Israel is using thinly disguised terrorists / mercenaries to grab more of what their maps designate as ‘Greater Israel,’ currently known as Syria.
A coup is currently reported by independent journalists in that location.
The head of MI6 has said a “staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage” has been uncovered in Europe.
Speaking at the British embassy in Paris, Sir Richard Moore said Russia was trying to “sow fear about the consequences of aiding Ukraine and challenge Western resolve in so doing”.
It comes after a DHL plane crash in Lithuania on Monday which officials suspect was a “hybrid” attack – meaning aggressive actions short of actual war, such as sabotage.
The plane was flying from Leipzig to Lithuania when it crashed in Vilnius, killing one crew member and leaving three others injured.
Earlier this year, incendiary devices caused fires at DHL facilities in Leipzig, Germany, and in Birmingham. Russia is suspected of being behind the incidents.
Suspicions were also raised about a massive fire that destroyed Warsaw’s largest shopping centre in May. It is “likely” that Russia was involved, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said at the time.
Germany blamed sabotage for the severing of two undersea internet cables last week.
Boris Pistorius, the defence minister, said that “nobody believes these cables were accidentally severed” after the Finnish owner of the C-Lion1 data cable announced that it had been cut.
In his speech, Sir Richard said: “We have recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe, even as Putin and his acolytes resort to nuclear sabre-rattling. Such activity and rhetoric is dangerous and beyond irresponsible.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Italy, Germany’s Annalena Baerbock referred to the DHL cargo plane crash, saying: “Our Lithuanian partners must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or another hybrid incident that shows what volatile times we are living in in the middle of Europe.”
Giving the inaugural Entente Cordiale lecture alongside his opposite number in the French external intelligence agency, Sir Richard said that in his 37-year career, he had “never seen the world in a more dangerous state”.
“The impact on Europe – our shared European home – could hardly be more serious,” he warned.
“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there. Our security – British, French and transatlantic – will be jeopardised.
“The cost of supporting Ukraine is well-known, but the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher.
“If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would be still more dangerous.”
Nicolas Lerner, the head of the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), France’s MI6 equivalent, warned the current situation in Europe could be “the turning point in our common history”.
Marking 120 years of the Entente Cordiale which, although not a formal alliance, ended centuries of conflict between the UK and France and set the path for a stronger Anglo-French relationship, Mr Lerner sought to “remind those who would doubt or contest the binding links between our two countries”.
“France and Great Britain are standing side by side in all the major crises shaking our planet,” he said.
Sir Richard, who goes by the title “C” – meaning Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6 – said: “SIS and DGSE intelligence has been critical to calibrating risk and informing the decisions of our respective governments so they can navigate successfully Putin’s mix of bluster and aggression.”
He said Putin was “jeopardising Russia’s future” through continuing his “catastrophic conflict” in Ukraine, highlighting the “transactional nature” of the relationship between Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang.
“There is no real trust or respect,” he warned. “Its roots are shallow [and] there are limits to the partnership.
“Russia should avoid the classic error of the authoritarian state, which confuses the splendidly irreverent clash and thunder of democracy with weakness and irresolution. Our democracy is our strength.”
Sir Richard also said British spies were taking “covert action” against Russia to defeat Vladimir Putin and likened intelligence activity today in Ukraine to the “secret war” fought in the Second World War against Nazi Germany.
“We cherish our heritage of covert action, which we keep alive today in helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion,” he said.
Highlighting the “vital partnerships” between the UK, France and America, Sir Richard said the allies’ “collective strengths will outmatch and outlast Putin’s morally bankrupt axis of aggression”.
In only a brief nod to the impending inauguration of Donald Trump as 57th US president, on Jan 20, Sir Richard said he had worked successfully with the first Trump administration, “and look forward to doing so again”.
Are you, like Tulsi Gabbard, a supporter of al-Assad?
Surely, you know more than Biden, AP, etc, Walter.
Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.
During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.
Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.
As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.
When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.
It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.
But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.
Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.
To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.
Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.
When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.
A coup is currently reported by independent journalists in that location.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – There have been widespread rumors and reports of a military coup in the Syrian capital, but they are all unfounded and the city remains calm, according to a Tasnim correspondent.
