KIT KLARENBERG—After 18 months of devastating proxy warfare, the scale of the depletion of the Ukrainian military is so extensive that even mainstream sources have been forced to concede the cruel reality. On August 1, The Wall Street Journal reported that “between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians” have “lost one or more limbs since the start of the war.” What’s more, the outlet notes, “the actual figure could be higher” because “it takes time to register patients after they undergo the procedure.”
THE PENTAGON-MEDIA COMPLEX
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The Disinformation Fraud: How America’s Most Powerful Institutions Joined Forces to Crush Speech & Silence Dissent, with Jacob Siegel
88 minutes readGLENN GREENWALD—It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world’s most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent.
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MIKE WHITNEY—“NATO is expected to ask its members to raise its ammunition stockpiles which have been badly depleted by the war in Ukraine… the pace of deliveries to Ukraine, where Kyiv’s troops are firing up to 10,000 artillery shells daily, has drained Western inventories and exposed holes in the efficiency, speed and manpower of supply chains. “If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days,” a European diplomat told Reuters… the stockpiles are running even lower due to the conflict in Ukraine…. The war also cast a spotlight on the lack of industrial capacity necessary to ramp up production quickly.
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America the Feckless: Lies and hypocrisy are at the heart of the Biden foreign policy
24 minutes readPHILIP GIRALDI—Given its potential political blowback, the Hersh story might very well be the most important expose to appear since fighting began in Ukraine over a year ago, but it is being ignored by the White House, which is denying the report, with a spokesman only commenting that “This is false and complete fiction.” The CIA’s spokesman Tammy Thorp likewise replied to Hersh that “This claim is completely and utterly false.” The US Navy was also asked for comments but did not respond. The media, clearly evident by its inaction, has religiously adhered to that government line, possibly due to some mistaken notion that our national security forces have to be supported when they are going “toe to toe with the Russkies” over Ukraine.
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JAMES TWEEDIE—The Pentagon’s excuse for not giving some of its stock of more than 6,000 M1 tanks (compared to Germany’s 300-odd Leopards) to the Ukraine is that they are high-maintenance, voracious gas-guzzlers, even by tank standards, and are fitted with technology that they can’t afford to let fall into Russian hands. But the US has previously exported ‘Nerfed’ versions of the Abrams to several Middle-Eastern countries without the depleted uranium armour inserts and other top-tier systems. The problem is that they turned out to be quite vulnerable.