The United Arab Emirates has gamed US foreign policy by meddling in the American political system using both legal and illegal tactics, intelligence officials have reportedly claimed in a classified report.

The Gulf kingdom is considered to be a close ally of Washington.


The activities in question spanned multiple US administrations and exploited "vulnerabilities" in the American system, including reliance on political contributions and lax enforcement of laws designed to protect against foreign interference, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Some of the tactics "resemble espionage," the newspaper added, citing three unidentified sources who have seen the classified report.

Russia abandons Kherson

In January, 1944, the newly reconstituted German Sixth Army found itself in an operationally cataclysmic situation in the southern bend of the Dnieper River, in the area of Krivoi Rog and Nikopol. The Germans occupied a dangerous salient, jutting out precariously into the Red Army's lines. Vulnerable on two awkward flanks, and facing an enemy with superiority in manpower and firepower, any general worth his salt would have sought to withdraw as soon as possible. In this case, however, Hitler insisted that the Wehrmacht hold the salient, because the region was Germany's last remaining source of manganese - a mineral crucial for making high quality steel.

A year prior, in the opening weeks of 1943, Hitler had intervened in another, more famous battle, forbidding the previous incarnation of the Sixth Army from breaking out of a pocket forming around it at Stalingrad. Prohibited from withdrawing, the Sixth was annihilated wholesale.

In both of these cases, there was a clash between pure military prudence and broader political aims and needs. In 1943, there was neither a compelling military nor political reason to keep the 6th Army in the pocket at Stalingrad - political intervention in military decision making was both senseless and disasterous. In 1944, however, Hitler (however difficult it is to admit it) had a valid argument. Without manganese from the Nikopol area, German war production was doomed. In this case, political intervention was perhaps warranted. Leaving an army in a vulnerable salient is bad, but so is running out of manganese.

A lot of attention these days is being focused on the results of the Israeli elections, where Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud bloc managed to secure a decisive win of 64 seats in the 120 seat parliament. This was due, of course, to the meteoric rise of Jewish Power, whose leader Itamar Ben-Gvir is heir to the Meir Kahane and the religious fundamentalist, fascistic nationalist vein which uses terror as its means. Ben-Gvir himself was convicted for supporting a Jewish terror organization and is an admirer of the 1994 Al-Khalil (Hebron) massacre perpetrator Baruch Goldstein. So-called 'liberal-Zionists' both in Israel and abroad are apoplectic, bemoaning the supposedly new Israel. New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, an avid Israel apologist, is now telling his readers,"the Israel we knew is gone."

But Friedman is being typically romantic about Israel. As Thomas Suarez's new book Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea demonstrates, terrorism has always been a means through which the Zionist movement has achieved its goals. Using compelling and detailed historical documentation Suarez shows how the Zionist movement has consistently applied terrorist methods from the pre-state years (against both Palestinians as well as British forces, including international operations and including senior ministers), to the years following the state's establishment in the form of state-terror. Occasionally the terror even targeted Jews, if it served what seemed to be a greater Zionist cause. In other words, the Israel that Thomas Friedman "knew", was not the real Israel. It was simply a fantasy.

We're a week into this year's UN climate summit, COP27, and the various agenda planned to roll out on the back of it are coming into focus.

None more so than the autumn offensive in the establishment's war on food. There's a big push on that front.

Today was "Adaptation and Agriculture" day at COP27, and you probably don't need me to tell you what was on the agenda - a lot of talk of "sustainability", "innovation", "climate-friendly production" and so on.

As usual with these global meetings, the closed-door discussions and po-faced newspeak presentations are accompanied by a wave of synchronized propaganda.

One angle this propaganda is taking is that COP27 "refused to discuss" meat or farming in general, and therefore those people insisting we should kill all the cows in the world and eat lab-grown paste instead are somehow rebels speaking truth to power.

That's how George Monbiot is arranging the narrative for his piece in the Guardian.

It's nonsense, of course. COP27 literally had an entire day dedicated to discussing farming, "food security" and "innovations" to "reduce methane" (that's code for "getting rid of cows" by the way).

Further, COP27 is being used to launch the UN's new Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) initiative. Which, according to Forbes, will promote:

[A] shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets would help reduce health and climate change costs by up to US$ 1.3 trillion while supporting food security in the face of climate change.

As well as the AIM initiative, which intends to channel 8 BILLION dollars into "farming innovations".

But, in another example of the fake binary, while COP27 members were inside discussing "adapting agriculture", "protestors" were outside demanding they discuss adapting agriculture.

Update (1037ET):


President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the explosion on the busy Istanbul street a "bomb attack."

