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How the US government is thwarting peace efforts in Ukraine and Israel

Published

1 month ago

12 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh warns of political repercussions for the Biden administration’s handling of the international crises in Europe and the Middle East.

To get to the news these days, you have to look beyond the facade of mainstream media. No major outlet in the West has reported the findings of Seymour Hersh, made in a post on Substack on March 21, which claim that the United States government is determined to prevent peace in Ukraine.

Citing an anonymous “American official,” Hersh wrote “officials of the Biden administration, working with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, continue to rebuff any chances of significant progress in peace talks.” Referring to his earlier report, which documented ongoing talks between the U.S. and Russia, Hersh says his source is “kept abreast” of this dialogue concerning a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine. According to the unnamed mole, peace was within reach, and the U.S. moved to prevent it with a threat to turn off the money supply to Ukraine.

We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin’s re-election and Zelensky’s military degradation.

The U.S. leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum – ‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds.’

This is the amount that Ukraine receives now, aside from military aid, to support its government. Without it, Zelensky’s regime would collapse. This was an ultimatum – but why did the U.S. issue it? The source explained:

Biden has staked his presidency on meeting the Russian threat to NATO and outsmarting the monster, and he will not change course now, under any circumstances, and the end is inevitable.

Does this end justify the means? The source gave a sobering assessment of the Biden administration’s willingness to risk a war with Russia, to save face at home: “There is no road to victory for Ukraine, and it will end with Putin as an historical icon in Russia, having recovered a national jewel [Kharkov] from the West.”

What Russia has gained, it is going to keep, said the source. “The reality,” he said, is “that the lands in dispute” – four oblasts formerly in Ukraine’s control and Crimea – “from north to south and east to west all are Russia’s. So stop talking about it and make a deal.”

This may be news to many “news-believers” in the subject nations of the U.S. Empire, but it is well known in government circles. Aside from Hersh’s report, a grim assessment that “Ukraine could fall very quickly” is reported to have fueled French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent outbursts, which saw him threaten to send French troops to fight Russia.

Panic in the EU

Macron is reported by Politico to have made that remark at a dinner in Paris on Tuesday, March 19. It followed leaks from French intelligence which said Ukraine could not win the war, was running out of men to conscript, and that the French army were “majorettes” compared to that of the Russians.

Germany and other EU nations were quick to distance themselves from Macron’s rhetoric, fearing the direct entry of NATO troops into Ukraine could lead to a nuclear war.

Added to this picture, again largely excluded from the news, is the obvious fact that the sanctions intended to weaken Russia have backfired. In reality, the one beyond the official narrative, the actions of the Biden administration have been a catastrophic failure.

“This is the world the Biden administration fostered,” says Hersh, quoting an Economist report that shows how Russia has not only weathered the storm of sanctions, but has in the process emerged a champion of a strengthening system, parallel to that controlled by the U.S.

According to The Economist on March 14:

Russia’s economy has been re-engineered. Oil exports bypass sanctions and are shipped to the global south. Western brands from BMW to H&M have been replaced with Chinese and local substitutes… Dissent at home has been strangled.

This last line could apply equally to the situation in the West, whose propaganda apparatus overmatches anything seen in the Soviet Union. Our “hypernormalization” – the state of unreality created by state propaganda – differs in one other important regard. Toward the end, most of the people in the Soviet Union knew their government was lying to them.

Biden, Trump, and the end times

Hersh claims that the predicament created by the Biden administration will likely see its undoing in the next election.

“Its refusal to seek a middle ground in the Ukraine war, along with its inability to check Israel’s continued assault in Gaza, will become a political liability in Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump, who warns of unending violence if he loses the presidential election in November.”

Trump’s own remarks on Israel have caused much concern amongst those convinced of his pledge to “end the forever wars” – a vow he repeated on the campaign trail in January.

Yet his ambiguity on Israel has seen him criticized by Jewish groups, as PBS reported on March 22.

Trump’s stance on both Israel and Ukraine – that neither war would have happened had he been president – is shaded by moves to appease the over 30 million Christian Zionists who PBS says lie at the core of his support. PBS said of Trump’s previous tenure:

Trump pursued policies that were popular among American Christian Zionists and Israeli religious-nationalists, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and supporting Jewish settlements in occupied territories.

