Joe Biden will very probably be re-elected. No incumbent President has ever lost a primary (though it should be remembered the current primary system is younger than me). Only one sitting President has ever not been selected by their party to stand again, and that was knocking on two hundred years ago.
Both Biden’s main primary challenger, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, are less than enthusiastic about promoting massive war in Europe and risking nuclear obliteration. (I hope everyone in the UK enjoyed the nationwide new alert test the other day and spent a few moments contemplating whether they would die instantly or slowly in agony).
The military industrial complex simply cannot permit a non-hawkish President. The sums of money at stake are enormous.
Trump, for all his many faults, was the only President in recent memory not to have started any wars. I know he continued some, but his entire Presidency needs to be seen as a dialectic between Trump and the intelligence service/military power base, in which to his credit Trump was never captured as completely as Obama. (Clinton and the Bush family did not need to be captured, they were always true believers).
Thirteen months ago, I wrote this:
The Biden laptop was leaked on 14 October 2020, three weeks before voting day in the Presidential election. Its suppression by the mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook, at the behest of the security services, is the biggest illegitimate interference in an election in modern western history.
The evidence has piled up since. It is truly astounding that incalculable volumes of media coverage have been given to largely groundless accusations of Russian interference in US Presidential elections, when this actual, entirely proven interference in a US Presidential Election, which arguably was key to Biden’s election, has in itself been largely suppressed.
The letter released by 51 former US intelligence officials, telling what we now know to be the outright lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation”, was initiated by the Biden campaign, according to sworn testimony from former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell – who was willingly a part of it with the declared aim of wanting Biden to win.
If you are not fully up to speed with this, this Wall Street Journal podcast is excellent.
It should be recalled that, apart from all the sex and drugs, the laptop contained emails showing plainly Hunter Biden leveraging his father’s influence to obtain lucrative business deals with, inter alia, Ukraine and China.
Three weeks before a close election, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could undoubtedly have swayed it, if it had not been massively and falsely derided as a Russian hoax by almost the entire mainstream media, and censored to death by Twitter and Facebook.
Since Elon Musk released Twitter files, we have known for certain that the FBI orchestrated the suppression of the story on social media. This Twitter thread is five months old but remains a must read.
It is, I think, the epitome of the corruption of modern mainstream media that, if you go to the CNN website you can still find a “fact check” item from CNN which states that Donald Trump was promoting Russian disinformation by referring to the Hunter Biden laptop.
Google searches differ depending on the person making them. But try this. Google for the exposure of the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian hoax” as itself misinformation. How many stories come up for you from the “liberal” media, from the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Guaridan etc?
I get nothing on from them on the front page of my google search except the old CNN misinformation. That says a great deal both about the legacy media – and about Google.
So we have conclusive evidence from the Hunter Biden laptop story that the security services, corporate media and corporate internet gatekeepers were in cahoots to ensure the election of Joe Biden. What we see now is the same forces working to ensure that he is re-elected.
Now read this from Robert F Kennedy’s campaign website:
In the long term, a nation’s strength does not come from its armies. America spends as much on weaponry as the next nine nations combined, yet the country has grown weaker, not stronger, over the last 30 years. Even as its military technology has reigned supreme, America has been hollowing out from the inside. We cannot be a strong or secure nation when our infrastructure, industry, society, and economy are infirm.
A high priority of a Kennedy administration will be to make America strong again. When a body is sick, it withdraws its energy from the extremities in order to nourish the vital organs. It is time to end the imperial project and attend to all that has been neglected: the crumbling cities, the antiquated railways, the failing water systems, the decaying infrastructure, the ailing economy. Annual defense-related spending is close to one trillion dollars. We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed. Now we have another chance.
As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s time to come home and restore this country.
In Ukraine, the most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first. He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine and brings our resources back where they belong. We will offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia’s borders. Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine and guarantee its freedom and independence. UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions. We will put an end to this war. We will put an end to the suffering of the Ukranian people. That will be the start of a broader program of demilitarization of all countries.
This is astonishing stuff to be put before the American people from the scion of one of the great American political dynasties.
(I am aware of his chequered past, his support for Hillary over Bernie, and his Covid vaccine scepticism, though the latter appears to be more based on his long term commitment to tackling the profiteering and corrupt influence of big Pharma than an actual anti-vaccine stance).
I did not predict that the USA would become a gerontocracy. Biden shows signs of the mental decay that is a natural part of the human condition. He will not have to face Kennedy in any Primary debates – the NDC could be relied on to stitch up that potentially huge hurdle for him – but the risk of Biden detariorating further mentally in a way that is impossible to hide must exist for anyone of his age. So the Kennedy challenge is not without a slim hope.
