Making sense of the world through data
The focus of this blog is #data #bigdata #dataanalytics #privacy #digitalmarketing #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #GIS #datavisualization and many other aspects, fields and applications of data
If you are not hypnotized by the current UFO / balloon mania, you will quickly realize that all is not well under the sun. Deficits are also ballooning faster than China can inflate balloons as tensions get hotter day by day. The two are unfortunately not unrelated.
Let's hope the coming conflict will not be nuclear although I do not see how this is avoidable since the outcome will quickly become existential for all the participants.
Analyst and financial writer John Rubino says we are in a “debt and death spiral” that will force dramatic changes on the world.
Rubino
explains, “The debt spiral part of this means things from here continue
to get worse and worse for the big currencies of the world until they
die..."
" In other words, until people lose faith
in them, refuse to use them and hold them anymore until their value
falls to their intrinsic value, which is zero. That manifests to
hyperinflation. The value of the currency falls as opposed to the
things you buy with it...
Things feel basically okay for a long time as long as governments could force interest rates down to really low levels. The
side effects of that are massive money creation and, eventually,
inflation. That’s what we are dealing with now. So, here we go.
Welcome to the end game for the world’s big currencies.”
Rubino
contends things have gotten so out of control that there is no stopping
what is coming. Rubino says, “We are in the part of the cycle now
where things just get worse, and there is nothing we can do about it..."
"
You are going to see companies that have borrowed huge amounts of money
to buy back their stock, and now they see their interest costs
explode. Governments around the world have the same problem, and there
is nothing central banks can do about this. The next stage of
this is when everybody realizes that there is no fix. Daddy is not
going to come home and take care of all of this, and there is no adult
supervision.
The financial markets are
basically on their own with so much debt that there is nothing left to
do. You either have mass bankruptcies or inflate away the currencies of
the world, and we’re there—finally. 2023 is going to be an amazing
year... and we make the decision about what kind of a crisis we fall
into.
We have a 1930’s style
deflationary depression, which is what happens if we keep raising
interest rates. Or, a Weimar Germany kind of hyperinflation, which is
what happens if we try to inflate our way out of our current debt
problems. And that’s it. This is not something on the distant horizon anymore. It’s something right here staring us in the face.”
Rubino
talks about the threat of global nuclear war and contends our extreme
financial problems will seem timid if the nukes fly.
In the nuclear war scenario, the global population could get cut in half with “radiation and starvation.”
Rubino
also talks about ways to be more resilient, and that starts with
shedding as much debt as you can. It also includes food, water, cash,
defensive investments and precious metals.
Rubino thinks
the economy is so weak, with so many different financial bubbles, that
one bubble pop could bring the entire system down rapidly.
Rubino says look out for big European banks to go insolvent as a warning
sign of trouble if the trillion-dollar derivative complex blows up.
Another way to put it nicely: "It does not mater how fast you run if you boarded the wrong train!" And unfortunately, we are all aboard the wrong train. Central Banks will soon inflate the money supply into irrelevance. This is unavoidable. It has happened countless times in the past and this time will not, cannot be different. It is not a curse, just the fact that once you go down the slippery slope of easy money, the end game is always the same. Dollars, Pesos and Denarius make no difference.
From Nixon's 1971 "temporary" end of convertibility to Reagan's 1981 "Good Morning America!" Reaganomics pile of debt, wars and empire have brought bankruptcy closer than ever. That, more than anything is the real reason behind the current world tensions. We'll be lucky if this house of cards stands until 2024...
There
is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank
bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable
systems.
The vapid discussions about "soft" or "hard" landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic's encounter with the iceberg was "soft" or "hard:" either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies.
Death
Spirals are the inevitable result of entrenched interests clinging on
to the status quo and thwarting any adaptation or evolution that
might threaten or diminish their share of the swag--and that includes
any real change because any consequential modification has the potential
to upset the gravy train.
The status quo "solution" is to borrow and blow whatever sums are needed to satisfy every entrenched interest. Filling
the federal slop-trough for all the hogs now requires borrowing a
staggering $1.4 trillion every year, and billions more in municipal,
county and state bonds (borrowing money via selling bonds) on the local
level.
This borrow and blow strategy avoids any uncomfortable discipline and difficult trade-offs: everybody gets everything they demand.
This strategy looks "unsinkable" until the iceberg looms dead ahead. History suggests that fiscal and political discipline is eventually imposed by the real world in one fashion or another when diminishing returns enter a Death Spiral.