PBS also noted his family connections to the Jewish community:

His daughter Ivanka is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, and her husband and their children are Jewish. The couple worked as high-profile surrogates to the Jewish community during Trump’s administration.

Finally, the report touched on the evangelical Zionists:

Trump’s core supporters include white evangelicals, many of whom believe the modern state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy. Prominent evangelicals who support Zionism have also been criticized for inflammatory statements about Jewish people.

This huge constituency includes many Christian Zionists who support the Armageddonist notion of ushering in the “Jewish Messiah” – through the sacrifice of red heifers and the rebuilding of the Jewish Third Temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

This process is underway, with five red heifers arriving in Israel in September 2022, expedited by U.S. Zionist Christian group Boneh Israel, and a large altar was constructed in Jerusalem to perform the diabolical ritual to usher in “the End Times.”

CBS News reported from the site on March 5, 2024.

 

Beyond the end?

With the sitting president mired in a disaster of his own making, and his successor with ties to a group dedicated to sparking Armageddon, the story beyond the mainstream media is all about the end times. The end of the Biden administration, the end of the war in Ukraine, and perhaps the end of the world if the factions of insanity succeed in provoking an escalating war with Russia or in the Middle East.

Hersh’s article ends with what could read as the epitaph for the one-term wonder Joe Biden.

The best that Biden has come up with is continued, if so far empty, talk about a ceasefire in Gaza, and a commitment that no American soldiers will be sent to the front in Ukraine.

The president also promises that the United States will keep on paying for Ukrainians to fight and die in a proxy war that could be ended.

Added to this is the fact that the Biden administration continues to supply Israel with military hardware, without which it could not continue its war. As retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brik said of the U.S. in November, “The minute they turn off the tap you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands we can’t fight this war without the United States.”

Brik has returned with an assessment of Israel’s war which dovetails with that provided by Hersh on Ukraine. It has been a defeat, both in military and in diplomatic terms.

“We have already lost the war with Hamas, and we are also losing our allies in the world at a dizzying pace Brik said to Israeli news outlet Ma’ariv, on March 24.

The realization is growing that the current model of U.S. power is determined to prevent the outbreak of peace. With little promise in the White House but more of the same, the hope is that in November, this will change. Yet, here are forces at work which would prefer that the end times come for us all.

What is needed is a clear statement on the future of Ukraine, of relations with Russia and the state of Israel from a man who once promised he could stop it all. We have a leaderless U.S. in the thrall of an election cycle. Instead of resignation to the end times, we need to hear some serious talk about what comes next. Our future depends upon an alternative to business as usual.

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Biden expands government’s power to spy on Americans without a warrant

Published on May 9, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Legal experts have pointed out that under an updated version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers could all be forced to surveil Americans.

U.S. President Joe Biden has quietly signed legislation reauthorizing and expanding the government’s ability to spy on American communications without a warrant.

On April 20, Biden signed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows the government to compel a broader range of businesses to collect the communications of U.S. citizens when they are in contact with foreigners, according to legal experts.

The newly passed, updated version of Section 702 accomplishes this by expanding the definition of “electronic communication service providers” who can receive FISA directives to tap communications by dropping the qualifier “communication” from electronic service providers. The new amendment, therefore, makes access merely to equipment on which communications are carried or stored enough to legally surveil Americans.

While the amendment lists types of businesses that cannot be considered Electronic Communication Service Providers (ECSPs), including public accommodations, dwellings, and restaurants, ZwillGenBlog points out that the law still allows the government to “compel the assistance of a wide range of additional entities and persons in conducting surveillance under FISA 702.”

“The breadth of the new definition is obvious from the fact that the drafters felt compelled to exclude such ordinary places such as senior centers, hotels, and coffee shops. But for these specific exceptions, the scope of the new definition would cover them — and scores of businesses that did not receive a specific exemption remain within its purview,” ZwillGenBlog explained.

The legal experts noted that among the entities that could be forced to surveil Americans under the amendment are “the owners and operators of facilities that house equipment used to store or carry data, such as data centers and buildings owned by commercial landlords,” as well as others who can access such equipment, including “delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers.”

