Voice of Russia
November 8, 2013
The NSA/US/NATO/Cyber Command are not simply passively spying – Rick Rozoff
John Robles
Recorded on November 5, 2013
AUDIO
The head of the US National Security Agency is also the head of the US/NATO Cyber Command, a tool of war designed to wage war in what the architects call the “Fourth Space”. This in effect means every time you get on-line you are potentially entering a war zone. The recent events surrounding the attempted military aggression against Syria that was stopped by Russia’s adept diplomatic efforts and the granting of asylum to Edward Snowden have shown that the days of US domination of the world are coming to an end. According to Voice of Russia regular contributor Rick Rozoff, the people of the world need to stand up and not just their leaders who have been “publically humiliated in front of their own people by being maltreated in the manner they have by their Yankee NATO allies.”
Hello! This is John Robles, I’m speaking with Rick Rozoff – the owner and manager of the stop NATO international mailing list and website.
Robles: Hello Sir.
Hello John. It is good to be back on your show. Thanks for the invitation.
Robles: And it is a pleasure to be speaking with you again. After US President Barack Obama’s loss in Syria being not allowed to attack another country have you seen any changes with NATO strategy? And do you think Obama is going to try to use proxies instead of the US military more so in the future?
Rozoff: I think the second question is perhaps easier to answer than the first, but I’ll attempt the first, first.
As we know, starting yesterday the US and NATO have launched major war games in the Baltic Sea Area to be conducted in Poland and Latvia called “Steadfast Jazz”. And the latest iteration this being the year it is, “Steadfast Jazz 2013″.
This includes participation of 6,000 troops, not only infantry but air and naval components, with the express intent to activate and put on a war footing, if you will, the NATO Response Force, which was something envisioned several years ago to be a global rapid reaction force NATO could use to intervene essentially anywhere around the world.
It was actually inaugurated, in its initial manifestation in 2006 with a series of war games off the west coast of Africa. But currently now it is in the Baltic Sea region in two countries that have borders with Russia; Poland, in this case Kaliningrad and Latvia similarly. So that what you are seeing is saber rattling right on the Russian border.
Were the situation to be reversed and Russia and its military allies were exercising along the Rio Grande, or the Saint Lawrence Seaway, I’m sure the US would have something to say about it.
So in that sense, though this was scheduled long in advance of the most recent developments in Syria, it indicates that the US still intends to use NATO as a military Trojan horse in northeastern Europe, amongst other places and ultimately globally.
On the second score: by the way you are correct in characterizing the developments in and around Syria, due to and almost entirely to adept principled Russian diplomatic intervention over the last few weeks, as having put a spoke in the wheel of the war plans of President Obama and the United States and its NATO allies.
So that, I think to segue into the second part of your question, the US is left with no other alternative, I suppose, than to use proxy forces.
And we have to recall that Secretary of State John Kerry was recently in Saudi Arabia (and he just left there) where he clearly is conspiring with that country and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council to wage perhaps more covert military activities against the government in Syria.
Robles: Recently, there was an incursion by Israel. Can you tell our listeners about that? Do you have any details on that?
Rozoff: Yes, it bombed the coastal city of Latakia exactly where, according an Associated Press report several days ago, Russian anti-aircraft missiles, air defense missiles, have been moved. And the report, according to the US news service, was that Israel intentionally targeted Russian-made and Russian-provided air defense missiles which had been supplied to Syria, under the rubric, or under the pretense actually, that such missiles were to be moved into Lebanon and given to Hezbollah.
That seems pretty far-fetched, if not beyond the realm of possibilities. Syria certainly needs them inside the country for exactly this sort of defense against Israeli attacks.
So, what we see then is not only an act of international aggression, an action of aggression against a neighbor, by Israel against Syria, but as the target of that attack were Russian air defense missiles, it is also an act of: disrespect for, if not, hostility towards; Russia.
Robles: Why would Hezbollah need air defense missiles?
Rozoff: They indeed need them, but I think in the more immediate sense Syria is not able to part with any, given the fact it is still is essentially under siege, as we’ve been talking about, that is from neighbors like Turkey or Jordan.
By the way, Turkey and Jordan recently concluded a joint military exercise, the intent of which and the target of which I don’t think we need to spell out, is clearly Syria.
And Syria would need all the air defense capabilities that it has for its own defense. And it is certainly not in a position currently to be sharing them with anyone else, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Robles: Being in the United States, our listeners know you are based in Chicago. Today marked a holiday that is important for the English; Guy Fawkes Day. There were massive demonstrations planned by supporters of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Have you seen any protests like that in Chicago? Can you comment on that?
Rozoff: I think what is significant about this is that this is indicative of an international outrage over historically unprecedented acts, not only of surveillance/spying, by the United States, particularly by the National Security Agency (NSA), but also that what we are seeing (and I think that this is a significant fact that has eluded many commentators on the issue) is that the individual who heads up the National Security Agency is a four-star general named Keith Alexander, and that with the activation of full operational capability of the first Pentagon, US Defense Department global command that is not geographically specific, and I’m talking about Cyber Command, which achieved full operational capability in May of 2010, that the intent from the very beginning was to use Cyber Command not – every military apparatus or program, or command ostensibly is for defensive purposes – but sensible people realize that there is an offensive component to it, and particularly when you are dealing with the self-proclaimed world’s sole military superpower (those are Obama’s words to describe the United States).