Any limit on debt is of course "impossible," just as it was "impossible" for the Titanic to sink. But
history is rather implacable in this regard. The self-serving hubris of
"impossible" limits on largesse tend to collapse on contact with
currency devaluation, structural inflation or a systemic crisis of legitimacy that sweeps away the entire worm-eaten facade of stability.
In
other words, the entrenched interests benefitting from the status quo
will continue to do what worked in the past until it all implodes. The pain of discipline and modest sacrifices is too great to bear, so let's collapse the entire system.
Autocracies excel at Death Spirals because they eliminate dissent, transparency and competing nodes of power. Nobody's left to push back on disastrous policy decisions, so autocratic regimes race toward the iceberg at full speed.
Rather than invest in real long-term solutions, everyone is in the casino, buying options that expire in a few hours. Rather
than invest for an entire quarter--whew, three whole
months!--speculators now consider a week an unbearably long time to hold
a trade.
Speculative frenzies create their own Death
Spirals, as gamblers front-run the "guaranteed" bailout of speculators
by central banks. This is the consequence of moral hazard being
elevated to "guaranteed": there is no need to actually wait for the
inevitable central bank bailout of bets gone bad, we can place bets
before the bailout because we know it's as assured as the sun rising
tomorrow morning.
Nice, except central banks and bailouts also reach diminishing returns and enter Death Spirals.Doing more of what's failed seems
to work once, then twice, if you give it enough juice, but the third
time is iffy and the fourth time collapses the speculative casino that
the status quo was trying to save.
No one who benefits from the Moral Hazard Casino Economy believes it's no longer sustainable. All
the gamblers, big and small, are confident the Federal Reserve and
other central banks can cover any losses and make good whatever befalls
the casino. The hubris of the punters, big and small, is essentially
infinite.
I'll get out before the house of cards collapses,
everyone tells themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to front-run the
inevitable bailout of this speculative frenzy.
There is an
element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank
bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable
systems. Death Spirals and speculative frenzies have now been
completely normalized. We can't imagine any other way to operate. But
this New Normal won't last as long as punters believe. Doing more of
what worked in the past is only accelerating the casino's demise.
We live in a time of lies and propaganda when telling the truth has become an act of dissidence. And still, here it is. A truth which has almost completely been obliterated in the West.
On
February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into
Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in
east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians.
Officials
from the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were located in the vicinity at the time
and kept a record of the shelling as it took place. What the OSCE
discovered was that the bombardment dramatically intensified as the week
went on until it reached a peak on February 19, when a total of 2,026
artillery strikes were recorded. Keep in mind, the Ukrainian
Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact
that were occupied by other Ukrainians.
We want to emphasize that the officials from the OSCE were operating in
their professional capacity gathering first-hand evidence of shelling in
the area. What their data shows is that Ukrainian Forces were
bombing and killing their own people. This has all been documented and
has not been challenged.
So, the question we must all ask ourselves is this: Is the bombardment and slaughter of one’s own people an ‘act of war’?
We
think it is. And if we are right, then we must logically assume that
the war began before the Russian invasion (which was launched a full
week later) We must also assume that Russia’s alleged
“unprovoked aggression” was not unprovoked at all but was the
appropriate humanitarian response to the deliberate killing of
civilians. In order to argue that the Russian invasion was ‘not
provoked’, we would have to say that firing over 4,000 artillery shells
into towns and neighborhoods where women and children live, is not a
provocation? Who will defend that point of view?
No one, because it’s absurd. The killing of civilians in the Donbas was a clear provocation, a provocation that was aimed at goading Russia into a war.
And –as we said earlier– the OSCE had monitors on the ground who
provided full documentation of the shelling as it took place, which is
as close to ironclad, eyewitness testimony as you’re going to get.
This, of course, is a major break with the “official narrative”
which identifies Russia as the perpetrator of hostilities. But, as we’ve
shown, that simply isn’t the case. The official narrative is wrong. Even
so, it might not surprise you to know that most of the mainstream media
completely omitted any coverage of the OSCE’s fact-finding activities
in east Ukraine. The one exception to was Reuters that published a
deliberately opaque account published on February 18 titled “Russia
voices alarm over sharp increase of Donbass shelling”. Here’s an
excerpt:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
voiced alarm on Friday over a sharp increase in shelling in eastern
Ukraine and accused the OSCE special monitoring mission of glossing over
what he said were Ukrainian violations of the peace process….
Washington and its allies have raised fears that the upsurge in violence
in the Donbass could form part of a Russian pretext to invade Ukraine.
Tensions are already high over a Russian military buildup to the north,
east and south of Ukraine.
