US GOVERNMENT CRIMES

W.T. WHITNEY Jr—Colombia acts as the local U.S. enforcer as regards Venezuela. That role grew out of U.S. Plan Colombia which after 2000 had the United States building up Colombia’s military, harassing leftist insurgents, and establishing a base for regional military operations – all under the pretext of combating illegal drugs.

Before arriving in Bogota, Pompeo had visited Venezuela’s other neighbors – Surinam, Brazil and Guyana. In Boa Vista, located 141 miles from the Venezuelan border, he met with Brazil’s foreign minister and commiserated with Venezuelan refugees.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even more complex with the addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions to continue to increase. We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet may well depend on our doing so. Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us all.

MoA—That is of course bollocks. The Ukrainian plot was real. We know that because officials from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, which is supported by the U.S. State Department, have officially admitted it and because the Ukrainian media have been all over the story.

CYNTHIA CHUNG—According to a 1998 International Committee of the Red Cross presentation before the European parliament intended on evaluating how “non-lethal” the non-lethal technologies promoted by Alexander, Channon et al. actually are in reality, it was found that non-lethal weapons are simply defined as weapons with a less-than 25% fatality rate. Perhaps this is what the senior Pentagon officials were referring to in their “limited” nuclear exchange scenarios. Included in the list of non-lethal weapons now widely used in the U.S. military are lasers, extremely low frequency (ELF) weapons, and various chemical, biological and audio stun weapons that can cause permanent damage such as blindness, deafness and destruction of the gastrointestinal system. According to Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the less-well-known al-Qa’im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander’s non-lethal conceptions. Jim Channon actually confirmed this in an email correspondence with Ronson.

ELIJAH MAGNIER—In the Levant, both US and Russian forces are present in a small area, but with different goals, interests and reasons. Russia seeks the unity of Syria because it is its region of influence. Long-term stability must be established there as an example to other nations. That is not an easy goal to achieve when the US is operating in Syria, interfering with the flow of food, oil and gas in an area considered to be the resource reservoir of the entire country.