Tasnim’s Salma Awdah, who is in Damascus, says the city is calm and rumors of a coup d'état are just a psychological operation by the terrorists and their supporters to break the resistance and advance further.
Since a few hours ago, media outlets linked to terrorist groups and Syrian rebels have been reporting that a military coup has taken place in Damascus but the Tasnim correspondent dismissed the reports as baseless.
Clips that have been circulating purporting to be related to the coup are also untrue.
Despite the prevailing calm in Damascus, all units of the Syrian Army in the city and its suburbs are on full alert to counter any possible conspiracy or act of sabotage.
It comes after foreign-backed terrorists led by the Hay’at Tahrir al-Shams (HTS) Takfiri group carried out a surprise assault in Syria’s Aleppo and Idlib countryside on Wednesday and overran a number of villages and towns before entering Aleppo on Friday.
The Syrian military says its forces have undertaken a redeployment operation in the northwestern city of Aleppo as part of preparations for a major counteroffensive against the Takfiri terrorists.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-sponsored militancy since March 2011, with Damascus saying Western states and their regional allies are aiding terrorist groups to wreak havoc in the Arab country.
Terror outfits are seeking to hinder the Syrian government’s efforts aimed at consolidating security and stability in the country, which is also under the Israeli regime's regular aggression.
Israel has been the principal supporter of terrorist groups that oppose the democratically-elected government of President Bashar al-Assad since the foreign-backed militancy erupted in Syria in March 2011.
Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span. He’s chosen a Fox News host with a sordid personal history to lead the Pentagon, an apologist for dictators in Russia and Syria to be the Director of National Intelligence, and an anti-vax, anti-science activist to be the nation’s top health official.
Trump has now added yet another dangerous nomination to this list. In a Saturday night post on his social-media site, Truth Social, he announced that he is nominating Kash Patel, a former federal prosecutor, to serve as the director of the FBI. A Patel nomination to some position in the law enforcement or intelligence spheres has always been lurking out there as a possibility, and Trump may have held off announcing it until he felt he had drawn out enough outrage (and exhaustion) with his other nominations.
Patel’s nomination is shocking in many ways, not least because the FBI already has a director, Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed to a 10-year term only seven years ago and who he would have to fire almost immediately to make way for Patel. Worse, Patel is a conspiracy theorist even by the standards of MAGA world. Like other senior Trump nominees, his primary qualification for the job appears to be his willingness to do Trump’s bidding without hesitation. Patel will likely face a difficult path to confirmation in the Senate.
For Trump, naming Patel to the post serves several purposes. First, Trump is taking his razor-thin election win as a mandate to rule as he pleases, and Patel is the perfect nominee to prove that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Even knowing what they know, Americans chose to return him to office, and he has taken their decision as a license to do whatever he wants—including giving immense power to someone like Kash Patel.
Second, Trump wants to show that the objections of senior elected Republicans are of no consequence to him, and that he can politically flatten them at will. Some of his nominations seem like a trollish flex, a way to display his power by naming people to posts and daring others to stop him. Trump has always thought of the GOP as his fiefdom and GOP leaders as his vassals—and if the Senate folds on Patel and others, he may be proven right on both counts.
This approach backfired when Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general flamed out quickly in the face of likely defeat in the Senate, but Trump seems confident he can get most of his other picks across the finish line, even nominees who would have stood little chance of confirmation in previous administrations. And Trump always keeps pushing limits: In place of Gaetz, he sent forward the more competent but equally committed MAGA loyalist Pam Bondi, who has aroused far less opposition.
Trump has made clear how much he hates the FBI, and he has convinced his MAGA base that it’s a nest of political corruption. In a stunning reversal of political polarity, a significant part of the law-and-order GOP now regards the men and women of federal law enforcement with contempt and paranoia. If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee. Some senior officials would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.
Of course, this means the FBI would struggle to do the things it’s supposed to be doing, including fighting crime and conducting counter-intelligence work against America’s enemies. But it would become an excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.
The Russians speak of the “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.
If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.
The early-20th-century Peruvian strongman Óscar R. Benavides once stated a simple principle that Trump now appears to be pursuing when he said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” It falls now to the Republican members of the Senate to decide whether Trump can impose this formula on the United States.
