YouTube link here.

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 8/2/24

The foreign policy establishment has been shaken by scandal. 

A former CIA operative and member of the George W. Bush National Security Council staff, Sue Mi Terry, was recently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for acting as a foreign agent for South Korea for over a decade. 

Terry, who, until the scandal broke, was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is married to the neoconservative chicken hawk (forgive the redundancy) Max Boot. Boot, a columnist at the Washington Post, also worked alongside his handbag-loving spouse as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot’s political trajectory tracks with those of other high-profile neocons away from the GOP, announcing in an October 2021 column, 

I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats.

He was also among the highly-placed Washington propagandists who helped create, then cash in on, the wholly fabricated narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. According to Boot, the authoritarian menace posed by Putin’s Russia is as serious as that posed by American citizens (invariably those who live in less exalted zip codes than the Boots’) with whom he disagrees. Trump voters, as well as conservative and progressive advocates for peace, realism, and restraint, are all consigned to the “Useful Idiot” bin by Boot and his colleagues at the Washington Post.

Boot’s speciality has long been to accuse those with whom he disagrees of acting as apologists for the Kremlin. These self-styled protectors of “democracy” yell at the top of their lungs about various and sundry threats to American democracy all the while doing their very best to undermine it by anathematizing and marginalizing those who dissent from the prerogatives of the D.C. foreign policy Blob. Needless to say, they make a handsome living in the process.

For all the richly deserved opprobrium that has come Boot’s way as a result of the scandal, Terry and Boot are hardly alone among establishment elites, who as a matter of course abuse their positions of influence in order to further the interests of foreign countries. 

The twin, indeed conjoined, careers of Anne Applebaum and her husband, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, is another such relationship, rife with conflict of interest and dual loyalties. While the similarities are obvious, both Boot and Applebaum are neocons-turned–liberal darlings who have made lucrative careers out of scaremongering, their differences are equally important: Boot is a simpleton for whom war is always the answer; Applebaum is far more formidable.

In the space of four years, Applebaum has published dozens of articles and two book-length contributions to the literature of the new Cold War. Released in 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends resembles nothing so much as Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends, one of the silliest neocon tracts to ever see print (and that is saying something). 

Applebaum’s book is an account of the political migration of her former cohort from what she describes as the “the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market” center-right to what in her eyes are far less reputable precincts of political thought. At its core, it is an effort to shift responsibility away from where it rightly belongs; after all, Applebaum and her set, including Boot, William Kristol, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other neocons-turned-MSNBC fixtures, were nothing if not enthusiastic supporters of the neoliberal economic and militaristic foreign policies that have so badly damaged this country. 

This summer saw the release of a second title, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a book that purports to be about the threat posed by, as Applebaum puts it, “the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others.” Yet one can’t escape the feeling that her intended target is closer to home, what she calls “the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.” The historian Heather Penatzer writes, “Applebaum’s narrative is a story of a cabal of financial elites pulling the strings of history from their headquarters in Trump Tower in close coordination with the Kremlin.” 

Indeed, any opposition to the policies Applebaum favors (war in Ukraine, war in Syria, NATO expansion, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) can be traced back to the sinister machinations of a global “cabal” of authoritarians. And how else to explain why over 70 million people voted for the American “autocrat” in 2020? It couldn’t possibly be that Midwesterners actually want, you know, jobs.

As we head closer to the November election, expect more of this kind of thing. Last week, to take one example, the Soros-funded Just Security website launched its “American Autocracy Threat Tracker” which purports to catalog all of the “actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security.” 

In the end, liberals’ tarring of their domestic political opponents as “authoritarian” is simply Russia-gate under a different guise; it is a way to smear Middle Americans as unpatriotic and, here’s the real trick, somehow also foreign—outside the acceptable, even legal bounds of American politics. Put simply: It is a scam, one that began during the 2016 campaign and continues to haunt our politics.

Boot and Applebaum and their like-minded acolytes at Just Security are neither protectors of democracy, nor avowed enemies of authoritarianism. They’re grifters, and should be treated accordingly.

RT, 8/16/24

The FBI has executed a search warrant at the home of Russian-born US political pundit and author Dimitri Simes, who has been a vocal critic of the administration of President Joe Biden.

The search took place on Tuesday on the property located in Rappahannock County, according to a local news outlet.

The author’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr., described it as “a bandit-like intimidation attempt” by the US government in a statement released on X (formerly Twitter).