“We are very concerned by the
reports of recent days – yesterday and the day before there was a sharp
increase in shelling using weapons that are prohibited under the Minsk
agreements,” Lavrov said, referring to peace accords aimed at
ending the conflict. “So far we are seeing the special monitoring
mission is doing its best to smooth over all questions that point to the
blame of Ukraine’s armed forces,” he told a news conference.
Ukraine’s military on Friday denied violating the Minsk peace process
and accused Moscow of waging an information war to say that Kyiv was
shelling civilians, allegations it said were lies and designed to
provoke it.” (Russia voices alarm over sharp increase of Donbass shelling, Reuters)
Notice
the clever way that Reuters frames its coverage so that the claims of
the Ukrainian military are given as much credibility as the claims of
the Russian Foreign Minister. What Reuters fails to point out is
that the OSCE’s report verifies Lavrov’s version of events while
disproving the claims of the Ukrainians. It is the job of a
journalist to make the distinction between fact and fiction but, once
again, we see how agenda-driven news is not meant to inform but to
mislead.
The point we are trying to make is simple: The war in Ukraine was not
launched by a tyrannical Russian leader (Putin) bent on rebuilding the
Soviet Empire. That narrative is a fraud that was cobbled together by
neocon spin-meisters trying to build public support for a war with
Russia. The facts I am presenting here can be identified on a
map where the actual explosions took place and were then recorded by
officials whose job was to fulfill that very task. Can you see
the difference between the two? In one case, the storyline rests on
speculation, conjecture and psychobabble; while in the other, the
storyline is linked to actual events that took place on the ground and
were catalogued by trained professionals in the field. In which version
of events do you have more confidence?
Bottom line:
Russia did not start the war in Ukraine. That is a fake narrative. The
responsibility lies with the Ukrainian Army and their leaders in Kiev.
And here’s something else that is typically excluded in the media’s selective coverage. Before
Putin sent his tanks across the border into Ukraine, he invoked United
Nations Article 51 which provides a legal justification for military
intervention. Of course, the United States has done this
numerous times to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy to its numerous
military interventions. But, in this case, you can see where the
so-called Responsibility To Protect (R2P) could actually be justified,
after all, by most estimates, the Ukrainian army has killed over 14,000
ethnic Russians since the US-backed coup 8 years ago. If ever there was a situation in which a defensive military operation could be justified, this was it.
But that still doesn’t fully explain why Putin invoked UN Article 51.
For that, we turn to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who
explained it like this:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a 'special military operation'…. under
Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s
contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been
subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed
thousands of people.… Moreover, Russia claims to have
documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive
military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the
Russian-led 'special military operation.' [OSCE figures show an increase
of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]
..The
bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the
doctrine of anticipatory collective self-defense, devised originally by
the US and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on
fact, not fiction.
While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in
the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military
intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations
Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the
uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the
legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter,
Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground. (“Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression”, Consortium News)
Here’s a bit more background from an article by foreign policy analyst Danial Kovalik:
One
must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already
a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian
military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in
Kiev… claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children,
and displaced around 1.5 million more … The government in Kiev, and
especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these
peoples … precisely because of their ethnicity. ..
While
the UN Charter prohibits unilateral acts of war, it also provides, in
Article 51, that 'nothing in the present Charter shall impair the
inherent right of individual or collective self-defense… ' And this
right of self-defense has been interpreted to permit countries to
respond, not only to actual armed attacks, but also to the threat of
imminent attack.
In light of the above, it is my assessment.. that Russia had a right to
act in its own self-defense by intervening in Ukraine, which had become a
proxy of the US and NATO for an assault – not only on Russian ethnics
within Ukraine – but also upon Russia itself. (“Why Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is legal under international law”, RT)
So,
has anyone in the western media reported on the fact that Putin invoked
UN Article 51 before he launched the Special Military Operation?
No, they haven’t, because to do so, would be an admission that Putin’s
military operation complies with international law. Instead, the media
continues to spread the fiction that ‘Hitler-Putin is trying to rebuild
the Soviet empire’, a claim for which there is not a scintilla of
evidence. Keep in mind, Putin’s operation does not involve the toppling
of a foreign government to install a Moscow-backed stooge, or the arming
and training a foreign military that will be used as proxies to fight a
geopolitical rival, or the stuffing a country with state-of-the-art
weaponry to achieve his own narrow strategic objectives, or perpetrating
terrorist acts of industrial sabotage (Nord-Stream 2) to prevent the
economic integration of Asia and Europe. No, Putin hasn’t engaged in any
of these things. But Washington certainly has, because Washington isn’t
constrained by international law. In Washington’s eyes, international
law is merely an inconvenience that is dismissively shrugged off
whenever unilateral action is required. But Putin is not nearly as
cavalier about such matters, in fact, he has a long history of playing
by the rules because he believes the rules help to strengthen everyone’s
security. And, he’s right; they do.
