeles Newspaper)
Posted: 2023-04-27 20:20:35
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/global-arms-industry

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that six countries—the U.S., Russia, France, China, Germany, and Italy—were responsible for 80 percent of global weapons exports from 2018 to 2022. The U.S. alone counted for 40 percent, while Russia was a distant second at 16 percent. Maintaining and growing their market share is a prerogative for countries that export weapons. Turkey has sold many drones to Ukraine, while Iran has sold its own arsenal to Russia. Both Turkey and Iran are aiming to pitch their products as low-cost alternatives to Western manufacturers. Turkey, however, is still in talks to buy Russia's S-400 missile defense system. Its provision of weapons to Ukraine, while it continues to negotiate weapons deals with Russia, demonstrates the complicated nature of the global arms industry. The war in Ukraine continues to underline how integral the arms industry is to geopolitics. China, for example, has not provided weapons to either Ukraine or Russia, but its largest civilian drone maker, DJI, is one of the most important suppliers for their militaries. The U.S. has been criticized in recent years for its weapons exports to Saudi Arabia, which is under fire for human rights abuses and for its conflict in Yemen.  And though claims of Western weapons being smuggled out of Ukraine have often been dismissed, there is concern that many of the weapons sent to the Ukrainian military have or will end up on the black market.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Leaks Reveal Reality Behind U.S. Propaganda in Ukraine
2023-04-19, LA Progressive (A popular Los Angeles Newspaper)
Posted: 2023-04-27 20:18:25
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/propaganda-in-ukraine

The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says. We can’t help wondering what President Biden’s plan could be, or if he even has one. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a “total breakdown” between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. According to Hersh’s report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation and war from reliable sources.


Who Controls How We Remember the Iraq War?
2023-03-18, LA Progressive (A popular Los Angeles Newspaper)
Posted: 2023-04-10 13:22:00
https://www.laprogressive.com/the-media-in-the-united-states/remember-the-ira...

As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget – first and foremost, the media’s own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war. But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period ... the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration’s propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices. A 2003 report by the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS Newshour featured a total of 267 American experts, analysts, and commentators on camera to supposedly help make sense of the march to war. Of these 267 guests, an astounding 75% were current or former government or military officials, and a grand total of one expressed any skepticism. The bedrock democratic principle of an independent, adversarial press was simply tossed out the window. “Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting,” [author Norman] Solomon says. “But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it. That really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.


20 Years After Illegal US Invasion of Iraq, Its Architects Are Still Cashing In
2023-03-19, Truthout
Posted: 2023-04-10 13:11:30
https://truthout.org/articles/20-years-after-illegal-us-invasion-of-iraq-its-...

It had been 15 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq when, on March 19, 2018, the celebrated Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoon published a blistering op-ed in The New York Times. He took readers through his observations of the steady deterioration of Iraqi society since the war began, but the most scathing words came toward the end. “No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago,” Antoon wrote. “Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a ‘blunder,’ or even a ‘colossal mistake.’ It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large.” That the invasion was not just a moral catastrophe but an egregious war crime has been echoed by everyone from United Nations heads to human rights leaders. With the 20th anniversary of the invasion now approaching, the sanitizing of the war’s major culprits — or, at the very least, the soft forgetting of their crimes — continues. As the very top decision-makers faded into retirement, the next layer of war pushers, enablers and overseers — the top defense and national security officials and the celebrity generals — went on to profit immensely following their leadership of an illegal war, darting through the revolving door to snag coveted corporate board seats and prestigious university appointments. Many of them remain in these positions with defense industry giants, tech firms and Wall Street investors today.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and war from reliable major media sources.


Two Decades and $90 Billion US Dollars Later: Dissecting the Afghan Military’s Total Collapse
2023-03-27, MintPress News
Posted: 2023-04-10 13:08:57
https://www.mintpressnews.com/90-billion-us-dollars-sigar-report-afghanistan/...

In February, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published an extensive investigation into the spectacular collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF), which the U.S. spent two decades and $90 billion building. In common with previous SIGAR reports, it offers a remarkably uncompromising, no-punches-pulled assessment, exposing corruption, incompetence, lies, and delusion every step of the way. The Pentagon and State Department rejected SIGAR’s jurisdiction over them, declined to review interim drafts of the report, denied access to their staff, and “mostly” refused to answer requests for information. The Afghan government and military, their trainers and the Pentagon alike were all heavily incentivized to lie to one another, and political leaders in Washington, who were in turn motivated to mislead the public. As prior SIGAR reports also found, so much money and equipment were flowing into Afghanistan without any supervision whatsoever, and weaponry and other aid were misused, stolen or illegally sold off with ease by Afghans, U.S. personnel and Pentagon contractors. SIGAR ominously warns that a similar absence of accountability is evident in the “unprecedented” U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022. Despite U.S. leaders promising a keen eye is being kept on the weapons shipments, SIGAR’s report makes clear these same officials did not even know what was being sent to Afghanistan. Is the same true for Kiev?

