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top of the heap to third world status in one generation

Gry

Gry

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Good for you, had family that used to drive one for a guard unit in West Va.
Had similar offers over the years. Their response was the same as yours.
Was a high end troop transport by BAE that was being offered as a consolation of sorts for
those who had asked for C130 to transport falcon hunting parties.
Of course that was very different era with respect to how we used to deal with the oil rich.
I think we should have cut them off from everything the day that man was cut up while still alive.
No more refueling, parts, intel etc. Nada squat.
We are in the process of turning over strategic proprietary manufacturing abilities of a sort
that we never ever would have let go before, and we should not be doing so now.
 
armedoldhippy

armedoldhippy

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Gry said:
Of course that was very different era with respect to how we used to deal with the oil rich.
I think we should have cut them off from everything the day that man was cut up while still aliv
Click to expand...
i don't know that you could justify upsetting most of the worlds applecart over the death of one man, regardless of how horrific it was...but i agree that our response was nowhere near what it should have been. considering WHERE it took place, i wonder if it was not tacitly sanctioned by the Turks too...they too are now considered an Islamic nation after decades of pointedly being a secular state. the religious folks in parts of this world don't play by the same rules RE govt treatment of "enemies" as we do here...not that we are without stain.
 
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Gry

Gry

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When one looks at the totality of the relationship, We have a monster of our own making.​
We have gone to war over their behalf more than once. Nixon gifted them Aramco.
The agency has had a back door relationship with them that is longstanding and rotten
as hell. Was used to install Reagan in what should have been Carter's second term.
Post 9/11, Aramco should have been reclaimed.
Everything about our relationship with the "House of Saud" has been shrouded in
both secrecy and corruption right from the very inception. The American people
have provided them with unimaginable wealth, which they used to perpetuate
atrocities, while treating us with contempt and distain ... knowing that they
could do so with impunity as they had that backdoor arrangement with the
agency to fall back on.
 
Gry

Gry

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A review of
“Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire,” . by Jonathan M. Katz


Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, twice a recipient of the Medal of Honor, became a celebrity during his career. When Butler was 45, he could see a fictional version of himself in the hit movie “Tell It to the Marines,” where he was played by Lon Chaney. A congressman’s son and a Quaker, Butler joined the Marines as a teenager, during the 1898 war with Spain. He served in Cuba, the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Panama, Haiti, Mexico and Nicaragua, among other war zones; his résumé gives an outline of U.S. colonialism on the march.

And then, in 1931, the secretary of the Navy ordered Butler court-martialed for saying publicly that Benito Mussolini’s Italy was a “mad dog nation” and illustrating the point with a story about the fascist’s driver running over a child in the road. As the vehicle drove on, Mussolini advised a fellow passenger, “Never look back in life.” The administration of Herbert Hoover wanted to punish Butler for causing a diplomatic incident, but as Jonathan M. Katz writes, officials had a problem: It turned out Butler’s story was “substantially true.”
 
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Gry

Gry

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www.businessinsider.com

Zelenskyy says Russia wired a hydroelectric dam to explode and flood 80 towns in region it may have to abandon

Zelenskyy said that Russia set mines at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant on the massive Dnipro river.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Institute for the Study of War

Russian authorities are likely setting information conditions to justify planned Russian retreats and significant territorial losses in Kherson Oblast. Commander of Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine Army General Sergey Surovikin reported during an
understandingwar.org understandingwar.org
 
Gry

Gry

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Brainwashed for War With Russia​

by Ray McGovern Posted onSeptember 22, 2022

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. "exceptionalism," find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, "Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk."

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to "explain," for example, why the Russians are "almost genetically driven" to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists "Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: "Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out."

Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues – Professor John Mearsheimer – got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault."

Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam." (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:


"Wooden-headedness…plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts."
Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing

Thanks to US media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:

  • 14 years ago, then US Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The Subject Line of Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: "Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines."
    Thus, Washington policymakers were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding membership for Ukraine in NATO. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2008, a NATO summit in Bucharest asserted: "NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO."
  • 8 years ago, on Feb. 22, 2014, the US orchestrated a coup in Kiev – rightly labeled "the most blatant coup in history’, insofar as it had already been blown on YouTube 18 days prior. Kiev’s spanking new leaders, handpicked and identified by name by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the YouTube-publicized conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, immediately called for Ukraine to join NATO.
  • 6 years ago, in June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Western reporters of his concern that so-called antiballistic missiles sites in Romania and Poland could be converted overnight to accommodate offensive strike missiles posing a threat to Russia’s own nuclear forces. (See this unique video, with English subtitles, from minute 37 to 49.) There is a direct analogy with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Moscow put offensive strike missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy reacted strongly to the existential threat that posed to the US.
  • On December 21, 2021, President Putin told his most senior military leaders:
    "It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security." [Emphasis added.]
  • On December 30, 2021, Biden and Putin talked by phone at Putin’s urgent request. The Kremlin readout stated:
  • "Joseph Biden emphasized that Russia and the US shared a special responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe and the whole world and that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine." Yuri Ushakov, a top foreign policy adviser to Putin, pointed out that this was also one of the goals Moscow hoped to achieve with its proposals for security guarantees to the US and NATO. [Emphasis added.]
  • On February 12, 2022, Ushakov briefed the media on the telephone conversation between Putin and Biden earlier that day.
  • "The call was as a follow-up of sorts to the … December 30 telephone conversation. … The Russian President made clear that President Biden’s proposals did not really address the central, key elements of Russia’s initiatives either with regards to non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems on Ukrainian territory … To these items, we have received no meaningful response." [Emphasis added.]
  • On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Unprovoked?

The US insists that Russia’s invasion was "unprovoked". Establishment media dutifully regurgitate that line, while keeping Americans in the dark about such facts (not opinion) as are outlined (and sourced) above. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

The late Fred Hiatt, who was op-ed editor at the Washington Post, is a case in point. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review [CJR, March/April 2004] he commented:


"If you look at the editorials we wrote running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction." "If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it."

(My journalism mentor, Robert Parry, had this to say about Hiatt’s remark. "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.")

It’s worse now. Russia is not Iraq. And Putin has been so demonized over the past six years that people are inclined to believe the likes of James Clapper to the effect there’s something genetic that makes Russians evil. "Russia-gate" was a big con (and, now, demonstrably so), but Americans don’t know that either. The consequences of prolonged demonization are extremely dangerous – and will become even more so in the next several weeks as politicians vie to be the strongest in opposing and countering Russia’s "unprovoked" attack on Ukraine.


THE Problem

Humorist Will Rogers had it right:


"The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem."

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

original.antiwar.com

Brainwashed for War With Russia - Antiwar.com Original

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security - Ray McGovern for Antiwar.com Original
original.antiwar.com original.antiwar.com
 
Gry

Gry

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Veteran
Gry

Gry

Well-known member
Veteran
"He looked far ahead and he wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps it is this that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy."

— Mikhail Gorbachev, former Premier of the Soviet Union.
 
armedoldhippy

armedoldhippy

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Gry said:
"He looked far ahead and he wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps it is this that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy."

— Mikhail Gorbachev, former Premier of the Soviet Union.
Click to expand...
being too far ahead of your time, or too smart / inquisitive, can shorten a man's lifespan dramatically. "never break another mans ricebowl..." bound to be someone here knows where that quote came from.
 
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