A slim hope for a declared opponent of the military industrial complex is one hope too many, therefore the twin agencies of social media suppression and corporate media ridicule have already swung in to action against Kennedy.
The challenge must be choked at birth. The range of acceptable opinion to the US Establishment is now extremely narrow.
Trump remains an enigma. He is a mixture of far right prejudice and serious outbursts of commonsense. I do not doubt that he does have interests beyond the personal advancement of Donald J Trump, but only in an incidental way.
In Ukraine we are either going to see death and destruction on a scale well beyond the terrible horrors already inflicted, or there is ultimately going to be a deal involving the ceding of some territory to Russia (Crimea+, as my FCO sources tell me it is currently called in Beijing based diplomacy).
Trump says this. It is the kind of thing that makes the US military-industrial-security service complex hate him, as they are seeing super profits, massive resources and political influence stretching ahead for at least another five years. They don’t care at all how many Eastern Europeans die.
Trump is a much greater threat to Biden, and the full weight of the state is therefore being thrown into stopping him through lawfare. Some of this is very dubious, and subject to the perfectly true response that Bill Clinton was never prosecuted for remarkably identical behaviours.
Watching the agencies of the state find a way to stop Trump is going to be fascinating.
Russiagate was a hoax. There is however a real interference with what the public are allowed to know which makes the notion of “democracy” in the USA meaningless, and that is the interference of the security state of the USA itself.
Those interests got Biden into power, and will do everything and literally anything to help him stay there.
The British security state is of course complicit. A final thought.
It is fast approaching a year since Julian Assange submitted his High Court appeal against extradition, and still the High Court has not even decided if it will hear the appeal or not. We had initially hoped the actual hearing might be before last Christmas.
The Assange prosecution is not popular in the USA, where even the mainstream media have come out against charging a journalist with espionage. In addition everybody can now see the parallel with Evan Gershkovich and potential impact of Assange’s treatment on Gershkovich.
Assange’s arrival in Washington would be a free speech cause celebre with the potential to alienate some liberal support from Biden in a close election. The US security services therefore still very much want Julian imprisoned for life – but they do not want him extradited until after Biden is safely re-elected.
The British government therefore need to keep Julian in maximum security in Belmarsh for another two years, to keep the Biden campaign and its security service backers happy.
This can only be done by introducing lengthy and unnecessary delays into the judicial process. We see that happening, or rather we see it “inexplicably” not happening, before our very eyes.
The senior British judiciary do what the security services tell them to do. Discreetly suggested, in the club.
————————————————
Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Do not bet your house on Biden getting reelected. He’s had the entire centrist-establishment media fully behind him and a booming economy, yet he’s still far below the comparable approval ratings of Trump. By 54 percent to 36 percent, Americans say Trump did a better job handling the economy…63 percent say Biden does not have the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/07/president-biden-post-abc-poll/
Matt Taibbi has a new piece out on Racket. I don´t know how long it is free to access.
So I post the link here and now:
https://www.racket.news/p/who-helped-overturn-the-pentagon
Taibbi summarizes the Twitter Files revelations.
Only now I am beginning to fully understand the true twisted and evil nature of this entire “sting” operation, signified by a meeting of the people involved at the Aspen Institute in Sept. 2020.
The core document is here (there are many more hyperlinks of course):
The Burisma Leak:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS6LAFzZYAuju1PVdpQH8tDQHj0LvEmPOHzwwmgXbWHqCjMFSpM-UDT0mPXfC-NRA/pub
This document in fact – and I needed a few moments to truly understand it – IS an invention.
When you read it, think of it as a theatre piece written by two members of the US government.
Thus the chronology of events “avant-la-lettre” is fictious.
The horrifying fact is: The things described in the fiction account of the “Burisma Leak” – more or less – did eventually take place in reality, just a few weeks/months later.
Which begs the question of how deep the entire manipulation in fact did reach.
So, “the world is a stage”.
Thinking of the demeaning treachery by US/UK et al. authorities used to trap and imprison Julian Assange. (i.e. the absurd comedy-like staging of “undercover” pizza delivery-men in front of the embassy as reported by yahoo News. And so on up to the horrific stuff.)
They are using the same techniques on a much bigger scale now.
I wonder why noone not even in Germany (no national interest there superficially) is reporting about the Twitter stuff in a serious fashion.
The Assange letter at least has been covered.
To what extent I don´t know yet.