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and war from reliable major media sources.


The Iraq war started the post-truth era. And America is to blame
2023-03-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2023-03-19 18:29:57
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/iraq-war-9-11-george-bu...

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. On 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden). In the two years following 9/11, Bush and his top officials publicly uttered at least 935 lies about the threat that Saddam posed to the United States, according to the Center for Public Integrity. In the run-up to war, Bush & associates flooded the airwaves with the talking point “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” so often that it began to sound like a jingle from a cheap law firm commercial. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Bush succeeded at the time because the public, primed to be afraid, was susceptible to his lies. The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies. The Iraq war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway ... told NBC’s Chuck Todd about “alternative facts” ... we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.


The U.S. Set Up the Afghan Army to Fail
2023-03-01, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-03-12 17:05:49
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/01/us-afghanistan-war-vietnam/

When the Afghan military and government collapsed in the summer of 2021, it was the worst failure of the U.S. defense establishment since the fall of Saigon. A new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, issued this week sheds critical light on what went so terribly wrong in America’s longest war — and how tens of thousands of ordinary Afghans were set up by their leaders and foreign partners to fight and die for a doomed cause. The American mission in Afghanistan had been to build an army that could stand on its own feet to resist the Taliban. In the end, however, the Afghan military was not only riddled with corruption, but also designed to function properly only so long as the foreign contractors and soldiers remained around to manage it. In effect, similar to its disastrous experience in South Vietnam, the United States had attempted to build an army suitable for a modern, industrialized country like itself, rather than one that would fit the realities of a poor and agrarian state. “The types of security forces that we were trying to build, which were relatively sophisticated and relied on advanced technology and electronics logistics systems, were just not within the general capacity of what Afghanistan would be able to use in sustainable ways,” said Jonathan Schroden, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Naval Analyses. “The real damning thing about what is in the report is that people had been telling the U.S. military this for years.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Hawkish Israel Is Pulling U.S. Into War With Iran
2023-03-01, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-03-12 17:03:35
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/01/us-israel-iran-war/

Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides appeared to endorse a plan for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with U.S. support. Nides’s words come after recent high-level military drills between Israel and the United States intended to showcase the ability to strike Iranian targets, as well as recent acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran believed to have been carried out by both countries. The Israeli escalations mean that the U.S. now faces the unsavory prospect of a major crisis flaring up in the Middle East at the exact moment when its bandwidth is already stretched thin because of a major war in Europe and its deteriorating relationship with China. “The decision to leave the JCPOA ... allowed Iran to restart its nuclear program and raise once again the question of what the U.S., Israel, or anyone else might do about it,” said Stephen Walt ... at the Harvard Kennedy School, referring to the nuclear deal by the initials of its former name, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The nuclear deal was intended to avoid the Middle East confrontation now visible on the horizon. Signed by President Barack Obama in 2015, the deal traded strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for its reintegration into the global economy. When President Donald Trump violated the deal ... this pragmatic arrangement went out the window — not only removing limits on Iran’s nuclear program, but also politically empowering hard-liners inside Iran who had balked at negotiating in the first place.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War
2023-02-24, Counterpunch
Posted: 2023-03-12 16:54:42
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/24/the-forgotten-terrorist-pretext-of-th...

Antiterrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War Two. The U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition. A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The Kennedy administration sought credibility by profoundly deceiving the American people and Congress regarding its Vietnam policy. In August 1963, South Vietnamese Special Forces “carried out midnight raids against Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. More than 1400 people, mostly monks were arrested and many of them were beaten,” according to the Pentagon Papers. The CIA was bankrolling these Special Forces, which were supposed to be used for covert operations against the Viet Cong or North Vietnam, not for religious repression. The Johnson administration exploited the terrorist label to sway Americans to support greater U.S. Involvement in Vietnam. In a special message to Congress on May 18, 1964 seeking additional fund for Vietnam, LBJ declared, “the Viet Cong guerrillas, under orders from their Communist masters in the North, have intensified terrorist actions against the peaceful people of South Vietnam. This increased terrorism requires increased response.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.