Erdogan said the attack took place on Istiklal Street in Beyoglu Square, left six people dead and 53 injured.

Here's Erdogan's statement (courtesy of local media outlet Halk TV):

"I wish God's mercy on our brothers who died in the bomb attack that took place on Istiklal Street at 16.20 today, and I wish a speedy recovery to our wounded. Efforts to take over Turkey and the Turkish nation through terrorism will not reach its goal today and tomorrow, as it was yesterday. Relevant units of our state continue to work to reveal the perpetrators of this treacherous attack and the gathering place behind it. We have been informed that there have been 6 deaths, four of which were at the scene and two at the hospital. Other than that, different figures may come. Necessary interventions have been made and are being carried out in hospitals, as well. I think these citizens will also be discharged. Let them be sure that the perpetrators of the incident will be punished as they deserve."

Did you ever wonder where all those billions of dollars were going in Ukraine? Did you ever wonder why anyone was trusting the elites in US politics like the Bidens with billions in funds going to Ukraine?

Today it turns out that these were excellent questions.

We have information that the tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine were actually laundered back to the US to corrupt Democrats and elites using FTX cryptocurrency. Now the money is gone and FTX is bankrupt.

Earlier today we reported that the FTX cryptocurrency appeared to be used in a ponzi scheme involving the Democrats and Ukraine.

As reported earlier, the FTX crypto company gave at least $40 million to Democrat candidates and causes in the midterms.

Sam Bankman-Fried is Biden's second biggest donor.

'You can't always get what you want.''
Courtesy of the Rolling Stones

This aptly sums up the Eurozone/East-Asian/US relationship: In short US hegemony. Suffice it to say that - of all people, Leon Trotsky writing in, (War - In the International 1933) - opined ...

''That prior to WW2 the US was Europe's debtor but now Europe was relegated to the background. The United States is the principal factory, the principal depot and the Central Bank of the world.''

US Ascendency in the 20^th Century.

This much was self-evident, and true enough, but in any case, America's hegemony over Europe long pre-dated WW2 and actually later grew larger with the addition of ex Eastern European states which had been formerly part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Western Europe had willy-nilly long since been subordinated to the USA. A while later (1946) the Americans gave the British short shrift reminding them that they would have to adjust to the post-war realities and take the medicine - the American loan, as Michael Hudson explains.

''In effect the Sterling Area was to be absorbed into the Dollar Area, which would be extended throughout the world. Britain was to remain in a weak position in which it found itself at the end of WW2, with barely any free monetary reserves and dependent on dollar borrowings to meet its current obligations. The United States would gain access to Britain's pre-war markets in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Far East. This first loan on the post-war agenda - which President Truman announced in forwarding it to Congress would set the course of American and British economic relations for many years to come. Truman was well aware of the change of fortunes for the UK, for the Anglo-American Loan Agreement spelled the end of Britain as a great power.''(1)

Moscow stands alone in its battle against the US-led NATO military bloc and is capable of vanquishing its enemies on its own, Russia's former president Dmitry Medvedev has said.

"Russia alone is fighting NATO and the Western world," Medvedev, who is the deputy head of the nation's Security Council and the leader of the ruling United Russia party, wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

"We are capable of destroying a mighty enemy or alliances of enemies by ourselves," the former president stated, adding that during its military activities Moscow is seeking to preserve the lives of its soldiers and civilians.

The UK and the EU intend to coordinate their efforts and do "everything possible" to make the Russian delegation feel unwelcome at the upcoming G20 summit in Indonesia's Bali, The Telegraph has claimed. The outlet conceded, however, that China - and possibly several other key players - would be highly unlikely to follow suit.

"We try to work with partners in order to show very, very, very firmly what the international community thinks about all these crimes, atrocities, and illegal actions by Russia," a spokesperson for the EU's foreign affairs service told the paper.

Our empire of lies seems to have perfected the template for fraud on an industrial scale.
Last week brought us another mega-scandal as another celebrated, multi-billion dollar success story turned out to be a massive fraud. As more details emerge about FTX and its young founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, the outlines of the story increasingly resemble another mega-scandal, Theranos. It would appear that our financial-political-media complex has developed a template for industrial scale fraud.

The template includes a genius entrepreneur - a brilliant, magnanimous person who'd pull him/her/itself by the bootstraps to become an instant billionaire. It also includes murky family connections, protection in high places, dirty political dealings, overflowing praise for the venture and its founder, and a rapid ascent to success.

Last October, I published a three-part series analyzing these aspects of Theranos, which remains one of the most fascinating stories I'd come across over the years. Theranos was also demonstrably related to the pandemic we have recently experienced, but the media reports about it universally ignored that aspect of the scandal. The links to the series are below: