March 31, 2017
On January 30 NBC News reported
that “On a snowy Polish plain dominated by Russian forces for decades, American
tanks and troops sent a message to Moscow and demonstrated the firepower of the
NATO alliance. Amid concerns that President
Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO is wavering, the tanks fired salvos that
declared the 28-nation alliance a vital deterrent in a dangerous new world.”
One intriguing aspect of this
slanted account are the phrases “dominated by Russian forces for decades” and
“vital deterrent” which are used by NBC to imply that Russia yearns, for some
unspecified reason, to invade Poland. As is common in the Western media there
is no justification or evidence to substantiate the suggestion that Russia is
hell-bent on domination, and the fact that US troops are far from home,
operating along the Russian border, is regarded as normal behaviour on the part
of the world’s “indispensable nation.”
Then Reuters recorded
that “Beginning in February, US military units will spread out across Poland,
the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Germany for training, exercises and
maintenance. The Army is also sending its 10th Combat Aviation Brigade with
about 50 Black Hawk and 10 CH-47 Chinook helicopters and 1,800 personnel, as
well as a separate aviation battalion with 400 troops and 24 Apache
helicopters.”
As the US-NATO military
alliance continues its deployments along Russia’s borders, including the US-UK
supported Joint Viking 2017 exercise in Norway that began on March 1 and the deployment
of more US troops in Poland “from the start of April, as the alliance
sets up a new force in response to Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea,” the
campaign by the US and British governments against alleged “Russian
Aggression” continues to increase in volume and intensity, aided by an
ever-compliant media.
During his visit to Washington
on March 6-7 Ukraine’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin met with Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson and Senator Marco Rubio of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations and received assurances of US
support in “confronting Russian aggression” while in Britain it was announced
that its foreign minister, Boris Johnson, the “mop-haired
buffoon” was about to visit Russia in to tell it to “keep its nose” out of
western affairs. Mr Johnson declared that Russia “was up to all sorts of no
good” and “engaged in cyber-warfare.”
The splendid irony of the
Johnson allegation about cyber warfare is that it came just before the
revelation that Britain’s intelligence agencies were deeply involved with those
of the United States in cyber-chicanery on a massive scale. WikiLeaks once
again showed the depths of deceit and humbug to which the West’s great
democracies submerge themselves, and revealed
that leaked files “describe CIA
plans and descriptions of malware and other tools that could be used to hack into
some of the world’s most popular technology platforms. The documents showed
that the developers aimed to be able to inject these tools into targeted
computers without the owners’ awareness . . . the documents show broad
exchanges of tools and information between the CIA, the National Security Agency and
other US federal intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence services of
close allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.”
ABC News then announced,
without a shred of proof, that “Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks,
appears to have a strong relationship with Russia” but could not disguise the report
by CNN that the documents disclosed that “to hide its operations, the CIA
routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were
Russian.”
There has been no comment on
the WikiLeaks revelations by such as US Senator Amy Klobuchar who declared
in January that “Russia used cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine
our democracy. We are not alone. Russia has a pattern of waging cyberattacks
and military invasions against democracies across the world.” She was
echoed by Senator Ben Sasse who declared that increased US sanctions would
“upend Putin’s calculus and defend America from Russian cyberattacks and
political meddling.”
Of course it would be
impossible for the Senators to revise their rabid hatred of Russia and overcome
their dismal pride to acknowledge that on March 1 the US National
Reconnaissance Office launched
a spy satellite carried
by an Atlas V rocket that was powered by a Russian RD-180 engine. In an
astonishing example of petty-minded obfuscation, the 1,500-word official report
on the launching mentioned RD-180 three times — but failed to state its country
of manufacture. The mainstream media followed suit.
There was to be another Atlas
V launch
in March, carrying supplies to the International Space Station, but it was delayed
by “a hydraulic issue that was uncovered on ground support equipment
required for launch.” Had it been deferred because of malfunction of the
Russian engine that powers it, there would have been gloating headlines.
Reaction by the US government
to the WikiLeaks disclosures has been to denounce
them because they supposedly “not only jeopardise US personnel and operations,
but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.”
Predictably, Senator Sasse tweeted
that “Julian Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange
jumpsuit. He’s an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin.”
There should be no surprise
about the activities of US and British intelligence agencies, because they
already have a proven
record of spying on UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, French Presidents
Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande and Brazilian President
Dilma Rousseff, to name but a few world leaders subjected to the indignity of
greasy little eavesdroppers sniggering at their private conversations.
In June 2013 it was revealed that the
United States of America had been spying on European Union computer networks in
the EU offices in Washington and New York. According to Germany’s Der Spiegel a
document of September 2010 “explicitly named the Union’s representation at the
UN as a ‘location target’.” Der Spiegel discovered
that “the NSA had also conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a
building in Brussels where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council
were located.” Together with their British colleagues, the techno-dweebs
of Government Communications Headquarters, the US agencies have been having a
ball — but have been unable to prove that Russia “used
cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine our democracy.”
The faithful CIA mouthpiece,
the New York Times, stated
in December that “American spy and law enforcement agencies were united in the
belief, in the weeks before the presidential election, that the Russian
government had deployed computer hackers to sow chaos during the campaign.”
Not only this, but “CIA officials presented lawmakers with a
stunning new judgment that upended the debate: Russia, they said, had
intervened with the primary aim of helping make Donald J Trump president.”
But there is no evidence
whatever that there was election-time hacking by Russia, and now there is proof
that “to hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled
its hackers to appear as if they were Russian.”
Although none of the
assertions that Russia has been conducting a cyber war against America can be
substantiated, Washington’s anti-Russia propaganda campaign will continue for
the foreseeable future, while President Trump’s initial intentions to enter
into dialogue with his counterpart in Moscow wither away to nothing. Even if he
does resurrect the sensible policy he seemed to endorse, his acolytes in
Washington will do their best to maintain confrontation by spreading more
allegations of Russian “aggression” and “cyberattacks.” The anti-Russia
campaign is gathering force, and it is not difficult to put a finger on why
such a counter-productive crusade appeals to so many in the West.
The US arms and intelligence
industries are the main beneficiaries of confrontation with Russia, closely
followed by the hierarchy of the defunct US-NATO military alliance who have
been desperately seeking justification for its existence for many years.
For so long as the military-industrial
complex holds sway in Washington, there will continue to be sabre-rattling
and mindless military posturing.
But the International Space
Station will continue to be resupplied by rockets powered by Russian engines.
Brian Cloughley writes about
foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure,
France.
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