US has spent billions on Ukraine war aid. But is that money landing in corrupt pockets?
2023-02-19, USA Today
Posted: 2023-02-26 22:42:01
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/02/19/oversight-ukraine-rus...

With more than $100 billion in U.S. weaponry and financial aid flowing to Ukraine in less than a year — and more on the way to counter Russia's invasion — concerns about arms falling into terrorists' hands and dollars into corrupt officials' pockets are mounting. The special inspector general who has overseen aid to Afghanistan since 2012, and some House Republicans, warn of the need for closer oversight of the military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The scale of the effort is massive. The $113 billion appropriated by Congress in 2022 approaches the $146 billion spent in 20 years for military and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. The Pentagon spent $62.3 billion in 2022 on Ukraine for weapons, ammunition, training, logistics, supplies, salaries and stipends, according to the Joint Strategic Oversight Plan for Ukraine Response report. Inspectors general for several agencies released the report in January. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development spent $46 billion for activities ranging from border security to funds for basic government services. Other government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, spent another $5 billion. The report noted the difficulty U.S. agencies had accounting for the billions spent. The Pentagon, for example, was "unable to provide end-use monitoring in accordance with DoD policy" in Ukraine. "End-use monitoring" includes tracking serial numbers of weapons and ammunition to ensure they're used as intended.

Note: Watch a concise, 15-min overview that reveals the background of the US-Ukraine-Russia war beyond the official narrative portrayed by Western media. This includes the decades-long US campaign to overthrow governments across Europe via US-funded radical militia groups, as part of efforts to maintain control over other nations and the world's resources. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


The toxic legacy of the Ukraine war
2023-02-21, BBC News
Posted: 2023-02-26 22:39:58
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230221-the-toxic-legacy-of-the-ukraine-war

On 6 June, satellite images captured hundreds of craters made by artillery shells and a 40m-wide (131 ft) hole left by a bomb in fields around the village of Dovhenke, in eastern Ukraine. It is just one site left scarred by Russia's invasion of its neighbour. And as the war continues to wreak a devastating humanitarian toll on the people caught up in the fighting, the conflict is leaving a far less obvious, toxic legacy on the land itself. Amongst the pockmarked landscape and burned-out buildings of Dovhenke, heavy metals, fuel and chemical residues from ammunition and missiles have seeped into the soil. Although the full extent of soil contamination in Ukraine is not yet known, there are concerns that the conflict will cause long-lasting damage to the country's agricultural productivity. Ukraine is one of the world's most important producers and exporters of cereals and oilseeds, including corn, wheat, barley and sunflower oil. The widespread pollution caused by the conflict also threatens local wildlife and the health of communities, who are at risk of eating contaminated crops. The latest figures collated in January by the UNEP estimate that 618 industrial or critical infrastructure sites have been damaged or destroyed in the year since the war began. A special taskforce coordinated by the Ecological Inspectorate of Ukraine, is investigating environmental crimes such as attacks on water facilities, chemical factories and nuclear power plants. UNEP warns that this impact assessment could be "a colossal task."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


White House-Linked Venture Capital Fund Boasts China War Would Be Great For Business
2023-02-03, The Intercept
Posted: 2023-02-13 14:02:58
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/03/china-americas-frontier-fund/

A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund ... according to audio from a February 1 event. The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. “If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight,” [a] person who identified as “Tom” said. “So I don’t want to share the name, but the one example I gave was a critical component that ... the total market value is $200 million, but it is a critical component to a $50 billion market cap. That’s like a choke point, right. And so if it’s only produced in China, for example, and there’s a kinetic event in the Pacific, that would 10x overnight, like no question about it. There’s a couple of different things like that.” AFF is surely not the only venture fund that would see stratospheric returns throughout their portfolio in the case of a destabilizing global crisis, like a “kinetic event in the Pacific” — that is to say, war. Gilman Louie, AFF’s co-founder and current CEO, serves as chair of the National Intelligence University, advises Biden through his Intelligence Advisory Board, and was tapped for the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Louie previously ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. In other words, AFF stands to massively profit from a geopolitical crisis while its CEO advises the Biden administration on geopolitical crises. AFF was founded last year with support from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Note: While the detection of a Chinese spy balloon drums up significant fear and outrage over hostile foreign “threats,” an incisive article reveals how US surveillance of foreign countries is quite common, including their recent expansion of military bases in Southeast Asia to monitor and surveil China. Furthermore, many independent journalists are questioning the war-fueling narrative that China is a threat to national security. Watch an insightful analysis uncovering the deeper story of what’s behind the growing tensions between the US and China.


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