And that’s why he invoked Article 51 before he sent the troops
to help the people in the Donbas. He felt he had a moral obligation to
lend them his assistance but wanted his actions to comply with
international law. We think he achieved both.
US imperial planner George Kennan, an architect of the first cold war, wrote in 1948:
"we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population"
"Our real task" is "to maintain this position of disparity"
Here’s
something else you will never see in the western media. You’ll never
see the actual text of Putin’s security demands that were made a full
two months before the war broke out. And, the reason you won’t see them,
is because his demands were legitimate, reasonable and necessary. All
Putin wanted was basic assurances that NATO was not planning to put its
bases, armies and missile sites on Russia’s border. In other words, he
was doing the same thing that all responsible leaders do to defend the
safety and security of their own people.
Here are a few critical excerpts from the text of Putin’s proposal to the US and NATO:
Article 1
The Parties shall cooperate on the basis of principles of indivisible, equal and undiminished security and to these ends:
shall not undertake actions nor participate in or support activities that affect the security of the other Party; shall not implement security measures adopted by each Party individually or in the framework of an international organization, military alliance or coalition that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.
Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The
United States of America shall not establish military bases in the
territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or
develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Article 5
The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the Parties.
The Parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear
or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type,
including in the framework of international organizations, military
alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and
national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack
targets in the territory of the other Party.
The Parties shall maintain dialogue and cooperate to improve mechanisms
to prevent dangerous military activities on and over the high seas,
including agreeing on the maximum approach distance between warships and
aircraft.
Article 6
The Parties
shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and
shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as
well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such
weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.
Article 7
The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and
return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories
at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national
territories. The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for
deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories.
The Parties shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons. The
Parties shall not conduct exercises or training for general-purpose
forces, that include scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons.” (“To Make Sense of War”, Israel Shamir, Unz Review)
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Putin was worried about. He
was worried about NATO expansion and, in particular, the emergence of a
hostile military alliance backed by Washington-groomed Nazis occupying
territory on his western flank. Was that unreasonable of him? Should
he have embraced these US-backed Russophobes and allowed them to place
their missiles on his border? Would that have been the prudent thing to
do?
So, what can we deduce from Putin’s list of demands?
First, we can deduce that he is not trying to reconstruct the Soviet empire as the MSM relentlessly insists. The list focuses exclusively on security-related demands, nothing else.
Second, it proves that the war could have easily been avoided
had Zelensky simply maintained the status quo and formally announced
that Ukraine would remain neutral. In fact, Zelensky actually
agreed to neutrality in negotiations with Moscow in March, but
Washington prevented the Ukrainian president from going through with the
deal which means that the Biden administration is largely responsible
for the ongoing conflict. (RT published an article stating
clearly that an agreement had been reached between Russia and Ukraine
in March but the deal was intentionally scuttled by the US and UK.
Washington wanted a war.)
Third, it shows that Putin is a reasonable leader whose demands should have been eagerly accepted. Was
it unreasonable of Putin to ask that “The Parties shall refrain from
deploying their armed forces and… military alliances.. in the areas
where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat
to its national security”? Was it unreasonable for him the ask that “The
Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of
nuclear weapons outside their national territories”?
Where exactly are the “unreasonable demands” that Putin supposedly made?
There aren’t any. Putin made no demands that the US wouldn’t have made if ‘the shoe was on the other foot.’
Fourth, it proves that the war is not a struggle for Ukrainian
liberation or democracy. That’s hogwash. It is a war that is aimed at
“weakening” Russia and eventually removing Putin from power. Those are
the overriding goals. What that means is that Ukrainian
soldiers are not dying for their country, they are dying for an elitist
dream to expand NATO, crush Russia, encircle China, and extend US
hegemony for another century. Ukraine is merely the battlefield on which
the Great Power struggle is being fought.
There are number points we are trying to make in this article:
1) Who started the war? Answer– Ukraine started the war
2) Was the Russian invasion a violation of international law? Answer– No, the Russian invasion should be approved under United Nations Article 51
3) Could the war have been avoided if Ukraine declared neutrality and met Putin’s reasonable demands? Answer– Yes, the war could have been avoided
4)
The last point deals with the Minsk Treaty and how the dishonesty of
western leaders is going to effect the final settlement in Ukraine. I am
convinced that neither Washington nor the NATO allies have any idea of
how severely international relations have been decimated by the Minsk
betrayal. In a world where legally binding agreements can be
breezily discarded in the name of political expediency, the only way to
settle disputes is through brute force. Did anyone in Germany, France or
Washington think about this before they acted? (But, first, some background on Minsk.)
The
aim of the Minsk agreement was to end the fighting between the
Ukrainian army and ethnic Russians in the Donbas region of Ukraine. It
was the responsibility of the four participants in the treaty– Germany,
France, Russia and Ukraine– to ensure that both sides followed the
terms of the deal. But in December, former German Chancellor Angela
Merkel said in an interview with a German magazine, that there was never
any intention of implementing the deal, instead, the plan was to use
the time to make Ukraine stronger in order to prepare for a war with
Russia. So, clearly, from the very beginning, the United States intended to provoke a war with Russia.
On September 5, 2014, Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia all signed
Minsk, but the treaty failed and the fighting resumed. On February 12,
2015, Minsk 2 was signed, but that failed, as well. Please, watch this
short segment on You Tube by Amit Sengupta who gives a brief rundown of
Minsk and its implications: (I transcribed the piece myself and any
mistakes are mine.)
(11:40 minute) “In 2015, Germany and
France were supposed to play a neutral role.They were supposed to make
Ukraine and Russia follow the rules. But they didn’t do that, and the
reason they didn’t do that is what Angela Merkel revealed in her
interview on December 7. Merkel said, “The 2014 Minsk agreement
was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also gave time to become
stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014 and 2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
Basically, all three partners of the Minsk Agreement lied and betrayed Russia. Even
Putin said, “One day Russia will have to reach an agreement with
Ukraine, but Germany and France betrayed Russia, and now they are
helping Ukraine with weapons.”… It is a shame that western political
leaders engage in negotiations that they do not intend to honor or
enforce…(Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has admitted the same as
Merkel and Hollande)….Now even Putin has acknowledged that it was a mistake to agree to the Minsk Accords.
He even said that the Donbas problem should have been resolved by
force-of-arms at the time. (2015) Russia waited 8 years to recognize
Donbas’s independence, and then launched a full-scale attack this year.
But then Putin was under the impression that the Minsk Accords–guaranteed by Germany and France and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council including the United States– would resolve the crisis and would give the Donbas autonomy while remaining part of Ukraine. Germany and France were supposed to make sure the Minsk accords were implemented from 2015 to 2022. The
collective west always knew that war was the only solution. They never
wanted peace, they just played along in the name of Minsk agreement. So, you can see, it is a diplomatic “win” for the west……
France and Germany appeased Russia with the Minsk agreement and gave
false hopes of a peaceful settlement. But, in reality, they were buying
time for Ukraine to build its military. There was never a diplomatic
solution; the collective west –which includes the United States,
NATO, the European Union and the G-7– fooled Russia into believing
there was a diplomatic solution to the Donbas conflict (but) instead,
they were preparing Ukraine for a full-fledged war against Russia.
So, either way, this war was meant to happen. There was never a
diplomatic solution…. This is what Angela Merkel wanted to convey: “The
Cold War never ended”. She was the German Chancellor when the coup took
place in Ukraine in 2014 and the Minsk Accords were signed. Therefore
her contribution to this duplicitous game along with Germany, France,
Ukraine and US– has led to this war. And she very well knows it. But,
either way, it is not going to end well for Germany or France whose
economies have been badly hurt. Ukraine has been completely destroyed.
It has become the Afghanistan of Europe. It is the western political leaders that are guilty of the murder of Ukraine.
As it has been since 2014, the Ukrainian government has been launching
vicious military attacks against Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians in
the Donbas region. Thousands of Russian speaking civilians have been
killed. Russia should have taken back the territory in 2014 along with
Crimea. But, then, Russia fell into the trap of the western countries’
Minsk Agreement. … It is not Russia that started this war, it is
the United States that started this war. Ukraine is just a pawn that is
supported by the US and the other european governments. And, it is a pity that the Ukrainian government serves the interests of the United States and not the Ukrainian people.” (“Angela Merkel’s revelation about Minsk Agreements | Russia Ukraine war“, Amit Sengupta, You Tube)
There’s
no way to overstate the importance of the Minsk betrayal or the impact
it’s going to have on the final settlement in Ukraine. When
trust is lost, nations can only ensure their security through brute
force. What that means is that Russia must expand its perimeter as far
as is necessary to ensure that it will remain beyond the enemy’s range
of fire. (Putin, Lavrov and Medvedev have already indicated that they
plan to do just that.) Second, the new perimeter must be permanently
fortified with combat troops and lethal weaponry that are kept on
hairtrigger alert. When treaties become vehicles for political
opportunism, then nations must accept a permanent state of war. This is
the world that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko and the US created by opting
to use ‘the cornerstone of international relations’ (Treaties) to
advance their own narrow warmongering objectives.
We just wonder if anyone in Washington realizes whet the fu** they’ve done?
Most often with the news, you get the "news" when it's hot and then move on to something else. And so it is with the protests against the Covid restrictions in China.
1 - Protests
2 - Turn around from the Chinese Government
3 - ???
But was there even a "3"? Well, apparently, there was. ALL the people who protested were disappeared. Gone!
And that is the real problem with the technological dystopia that China has become. They know who you are. They know where you are. They can therefore pinpoint the arrests and "disappear" the thousands of people involved without a wave. Welcome to the future! Tienanmen without blood.
All this was known from the very beginning as several epidemiologists explained that the mRNA vaccines were not ready, most probably offered limited protection at great price eventually which is exactly what we are seeing now.
In fact, a bombshell paper he co-authored last
month suggests ALL vaccines for common respiratory viruses may face
intractable hurdles. And that’s not even the worst news. I’m not
exaggerating.
Last month, three scientists pointed out flu shots barely work and couldn’t be approved based on the standards used for vaccines like measles:
“After more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines,
very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been
noted… our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases.” [emphasis added]
True. Severalrigorouspapers have proven that flu shots are placebos masquerading as public policy.
But the same scientists then compared our beloved and groundbreaking Covid vaccines to those pointless flu jabs:
As variant SARS-CoV-2 strains have emerged, deficiencies in these
[Covid] vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become
apparent.
Just who are these vicious anti-vax rebels?
Three researchers at the National Institutes for Health. Including
one whose name may ring a bell: the now-retired Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
Yet the Covid/flu shot comparison is only one of the article’s bombshells.
At its core, the piece raises the question of whether any vaccines can ever work well enough to matter against bugs like common coronaviruses, influenza, and RSV.
And that question hides an even more troubling one, one the authors
do not ask: have our efforts to beat Sars-Cov-2 by driving our immune
response in ways it was not designed to go caused dangers we are only
beginning to understand?
Long before the coronavirus hit, Fauci and scientists who specialize
in vaccine development knew flu shots hardly worked. They knew they
needed a better vaccine to beat Sars-Cov-2.
As Covid spread around the world in early 2020, they believed they
had found one: jabs that had a completely different mechanism of action
than influenza vaccines.
Flu shots are old-school “inactivated virus” vaccines. They contain
actual influenza viruses grown in chicken eggs and treated with formaldehyde so they cannot reproduce.
Fauci and his colleagues at Warp Speed, the federal program that
developed the Covid shots, decided to focus on mRNA biotechnology to
make a next-generation vaccine.
The Covid vaccines consist of a strand of genetic code – mRNA – that
tells our cells to make a piece of the coronavirus called the spike
protein, along with a tiny fat globe that encases the mRNA and helps
bring it to our cells. (mRNA occurs naturally, but the mRNA in the
vaccines has been subtly modified to make it easier to deliver to our
cells and more potent when it arrives.)
In the most basic way, mRNA vaccines work.
That is, they make our cells produce huge amounts of the spike
protein. They cause a powerful response with high levels of anti-spike
protein antibodies, far more than our immune systems produce in response
to an actual coronavirus infection. Fauci and other scientists hoped
those antibodies would have a strong and lasting protective effect.
—
Only they didn’t.
As Ken Frazier, the then-chief executive of Merck, which is history’s
most successful vaccine company but which rapidly ended its efforts at a
coronavirus vaccine, warned in 2020:
There are a lot of examples of vaccines in the past that have
stimulated the immune system, but ultimately didn’t confer protection.
Frazier was right.
We now have two years of real-world data on the mRNAs, based on
billions of doses. Putting side effects aside, they work extremely well
against Covid – for about four months after the second dose.
After that, their effectiveness rapidly wanes. It falls to zero
against coronavirus infection and transmission within a few months. In
fact, we have increasing evidence that it eventually turns negative –
that vaccinated people are MORE likely to get Covid repeatedly than the
unvaccinated.
What about severe disease and death from Covid? Early on, the mRNAs
prevent those too, because if you don’t get infected with the
coronavirus, you can’t die from it.
What about after they stop working against infection? What about now?
In truth, no one knows. Fauci and vaccine advocates will insist forever
that the mRNAs retain some effectiveness against severe disease and
death.
But their evidence comes almost entirely from epidemiological studies that compare the results in non-random groups
of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The problem is that these
studies cannot be trusted because vaccinated people are healthier as a
group than unvaccinated people (and the gap has likely increased with
each booster).
This is exactly the same reason that influenza shots seem to work against pneumonia EVEN BEFORE PEOPLE RECEIVE THEM. Flu vaccines are a marker for health, not a driver of health.
—
At the same time, the coronavirus has mutated against the vaccines
exactly as some immunologists predicted. It has changed its spike to
defeat the mRNA-generated antibodies.
Worse, efforts to update the vaccine against the new Omicron variants do not work, probably because the first generation vaccines leave such a powerful imprint on the immune system.
The upshot is that Covid vaccines, like flu vaccines, appear to be – at best – ineffective on a population basis.
Two years after mass mRNA vaccinations began, the wealthy countries
that used them are still having mass Covid waves and significant deaths,
mainly in the same very elderly people who have died from Covid all
along. Poorer countries that used other vaccines are not reporting many
Covid cases or deaths anymore, but whether that’s because they don’t
have them or have just stopped counting is not clear.
So the Covid vaccines work mechanistically as promised. Only they don’t actually do any long-term good.
—
And Fauci and his co-authors know where to lay the blame. On the human immune system.
It’s not me (or my vaccines) – it’s you!
No, seriously.
As the paper explains, we spend our lives breathing an almost infinite variety of threats:
Because humans inhale and ingest enormous quantities of exogenous
proteins with every breath and mouthful, the respiratory and
gastrointestinal immune compartments have evolved to deal with continual
and massive antigenic assaults from the outside world.
Thus our immune systems have learned to make a distinction between
relatively minor respiratory viruses like influenza and RSV – which have
“a short duration of illness and a typically uncomplicated course” –
and far more serious intruders like measles, which replicate
systemically and can kill even young and healthy people.
The serious threats rouse the full complement of our immune defenses.
And if we beat them, we end up with lifetime immunity. The minor
viruses do not:
As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory
viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2 tend to repeatedly re-infect
people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable
protection.
—
Any virologist or immunologist will tell you that – in the words of Science magazine:
For many infectious diseases, naturally acquired immunity is
known to be more powerful than vaccine-induced immunity and it often
lasts a lifetime.
But our immune systems aren’t trying to provide lifetime
protection against the minor respiratory viruses. We’d rather live with
them and the minor threats they represent, instead of blowing up our own
bodies to defeat an infection that will likely last only a few days.
In Fauci’s words, we have made an
immunologic “Faustian bargain” between tolerance versus infection
control [allowing] transient, moderated infection by respiratory agents
of low or intermediate pathogenicity to restrain the destructive forces
of an immune elimination response.
In other words, the natural human response to real coronaviruses is
NOT long-lasting immunity. And vaccines are not as effective as real
viruses in provoking an immune response. How, then, could a coronavirus
vaccine provide such immunity?
—
Two years ago, the geniuses of virology and immunology thought they had the answer.
The mRNA Covid jabs were designed to overcome evolution and
make us do something we had evolved NOT to do. They fooled our immune
systems into a much more powerful response than it would otherwise have
to Sars-Cov-2, producing supra-naturally high levels of IgG antibodies.
Those super-high antibody levels were supposed to be a feature, not a bug. They were the reason that the mRNAs suppressed infection.
But we now know that the body quickly returns those antibody levels to normal.
Worse, if we force them higher again with repeated booster shots, our
immune system will respond by producing a kind of antibody normally
seen primarily as a response to non-replicating allergens, not viruses.
In other words, our immune systems appear to respond very unfavorably in the long run to the provocation from the mRNAs.
—
The paper ends on a stunning note:
Past unsuccessful attempts to elicit solid protection against
mucosal respiratory viruses and to control the deadly outbreaks and
pandemics they cause have been a scientific and public health failure…
We are excited and invigorated that many investigators and
collaborative groups are rethinking, from the ground up, all of our past
assumptions and approaches to preventing important respiratory viral
diseases and working to find bold new paths forward.
Wait, what?
Past unsuccessful attempts?
From the ground up?
Fauci just helped spearhead the effort to push a new type of vaccine
on the world. After only a few months of testing, the United States and
other countries injected their citizens with more than 3 billion doses
of mRNA.
Yet with these words, Fauci is admitting that effort has failed
completely. He’s not excluding the mRNAs from “past unsuccessful
attempts” that “have been a public health failure.” He’s not saying they
can form the basis for “bold new paths.”
He’s washing his hands of them – and whatever the long-term
consequences of their failed effort to rewire the immune system may be.
Tony Fauci is lucky.
He’s 82.
It’ll be up to the rest of us to deal with what he’s done.
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the
pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and
forth debate inside Washington’s national security community . . .”
NORD STREAM
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location
as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama
City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of
Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is
as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II
structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side
of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across
what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for
decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are
capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear
harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the
bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for
undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The
Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in
America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn,
graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what
they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic
Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22,
planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later,
destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source
with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1,
had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap
Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines,
called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now,
with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest
war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the
pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for
his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said
in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a
spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This
claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine
months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s
national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For
much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how
to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of
the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were
Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Forces Command, whose
covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to
the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight.
The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks
as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of
2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser
Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland,
the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in
their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750
miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern
Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of
Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had
been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap
Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while
enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit,
throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the
administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict
with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its
anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding
company behind it, Nord Stream AG,
was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a
publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for
shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall
of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four
European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in
Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right
to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local
distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were
shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were
estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an
additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the
rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas
supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In
fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as
part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory,
which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other
European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives,
utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market
and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021,
would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas
that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second
pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of
Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating
between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the
Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden
inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz
of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian
natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of
State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as
Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be
enormous political and economic pressure from the German government,
then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added
that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s
views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord
Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive
tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including
Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding
that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had
“always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz,
announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy
nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep
into the fall. Politico later depicted
Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision,
arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan,
that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days,
amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension
and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would
lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington
just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood.
Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly
endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous
European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less
reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and
ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of
December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from
Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an
assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in
short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream.
As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural
gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be
reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to
defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan
to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled
into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task
force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the
State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how
to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure
room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to
the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth
chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the
recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be
reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency
restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not
be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with
direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group
to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream
pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for
an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to
assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs
with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that
whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved
understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If
the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered
former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state
in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working
group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar
with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over
the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a
plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger
an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned
from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian
Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of
Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy
command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington
area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers,
modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded,
after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers
planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully
intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the
security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers
without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced
monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was
compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton
who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in
1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians
for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and
risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s
intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s
enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered
questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the
Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for
a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right
across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for
the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working
guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this.
It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to
Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks
before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met
in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after
some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press
briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially
the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press
coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response
to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were
dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and
telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said.
“The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not
advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have
frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity.
According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA
determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a
covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to
do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a
covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was
deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military
support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a
legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to
do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have
superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White
House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d
said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill
Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has
vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs
1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic
Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and
contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of
millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force
facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an
advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of
penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American
intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening
sites inside China.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some
moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary
Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas”
in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well
as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering
with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in
1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of
NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as
Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO
post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things
Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence
community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.
“He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They
hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors
and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable
deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be
trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other
interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could
pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural
gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet
with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was
where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the
explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were
separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their
run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow
waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The
pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260
feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who,
operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a
mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and
plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective
covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the
waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal
currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City
once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose
trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by
the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically
seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or
submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the
less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a
destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is
mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the
cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight
community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and
told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source
said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but
there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters
off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies,
which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was
known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United
Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had
demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and
magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines
that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish
archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior
officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about
possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up
could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus
insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they
knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian
embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy
was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and
triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to
be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian
system as part of the natural background—something that required
adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a
fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when
the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the
American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of
Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving
scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held
in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth
Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the
program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy,
involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and
warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of
Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with
competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and
destroy them.
It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City
boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the
end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans
and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be
planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day
window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the
exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the
field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the
President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly
practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS,
but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what
he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of
his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the
CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some
shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the
Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing
anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its
charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by
spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being
controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became
clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent
newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about
the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the
assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist
government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the
mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it
clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that
he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant
violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that
“you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under
secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have
it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different
rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was
essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood
that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and
dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the
C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment
than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in
Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a
few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy
dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most
advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing
devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally
triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the
heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater
drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this,
the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low
frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a
piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set
hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is
robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse
that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol,
professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy
at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s
Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway
because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives
are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that
would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a
seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread
underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A
few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three
of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes,
pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be
seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that
something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit,
spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever
establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond
simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian
authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair
the pipelines, the New York Times described
the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No
major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines
made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own
lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action
came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all
remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from
Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his
imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous
strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re
determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the
consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries
or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise
of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations
Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like
you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know
that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the
bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to
sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached.
“Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a
pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said
cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the
U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert
operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated
on a covert signal.