RFK Jr says the CIA killed his uncle President John F Kennedy.
https://twitter.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/1655309978423500805
So what? How many hundreds of years do you want this nonsense to be repeated? Anyhow, that f***g rapist deserved that.
“So what?”
Yes death to any and every obstacle to the good old CIA Cause! And a righteous scolding for Mr Murray for not being a Good Caring Person like kashmiri! ???
Craig. I think you should not call yourself a human right activist. Human rights are not in your focus. You don’t appear to care about people’s access to healthcare, about workers rights, women’s rights, right to education (including student loans), poverty, etc. Never ever did you write about how an average American is affected by their president’s domestic policies, other than bitching about the military-industrial complex and the funding it receives.
It doesn’t seem you care that much.
Instead, you are preoccupied with democratic process, elections, military interventions, industrial lobbies, and secret services. You rank US presidents by their foreign policy vices, not by their domestic policies.
This may be about defence of citizens’ rights – likewise a noble cause – but human rights are something different. Human rights are about people as humans, not about people as citizens.
What are you talking about? Craig rails constantly against anti-human neoliberal policies – austerity, privatisation etc – and against the bought-off politicians that advocate and implement them. He supports the RMT and every other workers’ strike. He was a very rare public figure who supported Corbyn, Sanders, Melenchon etc in their efforts to turn back the neoliberal tide. How about you? That you openly celebrate the CIA murdering a president seeds a tiny doubt that you may not be quite the big-hearted human rights advocate and socialist you are purporting to be.
kashmiri: Here above you issue a litany of complaints, all of a certain nature, negatively evaluating Mr Murray’s performativity, such as
“You should not call yourself….”
“Human rights are not in your focus”
“You don’t appear to care about…”
“Never did you write about…”
“It doesn’t seem you care…”
Anyone can blow wind, espouse opinions. Many do. If my loudly espoused opinion agrees with your own sensibilities, does this make me virtuous? You seem to attach much virtue to “being an activist”. Is performativity, regardless of its effect or lack thereof, what makes an activist?
At great cost to Mr Murray’s own diplomatic career, in his capacity as the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan (2002—2004) we know that he issued scathing criticism (in channels internal to his institution) of the UK/US abetment and use of torture in that country. He has since written a book about this time, as you may know, called Murder in Samarkand, which has been adapted as a radio play.
I cannot know exactly how rare an honest man like Murray is, among those staffing contemporary Western institutions. I only know they are not common enough. The West is truly (to use a phrase coined by another insightful observer) the empire of lies.
Finally, you may not care that I disagree with your assessment. Nonetheless I recommend you consider the citation issued by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence on 21 January 2006.
Is the term activist a neologism? It feels like one to me. Tastes like Newspeak.
There is another term, actor, more basic to our language, and which has two distinct meanings that contrast with one another.
1. An actor[1] is an agent, one responsible for an act. They have some initiative, and the consequences of their acts demonstrate power. Their actions affect the world. Without such effect, absent real consequences, without power, one is no actor[1].
2. An actor[2] is one who pretends to be someone they are not. Their behaviour is a specialised sort of purely performative lie, conventionally appreciated for its verisimilitude. An actor[2] is not held accountable for their apparent behaviour, for the duration of the act. The conventionally understood purpose of their act is not the naïvely apparent effect such behavior would normally produce, but instead to create entertaining effects within the mind of the audience who attend the peformance willingly for that very purpose.
What counts as an “activist”? Do they resemble more the first sort of actor, or is it the second? Whenever the term is applied, I think this is a question worth considering.
RFK Jr offers a very good review of the current situation in Ukraine in this discussion between himself and Colonel Douglas MacGregor. If anybody knows a better review I’d like to hear about it. Please, no MSM references, thank you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xl4L_9GHf4
The Marco Polo report on the laptop. The findings included: 140 alleged business-related crimes, 191 sex-related offences, and 128 drug-related crimes. It’s quite damning and disturbing.
Marco Polo
This report the culmination of 13 months of research by half a dozen experts who recognize that the Biden laptop is the Rosetta Stone of political corruption, soft corruption and also crimes.
The report and its findings was sent to all 535 members of the House and Senate as well as jurisdictions where alleged crimes by Biden’s son took place.
https://bidenlaptopreport.marcopolousa.org/
“Trump, for all his many faults, was the only President in recent memory not to have started any wars.”
Sadly, that was not for want of trying.
