On September 24, while the Ukraine corruption scandal was gathering momentum in Washington, the US Air Force’s 31 Fighter Wing deployed F-16 strike aircraft to Graf Ignatievo Air Base in Bulgaria as part of Exercise Rapid Buzzard which has the aim of improving the “joint warfighting capability” of the US and Bulgarian air forces.
To the undiscerning, the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) perform different roles in the international arena. Yet both organisations have a common aim – the promotion of foreign intervention. While the UN promotes its humanitarian façade, NATO provides the militarisation of the UN’s purported human rights agenda.
The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government involvement.
Ukraine has filed a problematic complaint through the European Court of Human Rights against Russia, alleging violations of the human rights of both individual citizens, and violations against the Crimean Tatar minority on the whole. But how they’ve gone about it, may require the commission to determine – whether overtly or de facto – whether Russia’s control over Crimea is illegal. This raises serious questions about the admissibility of the claims themselves, and create a procedural headache for the ECHR.
With a dangerous right-wing and quasi-fascist administration in power in Washington, one that rejects internationalism and consensus-building, it is past time for the United Nations to move its headquarters and member states’ permanent missions to a more neutral location. One can understand why the UN was originally located in New York. The Rockefeller family donated the land on Turtle Bay on the East River for the construction of UN Headquarters.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed his true colors this week when he led the collapse of European support for the nuclear deal with Iran. What’s more, it was pathetically evident that Johnson was pandering to US President Donald Trump.
The beltway’s upside-down world has moved into the next phase of gas-lighting the American public over Trump, Biden, and Ukraine. In this establishment media alternate reality using alternative facts, that is ‘fake news’, the criminal is the victim and the victim is the criminal. What we are left with is a narrative in which Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian president Zelensky over Biden’s illegal shake-down of Ukraine’s judiciary process, are twisted by the establishment media instead as being a case of Trump undermining the legal rights of ‘opposition’ candidate Biden.
After months of rumors, John Bolton was finally fired from the White House but the post mortem on why it took so long to remove him continues, with the punditry and media trying to understand exactly what happened and why. Perhaps the most complete explanation for what occurred came from President Donald Trump himself shortly after the fact.
The Pentagon’s recent Report to Congress on Arctic Strategy makes it clear that the US considers the region as “US homeland” and therefore “When necessary and appropriate, the United States will challenge excessive maritime claims in the Arctic to preserve the rules-based international order and the rights and freedoms of the international community in navigation and overflight, as well as for other, related high seas uses.”
Should we chalk it up to coincidence theory that just days after Trump gives John Bolton the boot as his National Security Adviser, Iran is blamed for an attack on a Saudi oil facility, forcing Washington to forego any hope of peace with Tehran?