And as many of us warned three and a half years ago that the US was preparing the Cyber Command to begin a process of international cyber warfare, warfare in the fourth space, as it was described by US military officials. And the fact that Keith Alexander simultaneously heads up the National Security Agency and is the first commander of Cyber Command, I think, is reason to pause for a moment and realize that the United States is not simply passively gathering information by spying on the private phone conversations of the chancellor of Germany or, according to one report, spying on the conclave of Catholic cardinals as they selected the most recent Pope, and who knows what else they are prying into.
But they are also manipulating information, passing on falsified reports, engaging not only in espionage but in sabotage. And who knows the full extent of this?
But the fact that Russia took the principled path of granting asylum to Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee, who first blew the whistle on what was happening, only to have subsequently this become an international scandal and international affair, international incident rather, where everywhere from Brazil to Germany to around the world people are incensed by the gross and in essence the criminal intrusion of US spy agencies into every nook and cranny, every aspect of their lives.
And this should have been to a degree anticipated by the fact that the US openly acknowledged it was prepared to conduct not only defensive but offensive cyber warfare operations with the introduction and activation of the US Cyber Command three and a half years ago.
So, these are all related issues. But I don’t think there is any way of overestimating the significance of what is going on right now, because this represents, as you indicated vis-à-vis Syria, the fact that the US has suffered two black eyes in short succession, and both I think are going to go down as historically significant.
The first is that for the first time perhaps the US truly wanted to wage military aggression against a comparatively small country, of maybe 25 million people, and Russian intervention and world public opinion, I think, interfered with that and prevented the US from doing it.
And then, almost simultaneously, and again we have Russia playing on the side of the angels in both cases, preventing war against Syria and then granting asylum to this heroic young man Edward Snowden, who is going to go down in history books as a person who first had the courage to notify the world about the gross abuses of the US National Security Agency, and we’ve seen that everything subsequent to that not only confirms the alarm that he had sounded, but on a level that nobody could have anticipated.
Robles: They actually spied on the Vatican conclave when they were picking the new Pope?
Rozoff: Yes, there were reports to that effect, and to be perfectly frank with you, if the US has capacity (and it does), I would be a surprised if it didn’t.
I suspect it is not the first time the US has battled with Vatican policies, both with the Curia and with conclaves that have selected the pontiffs.
I personally have my suspicions about their role in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski was the National Security Advisor and the first non-Italian pope, his countryman, subsequently John Paul II, was selected as pope. That could be a coincidence, but it is an astonishing one.
Robles: A lot of questions just popped up. You mentioned Brzezinski, would you like to comment on a statement he made, I guess it was about 2.5-3 weeks ago? He said that American hegemony worldwide is no longer possible. The world, I believe he said, was a “complicated place”.
Rozoff: Yes, indeed. You know, it is amazing, a die-hard fanatical ideologue and Russophobe like Brzezinski would finally have to deal with subtlety and complexity and to realize that the world was not the US’ oyster as I’m firmly convinced is a notion he has subscribed to for all of his professional life.
In fact, things have got beyond his ability to even envision a way where the US could continue to unilaterally manipulate, if not ultimately dominate the world.
But we have to recall that in his book of the late 1990s – The Grand Chessboard – he actually identified the United States as being the first, and to date only uncontested world superpower and he offered prescriptions for sustaining that status for decades into the future and the chief component of which is maintaining control of what he referred to as the Eurasian Balkans, which would be the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia region. And basically this is Halford Mackinder’s concept of geopolitics; the world island, and whoever controls Eurasia ultimately controls the world, and Brzezinski was simply parroting that basic theme.
What has subsequently occurred, and you can expect from Brzezinski what you would anticipate with somebody who is basically unprincipled and not a little vain, that he’ll blame subsequent administrations for not following his blueprint and that’s why the US lost control of the world.
He’s already made statements of this effect going back to the George W. Bush administration for not handling things as deftly as he would have recommended personally.
So, has the US lost its previously uncontested control of the world? Not yet.
The US still controls Internet portals. The US still has overwhelming military superiority and so forth, but I think what we are seeing, to kind of jump back a little bit, both with the publically humiliating revelations about the National Security Agency and the utter contempt the US must have for the rest of the world and its so-called allies to be monitoring them down to the finest particular without notification and so forth, and the historic (again, I would underline), the historic setback the US suffered in Syria as you indicated at the beginning of this program; both I think are indications that we may be seeing the genuine emergence of a multi-polar world order, a new balance of power in the world; one that is no longer based on the Cold War or is bilateral, but one that truly can be democratic.
The slogan required in the post-Cold War period is democracy both within and between nations, I think is a concept that needs to be revived and that we are may be seeing the harbingers of the new world emerging around these two issues we are talking about. That finally, no ally or subservient vassal; the term is Brzezinski’s, incidentally; “tributaries and vassals”, this is how he described other nations around the world paying tribute to the US, who aren’t direct allies…
Robles: That sounds like something out of Mein Kampf or something.
Rozoff: Yes, I mean it is almost that bad. It truly is. One thinks of the slogan of Germany at that time, right? Heute Deutschland und Morgen die ganze Welt – today Germany and tomorrow the whole world.
I think the kind of imperial hubris you see in the United States with initially the weakening of the Soviet Union under the Mikhail Gorbachev presidency in the late 1980s and then with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, those in the US who saw themselves as global policemen and global empire-builders saw their moment and they seized it, and they have in fact not only run but ruined a good deal of the world in the interim, but those days appear to be coming to an end. And what we all have to hope for is the fact that it happens peaceably and happens with the increased involvement of the populace of the respective countries, rather than depending on the Angela Merkels or Francois Hollandes and others to continue to play ball with the United States even when they are publically humiliated in front of their own people by being maltreated in the manner they have by their Yankee NATO allies.
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