In an email on Wednesday night, FBI spokesperson Samantha Shero declined to comment on the raid, except to confirm that it had been authorized by a court, Rappahannock News has reported.

A former aide to Richard Nixon, Simes is a naturalized US citizen who immigrated to the country in 1973. He was described by US media as providing “a sympathetic platform for the Russian government in the heart of the DC policy establishment,” after Senator Rand Paul named him as a foreign policy adviser in 2014.

In 1999, he published a book on Russia’s search for a new place in the world following the collapse of the USSR. He was also the publisher and CEO of the National Interest magazine, which advocates a realist approach to international relations and geopolitics.

Simes was one of the people investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a suspected contact between Donald Trump and the Russian government. The report finalized in 2019, which failed to find any evidence of collusion between Moscow and Trump’s 2016 campaign, also vindicated the political expert, confirming that his activities were normal for how DC operates.

His family reportedly owns a 132.6-acre property in Rappahannock County, which they bought in 2021 for $1.63 million.

Charles Heberle visited Russia as a CCI delegate in 2015, the year that CCI (comprised of only one person by then, Sharon Tennison) resumed its original mission of bringing Russian and American citizens together in peace and friendship. It was not his first experience in the country – far from it. In the early 2000’s Charles was recruited by the Russian government to “teach democracy” in a country that had, by the admission of its own experts, experienced nothing but authoritarian governmental control for 1000 years. Moving to democracy, as they were and are intent on doing, created some challenges.

With a solid knowledge of American history, Russians were curious to learn how a relatively small group of 17th century Europeans managed to get themselves out from under monarchial control, come to a virtually unexplored continent and, over the next 120 years (from the time of their arrival until the American Revolution) teach themselves how to govern themselves via a form of direct democracy that was, and still is, unique. Put in that perspective, Americans today should be as amazed, impressed and curious as the Russians.

I met Charles a few weeks ago in a coffee house in Portland, Maine, where we spent a fascinating afternoon (for me!) while he described his background (helicopter pilot, Vietnam, career in the army, ‘retirement’ career in international organizations) and his eight years in Russia implementing his program, “You the PEOPLE.” It was an enormous undertaking covering the Republic of Karelia and centered in its capital, Petrozavodsk. If you haven’t seen it yet, please watch the video interview with Charles made by Mel Van Dusen, another 2015 CCI delegate, to catch the flavor of the complexity of that program.

One thing that struck me as Charles described how he guided the Russians to learn the art of democracy was that we, modern Americans watching our shining example become tarnished by hatred and corruption, could stand to take a lesson from the Russians; perhaps it’s time we (re)learned democracy, too?

As always, we look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Paula, Center for Citizen Initiatives

YouTube link here to interview with Charles Heberle.

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 8/15/24

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal dished up a steaming pile of deep-state horse hockey, an ‘exclusive’ with the wild and (literally) unbelievable headline, “A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage. But wait, it immediately got even better. The sub-headline claimed, “Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.”

Let’s check and see how well you guys have been following along. Take a quick test to predict where this article is going. Choose one of the following forecasts:

A. [_] The article was sourced from credible, verifiable individuals known to exist who were in positions to have personal knowledge about what happened; OR…

B. [_] The article was sourced only from loosely-identified, anonymous informants.

If you didn’t pick ‘B’, stay after class for a remedial reading assignment.

Now let’s use this piece of high fantasy as a guide for how to spot articles pre-written for media by the Operation Mockingbird department of some squiddly organization bearing an obscure three-letter acronym. This story might be the most obvious example to date; it’s like they aren’t even really trying anymore.

Ready? Let’s crack some cephalopods.

The Journal’s tall tale began with a tell: it described the story to follow as an “outlandish” —unbelievable— scheme, concocted in a bar using alcohol-muddied thinking. How relatable! Who among us hasn’t concocted wildly dangerous sabotage schemes after throwing back a few? In other words, it knew the story was a whopper and would be hard to swallow.

Prepare to throw the old canard, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” right out the window. Who needs evidence?

Here’s the Journal’s generic description of the highly-technical operation, with one key sentence highlighted. Think about that sentence while you’re reading the rest:

Haha, they couldn’t resist smuggling a little diversity into their fabulous fiction (“one was a woman”). Women can blow up pipelines too. And they even added a laugh track! But let’s focus back on that leading sentence: “Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told.”