Anyone who doesn’t know this should put me on ignore.
I won’t waste my time responding to you.
When the CIA & Mossad decide to create chaos to overturn a government, they employ mercenaries and lead or guide them.
(...) In the Washington Post, a US official condemned the militias as a “crazy and unreliable.” Another official called them “thugs and bandits and pirates that should be wiped off the face of the earth.” Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the scene as a “sickening horror,” blaming President Donald Trump exclusively for the atrocities.
But the fighters involved in the atrocities in northern Syria were not just random tribesmen assembled into an ad hoc army. In fact, many were former members of the Free Syrian Army, the force once armed by the CIA and Pentagon and branded as “moderate rebels.” This disturbing context was conveniently omitted from the breathless denunciations of US officials and Western pundits.
According to a research paper published this October by the pro-government Turkish think tank SETA, “Out of the 28 factions [in the Turkish mercenary force], 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence operation room of the ‘Friends of Syria’ to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.” (A graph by SETA naming the various militias and the type of US support they received is at the end of this article).
In other words, virtually the entire apparatus of anti-Assad insurgents armed and equipped under the Obama administration has been repurposed by the Turkish military to serve as the spearhead of its brutal invasion of northern Syria. The leader of this force is Salim Idriss, now the “Defense Minister” of Syria’s Turkish-backed “interim government.” He’s the same figure who hosted John McCain when the late senator made his infamous 2013 incursion into Syria. (...)
It would be very hard to find a Presidential Administration in our history that was more inclined to rely on Executive action - as opposed to legislation - to implement its key objectives than the, now happily ending, one of Joe Biden. (...) The size and regulatory reach of the Federal bureaucracy has been growing for decades along with the abrogation of its Legislative responsibilities by Both Republicans and Democrats in our Congress.
The cruel irony here is that none of this was the result of any external change in the border situation: it was entirely the result of the willful elimination of imperfect but far more effective Border policies and actions that had been working fairly effectively for a long time, and which subjected States & cities across the country to problems for which they were ill prepared to resolve.
The passage, by Democrats, in August 2022 of the oddly named "Inflation Reduction Act" authorized the expenditure of ~ $950 billion for vaguely described actions relating to "Climate Change", left largely at the President's discretion.
It is very hard to ignore the core authoritarian elements in all of this, and more importantly the damage to the country that has resulted from these willful and entirely unnecessary actions of one of the worst Presidential Administrations in our history.
Quote:The cruel irony here is that none of this was the result of any external change in the border situation: it was entirely the result of the willful elimination of imperfect but far more effective Border policies and actions that had been working fairly effectively for a long time, and which subjected States & cities across the country to problems for which they were ill prepared to resolve.
You're ignoring the massive increases in migration from factors like climate-induced poverty, political oppression, and gang violence. Frankly, I don't care if the border is completely closed. What I find objectionable is the demonization of prospective immigrants, such as Trump's repeated lie that they are being released from prisons and mental asylums, that they are responsible for much of the crime in the US, and that huge numbers of non-citizens are voting – which is the responsibility of states, not Washington, DC.
Quote:
The passage, by Democrats, in August 2022 of the oddly named "Inflation Reduction Act" authorized the expenditure of ~ $950 billion for vaguely described actions relating to "Climate Change", left largely at the President's discretion.
The cost of ignoring "Climate Change" (capitalization and quotes are yours) will dwarf this expenditure, affecting food, energy, and public health.
Quote:It would be very hard to find a Presidential Administration in our history that was more inclined to rely on Executive action - as opposed to legislation - to implement its key objectives than the, now happily ending, one of Joe Biden. (...) The size and regulatory reach of the Federal bureaucracy has been growing for decades along with the abrogation of its Legislative responsibilities by Both Republicans and Democrats in our Congress.
We discussed this before. With a divided congress (hovering around 50-50) it is next to impossible for the executive to get legislation passed by the sorts of majorities that we saw in the past. Executive orders have become more widely used – by Trump as well as Biden. Then when there's a change of administrations, an executive from the opposing party rescinds them and comes up with his own. It's a political problem but not one that can be laid at the feet of one party exclusively.
