WITNESSES TO HISTORY

CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.

STEPHEN GOWANS—If this plays out as it has in the past, the news media will report that the US intelligence community has concluded that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic. The key qualifier that the conclusion is based on no proof, will be quickly passed over and eventually forgotten, and the reality that the conclusion came from the intelligence community will be adduced as its substantiation, as if US spooks are impartial arbiters of all questions of consequence, and not part of a state apparatus that has a vested interest in discrediting a country Washington deems a near-peer competitor.

Former CIA case officer Ralph McGehee’s view of his former employer suggests what outcome we can expect from Biden’s ‘find me some evidence’ order to the intelligence community. “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a Central Intelligence Agency,” McGehee said. Instead, “it is the covert action arm of the president’s foreign policy advisers” whose role is “reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying” the president’s positions and activities. The CIA “shapes its intelligence … to support presidential policy.” McGehee concluded that disinformation is a large part of the intelligence community’s ambit, and the US population is “the primary target audience of its lies.”  

MATT EHRET—While China is the proud owner of a total of TWO BSL-4 labs (both within its own borders), a vast array of dozens of Pentagon-run bioweapons labs litter the international landscape. Exactly how many is hard to estimate as Alexei Mukhin (Director General of Russia’s Center for Political Information) stated in a May 2020 interview:

“According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, in the post-Soviet space, 65 American secret bio-laboratories operate: 15 – in Ukraine, 12 – in Armenia, 15 – in Georgia, 4 – in Kazakhstan. In the United States, such activity is prohibited . Accordingly, the Pentagon, in its own laws, is engaged in illegal activities (in spirit, not in letter). The goal is the creation of biological weapons directed against the peoples who inhabited the territory of the USSR.”

In 2018, investigative journalist Dilya Gaytandzhieva documented the Pentagon’s multibillion dollar budget that sustains bioweapons labs in 25 nations (and 11 within the USA itself) which grew exponentially since the December 2001 bioweaponized anthrax attack killed five Americans and justified a hyperbolic increase of bioweapon warfare to rise from $5 billion when Cheney’s Bioshield Act was passed in 2004 to over $50 billion today.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—From the end of World War Two to the fall of the USSR, the US military was used to smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, US foreign policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any other superpower which could rival its might. A 1992 article by The New York Times titled  “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop“, reporting on a leaked document which describes a policy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, reads as follows:

In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union. <> The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.
This is all US troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down. Not “freedom”, not “democracy”, and certainly not the American people. Just continual uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed out in order to achieve it. The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of that goal.

ISRAEL SHAMIR—The United States insists on its right to land any civilian vessel. In 2004, the United States forcibly landed a private plane in which a member of the Russian parliament’s upper chamber and a former deputy minister, Andrei Vavilov, was flying. He was taken for interrogation directly from the airport.

The most famous case was in 2013. The plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales took off from Moscow. US intelligence agencies suspected Snowden was on board. The president’s plane was forced to land in Vienna, where the plane was searched. Snowden was not found, so the plane was released. Afterwards, the United States publicly and officially declared its holy right to detain and search all the world’s civilian ships.

The United States was not alone in landing planes. In 2012, Turkey forced a Moscow-Damascus plane to land. But it was a Russian plane, so nobody cared.

Whom did the Belarusians detain? A Belarusian citizen named Roman Protasevich, the founder and head of the NEXTA telegram channel, who organized the riots in Minsk in 2020.