Can be told. That sentence was a mistake made in haste. It wasn’t written by any independent WSJ journalist. The line implied some outside force or authority always stopped the story from being told before. But now, it has granted permission. The article never explained who or what that authority was. It raises murky questions that linger like octopus ink:

Who stopped the story from being told?

Why did they stop the story about ‘private businessmen’ being told?

Why did this invisible authority decide now the story could be told?

I’ll suggest we weren’t meant to know about the outside authority. It slipped into the article by accident, as the writer struggled to explain the story’s timing. That was an unintended gift, but it wasn’t necessary to understand the game.

The article continued by claiming that President Zelensky initially approved Operation Vodka, but the CIA “found out about it,” asked the former comedian to stand down, and Zelensky complied, ordering the saboteurs to stop. But former commander-in-chief Zaluzhniy —since fired and given a sweet, immunity-laden ambassadorship— went ahead anyway.

How exactly did CIC Zaluzhniy get involved with these ‘private businessmen?’ How did the CIA find out about the plot (the article says Dutch intelligence told them, but how did the Dutch know)? Why was Zelensky involved in the first place? Was it an official military op or not?

Both Zelensky and Zaluzhniy denied the story. So our belief must rest only on the Journal’s anonymous sources, composed of “four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot.” The WSJ never sourced any of the alleged “private businessmen” (and woman!). It sounds like Operation Vodka included a lot more than “private businessmen,” but the article never stretched to connect that dot.

Think critically. How did these ‘senior officials’ learn of the supposedly private operation? Even more importantly, why would they would disclose it? Why would they disclose it to a newspaper? Why now? The Journal never said.

In whom do we readers place our trust? The named sources who denied the story? Or the Journal’s inky anonymous informants, who don’t even match the profile of the inebriated private businesspeople it claims planned the attack? Is this story just a massive appeal to the Journal’s credibility? You can trust us, because.

Enter the German connection. Based on “no evidence” (see for yourself) they issued a warrant for a Ukrainian dive instructor in June:

No admissible evidence? Is this the same Journal that for years stubbornly insisted there was “no evidence” Ivermectin successfully treated covid infections? Now, apparently, “no evidence” is just fine when assigning blame for one of the most geopolitically significant stories in our lifetimes.

Arrest warrants are usually public information. Knowing who is supposed to be arrested is generally helpful for catching them. Pose for the mugshot! But the story never disclosed the alleged “Ukrainian dive instructor’s” identity. He could be any old octopus, for all we know.

Not only were the Journal’s claims completely unverifiable by actual humans, but the Journal even insisted verification would be impossible:

Uh-huh. So … how does the WSJ know there is no paper trail? Is it plausible every junior bureaucrat would meekly accept a verbal approval for a massive war crime, without even wanting an email for the file? Did the conspirators never ever discuss the plan and its complicated logistics in any text messages, emails, DMs, Word documents, or even a spreadsheet?

The remainder of Journal’s article was packed with convoluted, mind-numbing details and speculations that would be inadmissible in county court. But there was an even bigger hole in the story. Again, think critically.

If the Journal just broke an explosive exclusive resulting from terrific, Pulitzer-level investigative reporting, where are those details? Where is the Journal’s triumphant narrative about how it broke the story of a lifetime and solved a war crime that the World’s governments have been unable to crack?

As to how the Journal pulled off this exclusive, there was nothing but radio silence. No paper trail. Just the inky water left behind.

Here’s what the Journal’s “Exclusive Investigation” amounted to: Anonymous informants, implausibly precise and highly technical operations (by civilians!), unnamed perps, critical internal contradictions, vague and convenient claims that evidence does not exist, denials by named sources, lack of source transparency, unexplained timing, and an invisible investigation.

Great work, Wall Street Journal. By “great “work,” I mean deplorable hackery. So this article could only have been yet another spectral fairy tale planted by the subterranean security state. But why? And why now? What we’ve learned in the past about these kinds of fantastic one-off stories, which quickly sink into the Baltic without a geopolitical ripple, is that they were intended to discipline Ukraine, by showing the deep state’s whip hand.

What are they trying to force a recalcitrant Zelensky to do now?

Oh well. A least now the story “can be told.” Thanks for letting us know, I guess. We live in a time of media malfeasance and control beyond any nightmarish, tentacular villain Orwell could possibly have dreamed up following a drunken oyster-eating contest. Stay frosty.