ZwillGenBlog also pointed out that “any U.S. business could have its communications” — if involving a foreigner — “tapped by a landlord with access to office wiring, or the data centers where their computers reside.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois had tried and failed to pass an amendment that would require government officials to obtain a warrant before spying on American communications, according to the Associated Press (AP).

“If the government wants to spy on my private communications or the private communications of any American, they should be required to get approval from a judge, just as our Founding Fathers intended in writing the Constitution,” Durbin said.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed in 2008, the National Security Agency (NSA), operating inside the United States, is authorized to collect communications of foreigners overseas for foreign intelligence purposes without a warrant “because courts have held that foreigners have no Fourth Amendment rights,” according to Elizabeth Goitein.

“Although ostensibly targeted at foreigners, Section 702 surveillance inevitably sweeps in massive amounts of Americans’ communications,” Goitein further noted.

“Recognizing the impact on Americans’ privacy, Congress required the NSA to ‘minimize’ the sharing, retention, and use of this ‘incidentally’ collected U.S. person data. But the government and the FISA Court have embraced an interpretation of ‘minimize’ that is remarkably … maximal.”

“The NSA shares raw data with multiple other agencies — including the FBI and the CIA — and all of them retain the data for a functional minimum of five years. Moreover, the FBI routinely combs through it looking for Americans’ communications to use in purely domestic cases, even in situations where the FBI lacks a factual predicate to open a full investigation,” Goitein continued.

There are other means by which the U.S. government can spy on Americans. In 2022, Biden issued an executive order (EO) that allows the government to surveil Americans for broadly defined reasons including understanding “public health risks,” “political instability,” and the “threat” of climate change.

The EO was ostensibly written to “enhanc[e] safeguards” for “United States Signals Intelligence Activities,” which is intelligence gathering by the interception of signals, including communications, such as through cell phones, or those not used in communication. An accompanying fact sheet explains that the EO is meant to help “implement the U.S. commitments under the European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-U.S. DPF)” in an effort to “restore trust and stability” to transatlantic data flows.

Alongside permitting spying for the purposes of sizing up the capabilities of foreign entities, the EO permits signals intelligence collection for “understanding or assessing transnational threats that impact global security, including climate and other ecological change, public health risks, humanitarian threats, political instability, and geographic rivalry.”

The document’s lack of elaboration on such so-called “transnational threats” raises the question of the true scope of activity now officially subject to spying by the U.S. government, which is potentially massive.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Biden Agencies Have Resumed Censorship Collaboration With Big Tech, Dem Senate Intel Chair Says

Published on May 8, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JASON COHEN

 

Agencies in President Joe Biden’s administration have resumed their perceived disinformation censorship collaboration with social media companies, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner told reporters at a recent security conference, Nextgov/FCW reported.

The administration stopped “misinformation” censorship collaboration with social media platforms after a July Missouri v. Biden ruling to prevent federal agencies from coordinating with social media companies, but recently restarted this work, Warner # reporters, according to Nextgov. He said the cooperation resumed as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, now called Murthy v. Missouri, in March, where multiple justices indicated they supported the Biden administration’s viewpoint that it has the right to work with platforms to combat what it believes is harmful content.

“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” Warner said, according to Nextgoc. He also reportedly called on the Biden administration to take strong action against any foreign countries that try to interfere in the 2024 election.

The agencies include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to NextGov.

“If the bad guy started to launch AI-driven tools that would threaten election officials in key communities, that clearly falls into the foreign interference category,” he added.

A district court judge issued an injunction in July preventing certain officials in agencies from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the FBI from communicating with social media platforms to censor speech, characterizing the government conduct exposed by the plaintiffs in the case as arguably “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, expressed concern during March oral arguments about restricting the government’s ability to persuade companies to take action when necessary, such as when terrorists disseminate speech on a platform.

The justices also questioned whether the plaintiffs could prove their platforms censored their speech as a direct result of the government.

Facebook executives believed they were engaged in a “knife fight” with Biden’s White House on COVID-19 censorship, according to a recent House Judiciary Committee report. Biden accused the platform of “killing people” in July 2021 for not censoring so-called COVID-19 misinformation, and unearthed WhatsApp messages between Facebook executives revealed that they were unhappy about the president’s remarks.

Warner, the White House and the FBI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. CISA declined to comment, but notified the DCNF about an Election Security hearing in the coming weeks with the agency’s Director, Jen Easterly.

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