Security

The Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre died almost 200 years ago, having expressed many opinions, including the observation that “Every country has the government it deserves.” He was an inflexible monarchist who approved of the Spanish Inquisition so his philosophy was not on the lines of Plato, John Locke or Immanuel Kant, and one can question his aphorism about deserved government if only because no country deserved or will ever deserve a political leader as disastrous as George W Bush.

Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own politicians are. Its passing into law – signed by President Trump this week – of sanctions to halt the Nord Stream-2 and Turk Stream gas supply projects is a naked imperialist move to bludgeon the European energy market for its own economic advantage.

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, American Professor Karl Grossman warns that the Trump administration is recklessly pushing ahead with long-held US plans to militarize outer space. This is in spite of a UN treaty banning such a development.



The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.

A devastating investigative report was published in the Washington Post on December 9th.

The Washington Post, through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has published a long investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400 testimonies from American diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that reports about Afghanistan were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the ground.

The CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme, through which individuals allegedly suspected of terrorism would be kidnapped and whisked off to secret interrogation centres known as black sites, has recently been revisited in mainstream media through a series of illustrations by a prisoner held in Guantanamo’s Camp 7. The sketches drawn by the prisoner Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn depict the torture inflicted upon him by CIA interrogators.

A Washington Post report this week (reposted here) has exposed the US war in Afghanistan as a vile charade. Declassified government papers reveal notes and interviews by hundreds of senior US officials which attest to systematic lies and deception in the conduct of that war.  The GW Bush and Obama administrations are directly implicated in hoodwinking the American people about why the US went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001.

While the spats between President Trump and other NATO leaders at the rancorous 70th summit garnered most media attention, barely noticed was the alliance’s announcement to make “space an operational domain”.