Here’s how everything unfolded from the start of this summer’s initially peaceful student-led protests against the judiciary’s reimposition of a contentious government job quota system to the spree of urban terrorism that ultimately forced the country’s long-serving leader to flee for her life to India.
Casual news consumers don’t know much about Bangladesh apart from it being a South Asian country that just experienced a regime change, but it’s also the eighth-most-populous country with one of the world’s largest textile industries and a highly geostrategic position. Bangladesh borders India’s Northeast States that are connected to the “mainland” by the “Chicken’s Neck”, which is only 12-14 miles wide at its narrowest, and some of these same states have been troubled by ethno-separatist unrest for years.
Former long-serving Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was a de facto Indian ally despite cultivating close ties with China and the US.
She shared Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of regional development and thus allowed his country transit rights across hers for facilitating trade with its Northeast States. Moreover, Hasina prevented her country from being used by related militant groups that are designated by Delhi as terrorists, and she also cracked down on religious radicals too.
Although the Bangladeshi economy rapidly grew under her leadership, she resorted to a heavy hand to maintain domestic stability, which upset the increasingly large number of Islamist-inclined youth who considered her government’s legal cases against the opposition to be “anti-democratic lawfare”. Controversial tactics by the security services inadvertently worsened domestic dissent and ultimately led to targeted sanctions by the US, which was already becoming unhappy with her multipolar balancing act.
The past 14 months saw the worsening of her ties with America after she accused it of fomenting regime change against her in April 2023, followed by Russia expressing concerned in November that it might orchestrate a Color Revolution during January 2024’s elections that the opposition boycotted. Less than three months ago, Hasina strongly implied that the US was the Western country that she accused of plotting to carve out a Christian proxy state in the region after she rejected its demand for a naval base.
Shortly thereafter, the High Court reinstated the contentious government job quota system in late June that had been declared illegal in 2018, which served as the trigger event for mobilizing a large segment of the population to take to the streets against that decision. This movement was initially driven by students but was quickly co-opted by opportunistic members of the opposition, Western-cultivated elements of civil society, and religious radicals, which culminated in her resignation and flight this week:
The preceding analyses document the regime change sequence that took place, which continued after the quota system was scaled back and succeeded due to the rioters gambling that the armed forces wouldn’t resort to lethal force to prevent large numbers of them from storming the parliament and her palace. Average Bangladeshis unconnected to the opposition, religious radicals, and foreign forces also participated in them after being enraged at decontextualized footage of state-on-“protester” violence.
This tactic is characteristic of Color Revolutions and was employed by violent rioters, who many suspect to be the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) banned Jamaat-e-Islami allies, provoking the security services into using lethal force as a last resort to restore safety to the streets. Those individuals were joined the unrest after seeing this footage became unwitting “human shields” for deterring the security services from replicating the aforementioned means out of fear of killing peaceful protesters.
Although social media was banned and a curfew imposed, many still came across that footage and an uncontrollable number of angry citizens then spilled into the streets, thus forcing the security services into the dilemma that was just described and leading to them standing down. Hasina fled once it became clear that she couldn’t count on the security services to protect her and uphold the government that she led. Retributive political violence and attacks against the Hindu minority then followed.
India is concerned about the possibility of Bangladesh reverting to the unfriendly country that it used to be under the BNP, which could see it once again host Delhi-designated terrorist groups as part of a major proxy war against this emerging Great Power. Pakistan’s hatred of India is well known, China is embroiled in a bitter border dispute with India, and the US is furious that India won’t submit to being a vassal by dumping Russia and fighting China on its behalf, so all three have reasons to punish it in this way.
Their interests could therefore converge in Bangladesh to pose serious threats to India’s domestic security and territorial integrity. In that worst-case scenario, the combined effect of their policies – whether coordinated or independently promulgated – would be to sabotage India’s rise as a Great Power, thus representing a major power play in the New Cold War. It’s too early to say whether that’ll happen, but it also can’t be ruled out by India either, which is closely monitoring this neighboring crisis.
Much is talked about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, integrating environmental, social and governance topics. Sustainability is a core concept here – and such is increasingly becoming a controversial topic, sometimes associated with “climate colonialism”. One could even talk about a “sustainability fatigue”. Even Brazil’s president Lula da Silva has famously accused the European Union (EU) of disguising protectionist initiatives under an environmental agenda. Within the nationalist and state-developmentalist camp (especially in the Global South, formerly known as the Third World), there often is a perception that all environmental discourse and topics amount to merely a veil over neo-colonialist interests.
It has always been a great challenge to reconcile, on the one hand, national industrial and developmental needs and, on the other hand, environmental concerns. Such is a complex balancing, involving intricate technical issues. The environmental problems in any case are matters of greatest importance to the future (and present) of mankind. There is no denying that the rising levels of pollution and deforestation, among other concerns, need to be dealt with in an efficient manner. It is also true, however, that at the same time the so-called environmental agenda is weaponized by great powers. There really is a false dilemma at play here: true facts can also be used for propaganda. The burning forests and poisoned rivers (and their effects) are real and so is the weaponization of environmentalism and sustainability and the double standard about it.
The logic of it is quite similar to that behind the weaponization of human rights (or of diversity and wokeism, for that matter). For example, there may indeed be concerns about the way China deals with political-religious extremism and the related domestic security issues (an Eurasian transnational problem). Some Chinese initiatives to fight Islamic extremism are indeed controversial: the “Vocational Education and Training Centers” have been described by critics as “concentration camps”. In any case, Washington highlights the matter (often in a hyperbolic and distorted manner) while aiming to engage Muslim-majority nations and their civil societies to urge their leaders to cut down on trade with Beijing, thereby reducing the flow of oil to the Asian superpower – the goal being, among other things, to have South Asian countries block Chinese low-interest infrastructure projects. These very projects, ironically, can contribute to achieving SDGs in the region.
The American humanitarian concern can only be described as hypocrisy if one is aware of the fact that the United States, as the Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports, for more than two decades has made use of the so-called “indefinite detention”, and has been imprisoning (without due process of law) and torturing thousands of adults and minors (mostly Muslims), who are kept in places like Guantanamo Bay or in CIA “black sites” and secret prisons in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Back to the environmental issue, one can see, time and time again, the same kind of hypocrisy and double-standard. Various African energy projects, as I wrote a couple of years ago, have been repeatedly opposed by the US-led West. In September 2022, for instance, the EU Parliament passed a resolution stating that the Tanzania’s and Uganda’s East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project poses “social and environmental risks.” The European Parliament thereby advised its member states not to support (either diplomatically or financially) Uganda’s oil and gas projects. Uganda’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament Thomas Tayebwa reacted to that by describing the European resolution as the “highest level of neocolonialism and imperialism” against Uganda’s and Tanzania’s sovereignty. Bear in mind that the whole continent of Africa in 2020 accounted for merely 3.8% of the world CO2 emissions from industry and fossil fuels.
Proposed route of 1,410km Hoima-Tanga Oil Pipeline (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
The most blatant instance of the US weaponizing environmental agendas lies, as I wrote before, in the very way it seeks water hegemony through a number of initiatives framed in the language of climate concerns. Biden’s Washington exerts pressure on Brazil on the matter of the Amazon while endorsing Ford F-150, an electric truck that damages the Amazon river (the aluminum used poisons the waters).
Such game goes even beyond the scope of the “Global South”, sometimes being weaponized by the United States against transatlantic allies (who, mind you, are also the target of a subsidy war): for instance, in 2022, John Kerry, who then was the American “Climate Czar”, that is Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, warned investors against funding a Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project which could benefit Africa and also Europe. The way Washington has played the European energy crisis in the last years, by the way, is key to understanding the current conflict in Ukraine. In fact, American geoeconomic and private and even shady interests about gas, energy and resources play an important role in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis – in addition to Washington-led NATO geopolitical goals pertaining to encircling Russia. But that is another topic.
Managing natural resources and water access is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and various disputes and conflicts can be expected to emerge over such issues, both on the intra-national and international level. Unfortunately, one can also expect environmental rhetoric to be increasingly used as a tool by a superpower such as the United States.
But the SDG are not necessarily “the enemy”, even from the perspective of the East or the Global South. Hannah McNicol, a University of Melbourne doctoral researcher, argues that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in fact largely converges with the SDGs, with the former adopting the latter’s framework. Thus, according to McNicol, “the SDGs are materially achieved via BRI economic and infrastructure policies.”
China in Red, the members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in orange. The proposed corridors and in black (Land Silk Road), and blue (Maritime Silk Road). (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Discussions about the SDGs usually emphasize the environmental angle (clean water, clean energy) or sometimes the gender angle, however the SDGs encompass industry and infrastructure as well as the fight against poverty. There is no way to achieve any of that without responsible and consistent re-industrialization – no matter how much is talked about the supposed “post-industrial” world today. No developing or emerging nation should be shy about seeking industrial power while even the West struggles to overcome deindustrialization. It is precisely because manufacturing/industrialization matters so much that it has become the target of economic warfare – which is often framed in the language of sustainability and environmental concerns. It is just part of the game.
The Tennessee Star learned the controversial and allegedly politicized FBI on Friday executed a search warrant at the Maury County, Tennessee, home of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05).
Ogles confirmed in a statement provided to The Star that the FBI executed a search warrant for his personal cell phone in an apparent investigation of his campaign filings.
“It has been widely reported for months that my campaign made mistakes in our initial financial filings. We have worked diligently with attorneys and reporting experts to correct the errors and ensure compliance going forward,” stated Ogles, referencing amendments submitted over the course of this year to his earlier Federal Elections Commission (FEC) reports.
“Last Friday, the FBI took possession of my cell phone,” Ogles confirmed. “It is my understanding that they are investigating the same well-known facts surrounding these filings. I will of course fully cooperate with them, just as I have with the Federal Election Commission. I am confident all involved will conclude that the reporting discrepancies were based on honest mistakes, and nothing more.”
Ogles later posted the statement on the social media platform X.
It has been widely reported for months that my campaign made mistakes in our initial financial filings. We have worked diligently with attorneys and reporting experts to correct the errors and ensure compliance going forward. Last Friday, the FBI took possession of my cell phone.…
When The Star reached the FBI’s national press office, it declined to confirm that it executed the search warrant. A spokesman suggested that the U.S. District Attorney for Middle Tennessee could provide more information, but Assistant District Attorney Mark Wildasin told The Star that he could not comment due to policy.
A separate inquiry from The Star to the FBI, which sought a copy of the search warrant, was not answered.
It is unclear who the FBI informed of the search warrant before its execution, as Maury County Sheriff Bucky Rowland told The Star, “I was not aware of any search warrant regarding Rep. Andy Ogles.”
Similarly, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) spokesman told The Star, “Our agency is not involved in an investigation into Representative Andy Ogles.”
The police department in Columbia, where Ogles’ congressional office is located, did not immediately reply to The Star’s inquiry.
Ogles carried every county in the 5th Congressional District except Davidson County, where Nashville is located, which was one of just three Tennessee counties won by Biden in 2020.
It also came less than two weeks after Ogles introduced new articles of impeachment against Vice President Kamala Harris, alleging the Democratic presidential candidate committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” through her neglect of the southern border.
Due to her alleged systematic refusal “to uphold Federal immigration laws,” Ogles argued, “In her conduct of the Office of Vice President of the United States, Kamala Devi Harris… has willfully prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.”
Ogles included a new article of impeachment in his June 2024 filing: Vice President Harris’s failure to lead a 25th Amendment removal of President Biden, whom Ogles argued was not cognitively capable of handling his duties, which Harris is keenly aware of.
Ogles first introduced articles of impeachment against Harris and President Joe Biden in June of last year and was among the Republicans who voted last month to condemn Harris for her failure to perform as the Biden administration’s border czar.
Episode 11 Dividing the Empire: A Tale of Four Brothers
The Mongol Empire
Dr Craig Benjamin (2020)
Film Review
By the time Chenggis Khan’s grandson Mongke became Great Khan in 1251, the empire built by Ogedei (see Ogedei Khan’s Western Campaigns) had disintegrated into independent warring khanates.
Mongke tried to unify them by appointing two extremely skilled central administrators Menggesser and Aqaa Bulgai. After ordering a census, he created four official administrative regions for tax purposes, as well as four secretariats directly responsible to the central Menggesser and Bulgai:
the principalities of (ruled by the Jochi’s descendants, aka the Golden Horde)
Turkestan/Chagatai Khanate (ruled by Mongke Khan)
the Ilkhanate (ruled by Mongke’s younger brother Hulagu)
the Yuan Dynasty (ruled by Mongke’s younger brother Qubilai Khan)
In 1252, Mongke ordered a second kuritai to receive approval and support to continue the wars of Ogedei. He allotted 20% of the army to Qubilai in his conquest of the Song empire, 20% to Hulagu in his consolidation of Ogedei’s victories in Persia. He allotted an estimated 600,000 warriors and untold millions of non-nomads to himself he joined Qubilai in attacking the Song Dynasty.
Facing formidable iron fortifications on the northern Song border, he dispatched Qubilai to invade the Dali empire to the west of the Song empire. Assuming control of the Dali empire in 1254, Qubilai attached the Song from the west while Mongke approached from the north. Facing hundreds of thousands of skilled former Jin dynasty warriors, four years of bitter battle, the Song Empire finally surrendered.
Meanwhile Hulagu’s army in Persia captured the fortresses of Nizari assassins west of Persia and in 1258 sacked Bagdad, capitol of the Abbasid Caliphate. After opening dams to drown 20,000 of the caliphate’s cavalry, the Mongol armies used pontoon bridges to cross the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and Chinese engineers to crush the city walls with siege engines that pummeled it with massive boulders.
Pausing three days to collect the massive treasure of precious metals and jewels amassed by the Caliph, Hulagu unleashed his warriors to pillage Baghdad homes and rape and slaughter at least 90,000 civilians. They destroyed all the books in Baghdad’s phenomenal House of Wisdom, using the book covers to make shoes.
Once the Mongols moved on, Hulagu appointed Ata Mada Jervaine the new governor of Baghdad and offered the Nistorian Christian patriarch the former Caliph’s palace as a residence. The city would become an important center of Mongol administration, trade and religious affairs.
Continuing to march west the Mongols defeated Aleppo in five day with their siege engines. Opening its gates to them, Damascus was spared looting.
General Ket Buq now led a sizeable Mongol force north, while a third force marched to Gaza, where they briefly skirmished with European Crusaders.
The Mamaluks (former slave solders who now controlled Egypt – see Mongol Queens and the Contest for Empire) put an end to the Mongol’s westward advance at the battle of An Jalut.
All Mongol military campaigns ceased with Mongke’s death in 1265. Batu’s youngest son Arique Boke called a kuritai, which none of Mongke’s brothers attended, resulting in Boke being appointed Great Khan. When Quibilai called his own kuritai, he too and was declared Great Khan. Boke ceded to Quibilai when the led led his army north against him in 1274.
With Qubilai’s failure to demand loyalty from the other Mongol rulers and the four khanates established under Mongke became totally independent.
*For almost two centuries, from 1090 until 1273, the Order of Assassins played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East. A small Shiite sect more properly known as the Nizari Ismailis, the Assassins were relatively few, geographically dispersed, and despised as heretics by both the Sunni Muslim majority and even by most other Shiites. See Holy Terror: The Rise of the Order of Assassins
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst joined “The Defender In-Depth” this week to discuss the European Union’s (EU) plans for a European Vaccination Card (EVC), the plan’s similarities to the EU’s Digital COVID Certificate, the global push toward digital ID and implications for health and medical freedom.
The EU, which pioneered the development of digital “vaccine passports,” will next month launch a test run of its new EVC in five countries — Belgium, Germany, Greece, Latvia and Portugal.
The card purports to “foster informed decision-making on vaccination, and improve continuity of care across the EU” and “aims to empower individuals by consolidating all their vaccination data in one easily accessible location.”
While the objectives of the program, set to be implemented throughout the EU by 2026, appear benign, critics argue the EVC is a stepping stone for mandatory vaccinations in the future.
Some also argue the EVC is connected to large financial interests and plans to limit personal and national sovereignty.
‘The plan is to get everybody vaccinated’
For Terhorst, efforts to launch the EVC are, at their root, “about digital ID.”
“You get a digital ID where all your vaccination records are stored … All your personal details are stored in one place, and you can move it easily from one country to another without having to redo or reapply … So basically, it’s about a digital ID, and then a link from your personal ID to your medical records on vaccination,” she said.
Terhorst said that while the idea of having one’s medical records easily accessible and transferrable sounds benign, “The plan is to get everybody vaccinated and to kind of overrule constitutional rights.”
“It was very clear that the object was that anybody within the EU could not say no to … vaccination,” Terhorst said.
This includes a requirement for “the free and informed consent of the person concerned” in relation to medical procedures, and “the prohibition on making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain.”
EVC a continuation of EU ‘vaccine passport’
Terhorst said that the EVC and the EU’s digital vaccination certificate are “presented as different programs,” with the EVC being “rebranded as something completely different and completely new” — even though they are both based on “the same software,” she said.
“They’ve been working on it for years and years and years. And it works perfect, and it’s all linked together like the banking infrastructure, the personal medical records, insurance, everything links into each other,” Terhorst said.
Noting that plans for the EVC were launched in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Terhorst said, “This plan is not new. It has been in the making for a very long time.”
Terhorst said the EVC threatens to usurp personal and national sovereignty.
“There was a digital roadmap for a digital passport. So basically, the EU is trying to become a kind of country or federal state that has the capacity to issue a passport to all the EU citizens,” she said.
Terhorst also connected the plans to launch the EVC with the amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations, passed in June at the World Health Assembly.
The amendments contain articles that “allow states to enforce medication on anybody during a crisis or emergency or pandemic,” she said. “It doesn’t say that it has to be done, but it gives this permission.”
Terhorst also connected plans for the EVC with efforts in other countries to enact new pandemic preparedness plans. She cited the example of New Zealand, which last month published an interim update to its national Pandemic Plan and which was expanded to cover “respiratory-type pathogens of pandemic potential.”
Digital ID “is very necessary for financial services, but not only. It is also good for school enrollment, it is also good for health — who actually got a vaccination or not,” Queen Máxima said.
“There was very intense pressure put on us to get vaccinated,” Terhorst said, referring to her experience in the Netherlands. “And then knowing that it didn’t stop transmission, why was it so important? I think still we don’t know everything, but we have to keep on digging and fighting for the truth to come out to really know why it was so important.”
Will vaccines be mandated in Europe?
Terhorst cited as one example the recent release of the “RKI Files” in Germany, named after the country’s Robert Koch Institute — the German equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The files indicated that political objectives — not science — guided pandemic decision-making in Germany.
According to Terhorst, the files made it “very clear that it was a scam — the whole COVID-19 lockdown, all the measures, closing schools, etc., didn’t have a scientific basis. And so, all the measures were based on political decisions and not on science, although the public was told that it was all based on science.”
The release of the files was significant, Terhorst said, because Germany is not just one of the five countries set to trial the EVC, but is also Europe’s economic leader and the home country of scandal-ridden European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The European Commission is the EU’s executive branch.
“Germany has played a very important role in the COVID-19 period,” Terhors said. “And of course, von der Leyen is German, and she is the head of the European Commission … She is very much in favor of vaccination, and so, she will push as much as she can to let this digital vaccination passport be a success, and even, I think, to try to force people to get vaccinated.”
Terhorst said prominent financial interests are behind the public health rhetoric promoting initiatives such as the EVC.
She referenced recent remarks by Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who told The Defender the EVC represents “another step toward asserting control of labor and travel, with a goal to controlling resources and assets.”
“The goal is financial control,” Fitts said. “There is no legitimate public health purpose. The central bankers are hiding behind a health narrative — policies like lockdown are a way to manage inflation and resource demand when monetary policy is highly inflationary.”
“It’s one big conglomerate which is ruling the world, and it’s this conglomerate which wants a change of the financial system,” Terhorst said. “And the change they want to have is that they can decide how much money you have in your own bank account with the CBDC,” central bank digital currency.
“So basically, and this is I think very important for everybody to realize, it’s not about health, it’s about your money,” Terhorst said. “They want to make you into a kind of minion as somebody who’s not having real rights.”
“What the politic is moving towards — it’s much more towards a government or a political system where you have no rights and also you have no ownership and you have no right to say no,” Terhorst added.
Noting that influential organizations such as the WEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have supported efforts to develop digital ID and digital vaccine passports, Terhorst said “Such an accumulation of power … is just incredible and it’s a direct threat for every citizen.”
“The threat is that anybody objecting to vaccination, especially when there will be a new crisis [like] we’ve seen with COVID-19, then … perhaps your bank could say, well, then you cannot have access to your bank account,” Terhorst said, citing Canadian banks who froze the accounts of participants in the 2022 Freedom Convoy.
The US government continues its violent persecution of all citizens who express opinions contrary to the foreign policy of the White House. Once again, the country’s authorities unjustifiably harassed military analyst Scott Ritter, raiding his house under the allegation that Ritter is a “foreign agent.” Apparently, any American citizen who disagrees with the policy of war with Russia is considered a “spy” by the government, which shows how Washington is becoming an antidemocratic police state.
The FBI and the New York State Police raided Ritter’s house in Ethlehem Township, south of Albany. The agents remained inside Scott’s house for about five hours, collecting materials they considered suspicious. More than two dozen boxes were removed from the place by the police containing various items meant for investigation, including several electronic devices.
The police presented a search and seizure warrant based on the Foreign Agents Restriction Act. In practice, this means that for the American police, Scott Ritter is officially a “Russian asset.” The investigations are certainly intended to find some kind of incriminating content that would allow a formal charge of espionage and conspiracy against the American state.
This is not the first time that Scott Ritter has been attacked by the authorities of his own country. The analyst has already lost his passport and the right to leave the US after the American police forcibly escorted him off a plane when he was about to go to the Russian Federation in June. Ritter had been invited to participate in the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where he was expected to give a talk on a panel about multipolarity and geopolitics. However, shortly after boarding the plane, American guards confiscated his passport without providing any explanation, which is a serious violation of basic individual rights.
Now, with the FBI’s harassment, Scott’s situation is even more complicated. Without a passport, he is unable to leave the country to seek political asylum in another state. Having to remain on American soil, he is likely to be increasingly targeted by the Washington’s authorities, who have become well-known for implementing a method similar to psychological torture to coerce citizens who disobey the country’s tacit “rule” of supporting the White House’s aggressive foreign policy.
Ritter is a former officer of the US Marine Corps, having served as an intelligence agent specializing in missiles during the Gulf War. He became known for his work as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, having been an opponent of the US invasion of the country. At the time, Ritter repeatedly stated that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and therefore the US military action was unjustified. The judicial and police harassment against him began in the early 2000s precisely in retaliation for his pro-peace stance.
In the same vein, having studied Russian affairs academically, Ritter is deeply familiar with the history of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis and has been a vocal critic of the US policy of arming Kiev since 2022. He advocates a peaceful policy between the US and Russia and the establishment of mutually favorable conditions for coexistence. In the same vein, Ritter has used his military expertise to debunk some fallacious Western narratives about the situation on the battlefield.
Since 2022, he has been pointing out how Russian troops maintain complete control over the military situation, with Ukraine having no chance of reversing this scenario. Ritter’s work is seen as a threat by the Western propaganda machine, which constantly needs to spread lies to convince public opinion to continue supporting Ukraine. Ritter’s situation has become even worse since October 2023, when he spoke out against Israel’s violent incursions into Gaza and has become a critic of US support for Netanyahu. The persecution of Ritter has escalated since then, with both the pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel lobbies now targeting him.
In fact, what is happening to Ritter is just one example of how the US is becoming a police state. Democracy and freedom of speech are no longer part of American political principles – at least not on a practical level, being just pointless rhetoric. Unfortunately, Ritter is likely to face even more police and judicial abuse, since without a passport he has no way of leaving the country to escape persecution. The same fate awaits any American citizen who dares to publicly criticize the international crimes committed by Washington.
Scene of the Watergate break-in. [Source: cnn.com]
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace on the threshold of impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.
Two years earlier, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s re-election committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident and then published a book, All the President’s Men, that established them as heroes for having uncovered the corruption in the Nixon administration, which supposedly helped to restore the rule of law to government.
Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting prompted establishment of a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the “Watergate Committee”), headed by Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), which garnered testimony from, among others, former White House Legal Counsel John Dean.
He testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up and tried to order the FBI to halt the investigation.
To this day, most history textbooks repeat the official story about Watergate in which Nixon and his staffers are the villains, and Woodward and Bernstein and the Senate Committee, are the heroes.
Nick Bryant’s book, The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars (Trine Day, 2023), turns official history on its head. It details how Watergate may have been set up by the CIA as part of a far-right coup that empowered neo-conservatives contemptuous of Nixon’s détente policies toward Russia and China.
Author of a previous study on a child-sex trafficking ring in Nebraska that implicated high-level politicians, Bryant’s book builds off Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984), and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
Besides the CIA, Bryant shows the pivotal role in Watergate played by John Dean, whose wife Maureen appears to have been part of a prostitution ring/CIA blackmail operation run out of DNC headquarters about which the CIA was trying to prevent exposure.
At the outset of his book, Bryant quotes Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, one of the so-called “plumbers” working for Nixon, who said that “it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a C.I.A. setup. We were just pawns.”
Two key CIA operatives—E. Howard Hunt and James McCord—were part of “the plumbers,” along with a number of CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba.
The working relationship of Hunt and McCord went back to the early 1960s when both men reportedly participated in a clandestine venture designed to undermine Cuba’s Castro government.[1] McCord had also been a cog in the branch of the CIA that perpetrated domestic spying. Bryant characterizes him as “the impish ringmaster to a very bizarre circus [Watergate],” and “catalyst to trigger the avalanche that engulfed and then overwhelmed Nixon.”[2]
According to Bryant, there were two purposes to the Watergate break-ins. The first was to plant a bug in the phone of Spencer Oliver, the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen, and his secretary, Ida “Maxie” Wells, who was running a call-girl ring headed by D.C. madam Heidi Rikan that implicated Democratic Party politicians and other Washington power brokers whom the CIA could blackmail.[3]
The second purpose was to create a political scandal that would bring down Nixon whom the CIA hated because of his a) détente policies toward the Soviet Union and China; b) relatively liberal domestic policies; and c) transformation of foreign policy decision-making power away from the CIA in favor of the National Security Council (NSC).
According to Bryant, McCord set up the Watergate burglaries so that the burglars would be caught. Afterwards, McCord was incarcerated for a mere three months and 21 days while the other “plumbers” received longer sentences.
Bryant wrote that McCord “hated Nixon and Kissinger for their friendly posturing towards both the Soviet Union and China.”[4]
According to Bryant, an indication that the Watergate arrests were premeditated was the arrival of D.C. police officer Carl Shoffler, “a frothing at the mouth right-winger” who dressed like a hippie but had a “history of aiding and abetting the C.I.A. in various operations.”[5]
Inexplicably, Shoffler had volunteered to work a second shift the night of the Watergate break-in even though it was his birthday and his family had driven down from Pennsylvania to see him.
Shoffler told his former superior at the Army Security Agency that the arrests of the Watergate buglars were “the result of a tip” he received from a “McCord lackey” named Alfred Baldwin.
Shoffler reportedly told his former superior that “his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel” if his actual role in Watergate were exposed.[6]
Another sign of a set-up was that McCord proceeded with the break-in plans even though tape they had placed on the door lock was removed, demonstrating that someone was on to the burglary and that McCord was willing to risk arrest.[7]
FBI Director L. Patrick Gray surmised that Watergate was a CIA operation after the FBI uncovered irregularities in a Watergate burglar’s bank account—of five checks deposited in his bank account, four came from Mexico.[8]
Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the dirty tricks against the Democrats were underwritten by a secret fund controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell; however, Mitchell, who served 19 months in prison for Watergate-related offenses, never in fact controlled a secret fund that was used to bankroll intelligence operations.[9]
Mitchell, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman could not secure a fair trial, as Nixon was viewed by the Watergate Special Prosecution team and Judge John Sirica as “the anti-Christ,” and the objective of the trial was “to extract a pound of flesh,” according to Bryant.[10]
After the Watergate scandal broke, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord tried to shake down the Nixon administration, which may have been part of a ploy to further entrap Nixon and get him to commit more crimes.[11]
During his sentencing, McCord wrote a letter to the judge exonerating the CIA and stating that he feared retaliation for coming forward to “tell the truth” about Watergate. McCord tried to make it look like he was a whistleblower facing persecution, when he was covering up a CIA operation.[12]
Bryant suggests that this CIA operation started with a treasonous espionage campaign carried out in conjunction with the Army Joint Chiefs of Staff after the Nixon administration was infiltrated by military and intelligence “assets.”
The key figures in this operation were a) Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Alabama whom Bryant describes as a “frothing at the mouth anticommunist stunned by Nixon’s affable comportment towards the Russians and Chinese”;[13] and b) Charles E. Radford, a Navy yeoman who served as a stenographer in the Joint Chiefs liaison office to the NSC, who pilfered top-secret documents from the NSC.[14]
When the authors of Silent Coup asked Radford about the primary objective of the Joint Chiefs espionage, Radford replied “bringing down Nixon” and “getting rid of [Henry] Kissinger [Nixon’s NSC adviser and Secretary of State].”[15]
Radford received a helping hand from Alexander Haig, a military aide to Kissinger appointed as Nixon’s chief of staff in May 1973, who sold out Nixon by giving him bad advice during the Senate Watergate hearings.
Haig also appointed J. Fred Buzhardt, a former aide to Strom Thurmond (R-SC), as Nixon’s special counsel for Watergate who released transcripts of conversations between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman to various congressmen that made them look bad.
Bryant suggests that Haig and Buzhardt may have been responsible for the erasure of White House tapes that made Nixon look guilty of a cover-up in the Watergate break-ins.[16]
Bob Woodward’s intimate ties to Haig—a key figure in the Watergate coup—went back to his stint working for Admiral Moorer, the chief of naval operations in 1969-70, when he was Haig’s briefer at the White House, which Woodward covered up.
As a follow-up to All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein wrote The Final Days about a commander-in-chief [Nixon] freefalling into an abyss of madness who had the potential to trigger nuclear Armageddon—until super-hero Alexander Haig intervened and saved humanity.[17]
Bryant quotes one of Woodward’s Yale history professors who said that Woodward had conservative political views that he would characterize as “crypto fascist.”[18]
As a signal for his Watergate informant—FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat—Woodward claimed that he placed a red flag on his apartment’s sixth-floor balcony, and that the two would meet at 2:00 a.m. in an underground garage.