For instance, as Ambassador Murray has previously covered in his brilliant “Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani” [link] post, the fact that the United States is not currently in another “forever war” in Iran as a result of Qassem Soleimani’s assassination on January 3, 2020 can be credited far more to the Iranian government’s subsequent restraint than any known de-escalatory moves on the part of Donald Trump or anyone else in his administration (see Mary Louise Kelly, et. al., “Two Years After the U.S. Killed Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, Tensions Remain,” National Public Radio (NPR), January 3, 2022). Note that, by this action, Trump proved that he could have a John Bolton foreign policy without Bolton himself whispering into his ear (even though I am sure Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper, Robert C. O’Brien, Elliott Abrams, and others made a valiant effort to pick up his slack) – Trump had already dumped the mustachioed warmonger from his cabinet by that point while ridiculing him for his hawkishness (e.g., his quip that we would already be in “World War Six” if Trump had routinely relied on Bolton’s advice), and had at least pantomimed skittishness toward military reprisals in previous cases such as the “Gulf of Oman incident” in June 2019. Of course, as an aside, the likes of former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio simultaneously proved that he can scaremonger as well as any neoconservative (see “Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on MSNBC’s Velshi and Ruhle,” Official Website of the City of New York (nyc.gov), January 3, 2020).
As an analogy, imagine the Soviet Union assassinating the late CIA directors Admiral Stansfield Turner, William J. Casey, or William H. Webster with a targeted airstrike while they were on foreign soil due to covert US support for Mujahideen terrorist insurgents that were (often brutally) killing Soviet troops invading and occupying Afghanistan (alongside the occasional BBC journalist on the side – see Phil Miller, “To Charm ‘Seriously Evil’ Warlord, Foreign Office Overlooked Journalist’s Murder,” Declassified UK, November 9, 2021), whose ruthlessness already was or should have been well-known to those figures (for instance, see “‘Grim’ Nickname Fits Afghan Tales of Torture, Murder,” The Washington Post, May 11, 1979). There would be no love lost on my part for the loss of any of them (as with Soleimani himself), but it is obvious that it would have been a provocation that only made things geopolitically worse for the world at large.
Of course, this is without even considering the policy innovations that the Trump administration employed to consolidate and escalate conflicts in other contexts, be they repeated missile strikes in Syria that even Barack Obama and James “Not a Slam Dunk” Clapper relented from as a strategy in 2013, to supporting Juan Guaido’s government as part of a “hybrid war” involving devastating sanctions in Venezuela, to providing offensive weapons to Ukraine for the first time and thereby laying the groundwork for the current situation.
As an entirely separate aside, I do find Murray’s suppositions about Assange’s extended stay in Belmarsh Prison until potentially after the 2024 US presidential election is concluded to be an intriguing yet deeply troubling possible explanation for what appears to be some recent tentative headway in Julian Assange’s case (e.g., Australian PM Anthony Albanese’s expressions of open frustration against US authorities regarding the treatment of Assange as an Australian citizen after a period of previous wishy-washiness, and US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy’s recent meeting with Australian MPs regarding their own likely sincere concerns over Assange’s treatment).
It gives me the queasy feeling that even those grounds for optimism in the Assange case (vestigial as they already were) may just be a cynical way to lure a significant segment of hitherto disaffected opponents of his prosecution throughout the world in general and within the United States in particular into a false sense of complacency and satisfaction that the Biden administration may be authentically changing tack. In this way, the powers-that-be, chiefly within the current Biden administration, can downplay the Assange prosecution as an election issue (when it might otherwise be lavished with unprecedented degrees of quite probably game-changing attention), and still keep it on the backburner as a means of dangerously diminishing the already fragile First Amendment and press freedoms globally. If so, John Peter Zenger is about to be rolling in his grave!
“Optimism about a diplomatic solution to Assange’s plight rose in May when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made his clearest statements yet on the case. He said for the first time that he had spoken directly to U.S. authorities about Assange; that he wanted the prosecution to end and that he was concerned for his health.
Optimism grew further when five days later, Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Australia, agreed to meet a group of six, pro-Assange, Australian MPs, from three different parties, plus an independent. It is highly unlikely Kennedy would have invited them to the U.S. embassy for lunch to discuss Assange’s case without approval from at least the State Department, if not the White House.
[…]
News of the F.B.I. continuing its probe has thrown those hopes of a deal into disarray.”
Source:
Joe Lauria, “Report: FBI Reopens Assange Investigation,” Consortium News, May 31, 2023 (https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/31/report-fbi-reopens-assange-investigation/)
for some funny kids´ entertainment, watch RFK in conversation with Judge Napolitano, 7/7/23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIs-JBOdQc
Because thats the level of political understanding presented here.