However, Felt lived in Fairfax, Virginia, some distance from Washington, D.C., and was forced out of the FBI well before Woodward said the meetings took place. Woodward’s balcony further was only visible from an alley where Felt would have been detected if he had gone there.[19]
Felt was also said to have sent cryptic messages to Woodward in his daily copy of The New York Times; however, The New York Times was not delivered to Woodward’s apartment door, according to Bryant, but rather a stack of newspapers was left in the reception area—meaning that Felt’s message could have been read by other subscribers in the building and would not likely have been seen by Woodward.[20]
Bryant suggests that Woodward was being instructed what to write by the CEO of the Robert Mullen Company, a PR firm and CIA front for which E. Howard Hunt worked.[21]
The Watergate Committee’s senior Republican, Howard Baker, had a hunch that Woodward was affiliated with the CIA, and he directed one of the Watergate Committee’s lawyers to inquire about the association, though the inquiry was rebuffed by the CIA.[22]
Woodward’s employer, The Washington Post, which published his Watergate scoops, had a close relationship with the CIA that was solidified during the period when Ben Bradlee was the executive editor (1965-1991). According to Bryant, Bradlee deployed every fabrication and resource at his disposal to ensure that his CIA affiliation was not exposed. Like his two ace reporters, Bradlee was “an unabashed liar.”[23]
Regarding Woodward and Bernstein, Bryant wrote that they are “not the honorable knights for truth and justice depicted by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men [1976 award-winning film]. Indeed their lives and their Watergate reporting are, unfortunately, a sprawling net of lies that are moored to the monolithic lie of Deep Throat.”[24]
Another CIA connection to Watergate lies with Alexander Butterfield, a former aide to H.R. Haldeman, who coughed up to the Watergate Committee the secret taping system, which revealed Nixon’s involvement in efforts to cover up the Watergate break-ins and other activities. Butterfield had been an Air Force Colonel who served as the principal liaison between the military and CIA in Australia.[25]
Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was yet another figure in the Watergate saga with covert CIA connections.
A former war crimes prosecutor in Germany after World War II who helped Lyndon B. Johnson escape voter fraud charges, Jaworski served as attorney and director of the Texas-based M.D. Anderson Foundation which funded medical research and covertly acted as a CIA conduit to disburse funds in the 1960s, including to the National Students Association.[26]
Bryant writes that Nixon was “utterly blind to the fact that Haig would use Jaworski to raze his administration.”[27]
The silent coup of 1974, abetted by Haig, Woodward, Jaworski, Butterfield, McCord and others, delivered the U.S. presidency to Vice President Gerald Ford, who appointed Haig as his Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney as his Deputy Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense.[28]
Bryant wrote that “Bob Woodward and The Washington Post had enabled the neocons to have their first considerable taste of power. The hawks had triumphed over Nixon’s détente with the Soviets and China.”[29
Russia has significantly stepped up its military cooperation with Iran amid the Islamic Republic’s showdown with Israel. Many days have passed since Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, with the region still on edge awaiting a likely major Iranian response.
The NY Times and others confirmed this week that Russia has begun delivering radars and air defense equipment, possibly including S-400 anti-air missile components, to the Iranians.
This can be seen as Moscow’s ‘payback’ for America arming Ukraine. Now, Russia is arming America’s (and Israel’s) chief enemy in the Middle East.
While the Times report did not specify precisely what arms or defense equipment is being delivered, Iranian officials have long sought its S-400 Triumf air defense system. “The Times report did not say what equipment Iran had requested from Russia or what had been delivered,” Israeli media has noted of the report. “Iran already has some Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, though Moscow now has the more advanced S-400 system.”
[…]
Read the full article at ZeroHedge News. (Subscription needed.)
After the recent Microsoft Windows failed update by CrowdStrike that crippled computers worldwide, cyber security experts have been in high demand for journalists worldwide to report on just how serious and how likely it is that a cyber attack could cripple our society.
For those criminal elements who earn their living from cyber attacks and ransoms, this must be cyber heaven for them, because the corporate media is doing their jobs for them, for free!
The Daily Mail is a recent example, where they have almost literally published a blueprint on how to destroy America through a cyber attack.
EXCLUSIVE: How a cybersecurity attack would cripple America – after catastrophic Crowdsource glitch
Cybercriminals could cripple the US by targeting just 10 critical components in an electrical network, experts have revealed.
The attack would begin with ‘a series of cascading failures,’ first shutting down essential service providers, like 911 call centers and healthcare providers, and then spreading to critical infrastructure.
Americans would lose access to energy, water, financial services, public transportation and cell phone networks, resulting in severe ramifications.
Morgan Wright, a former senior advisor in antiterrorism at the US State Department, told DailyMail.com that ‘civil unrest’ and a ‘breakdown in the social order’ would soon follow.
The world had a taste of what a cyberattack could do when a flawed update was issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last month, causing 8.5 million Windows computers to malfunction.
The misstep impacted airlines, banks, supermarkets, TV stations, and many other industries worldwide.
Microsoft experienced a second outage on Tuesday, which impacted many of its services and companies that use its tech for about 10 hours.
The tech giant later admitted that its services were taken down by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that was ‘amplified’ by an error in the company’s cyber defenses.
Eric O’Neill, a former FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence operative, told DailyMail.com that foreign spies have spent over a decade looking for security holes in infrastructure to leverage for conducting catastrophic cyber attacks.
They have already found ways to disrupt America’s fuel, power, water, communications, and education systems as they look to exploit our reliance on these essential resources, he continued.
An attack of this kind would have dire consequences for US citizens, such as even killing Americans on their soil, warned Nicholas Reese, a cyber expert and adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.
He explained that a cyberattack on 911 call centers would deprive patients of urgent medical care.
Meanwhile, hospitals would see a disruption in intensive care units and operating rooms, causing medical equipment to falter and patient deaths. (Full article.)
In fact, just type in “cyber attack” into your favorite news search, and you will see that cyber attacks are already a daily occurrence, and gaining in frequency.
Here are a few examples just within the past couple of days:
McLaren confirms cyberattack across its 13 Michigan hospitals, physician network
For the second time in a year, cybercriminals have attacked McLaren Health Care’s technology platforms, the Grand Blanc-based health system said Wednesday afternoon, confirming the cause of a disruption earlier this week to all 13 of its Michigan hospitals, surgery, infusion and imaging centers along with its network of 113,000 medical providers throughout Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.
“McLaren Health Care can now confirm the disruption … was the result of a criminal cyber attack,” said a statement sent to the Free Press. “Our information technology team continues to work with external cyber security experts to analyze the nature of the attack and mitigate the impacts of the threat actors. At this time, we have not determined if any patient or employee data was compromised.” (Full article.)
Hacker group responsible for Columbus cyberattack claims 45% of data is published; ransom deadline extended
Mayor Ginther’s office said that as of 4 p.m. Wednesday, they have no evidence that any of the city’s data has been published.
The hacker group holding the city’s data for ransom now claims they’ve published about 45% of it and is threatening to release more if the city doesn’t pay the ransom by Thursday morning. However, Mayor Andrew Ginther’s office says there is no evidence that data has been published.
Hackers claim to have uploaded access to surveillance video, building information and personal information of employees on the dark web. (Full article.)
North Miami City Hall remains closed following possible cyber attack
The city of North Miami remains closed Tuesday as officials deal with a possible cyber breach.
A notice now appears on the city’s website alerting visitors to the “possible breach affecting its network system.”
Local 10 News has learned their IT department was notified of the breach on Sunday.
Residents are growing more frustrated as city business is unable to be conducted. (Full article.)
Hackers Allegedly Steal Billions of Personal Records From Fla. Security Firm
The stolen data includes Social Security numbers and physical addresses, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against National Public Data, which performs background checks.
A little-known company in Florida allegedly lost records on 2.9 billion individuals to hackers, according to a class-action lawsuit.
National Public Data specializes in background checks and fraud prevention. But the data it collects appears to have ended up in the hands of a hacking group called “USDoD.” It began selling access to the stolen data in April, claiming to have info on users in the US, UK, and Canada.
It has since been hit with a class-action lawsuit, Bloomberg Law reports. California resident Christopher Hoffman filed after his identity protection provider notified him that his personal data had been compromised in the breach.
The data leak might be one of the largest of all time, although the full scale of the incident remains unconfirmed. National Public Data didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in June, malware collection site VX Underground was able to review the stolen data, which was originally on sale for $3.5 million. (Full article.)
The US government has put former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard on a special air traffic surveillance list, according to a group of Air Marshal whistleblowers.
Gabbard served in Congress for eight years (2013-2021) and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, but left the party in 2022 over ideological differences. She is also a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army reserve.
For the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), however, Gabbard appears to be a security risk. Last month, she was placed into the ‘Quiet Skies’ program and monitored wherever she flies, according to the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC).
The outlet UncoverDC reported this week that Gabbard has “two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals [FAMs] on every flight she boards,” citing AMNC director Sonya LaBosco.
AMNC posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the claim came from their whistleblowers, who are ready to go on the record with the appropriate documentation.
— Air Marshal National Council (@FAMS_AMNC) August 4, 2024
The group has also claimed that the TSA and FAMS have “initiated armed government surveillance on high level conservative politicians,” and that the information they intend to reveal will “horrify and sicken you as Americans.”
LaBosco has accused the TSA and its parent department, Homeland Security, of engaging in a “big domestic surveillance grab” that seems to be targeting conservatives. According to the group, Quiet Skies has been used against several people who attended the January 6, 2021 protest at the US Capitol – and their family members, including infants.
According to LaBosco, Gabbard was placed on the list on July 23, a day after she criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in a Fox News interview. FAMs were mobilized the very next day and followed her on a July 25 flight, LaBosco said.
Gabbard famously rattled Harris during the 2020 Democratic primary debates, bringing up her prosecutorial record. She also denounced Hillary Clinton as “the queen of warmongers,” after the former presidential candidate accused her of being a “Russian asset.”
Most recently, Gabbard told podcaster Lex Fridman that “all the statements and comments that the [Biden-Harris White House] has made from the beginning of this war essentially point to their objective being to basically destroy Russia.”
Gabbard has not yet commented on the whistleblower revelations. She has just returned from Oklahoma, where she took command of a drill sergeant battalion that runs the US Army basic training program.
According to the TSA, ‘Quiet Skies’ is a tool that allows the FAMS to “focus on travelers who may present an elevated risk to aviation security.” The agency claims to have developed “a set of risk-based, intelligence-driven scenario rules,” under strict DHS oversight and respect for privacy and civil rights.
