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Will NATO survive a second Trump term? Some think otherwise

Scott Ritter
RT
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:26 UTC
Trump/NATO
© InfoWars
US President Donald Trump
By calling out Germany for failing to pay its fair share of the cost of NATO, US President Donald Trump has challenged the legitimacy of the foundational premise upon which the alliance was built. This is a good thing.

A group of international academics, during a recent conference at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, have concluded that a second Trump term in office could fatally weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the transatlantic alliance charged with deterring perceived Russian aggression and protecting the international rules-based order that has dominated international relations since the end of the Second World War. This conclusion came on the heels of a decision by the Trump administration to withdraw some 9,500 troops from Germany as punishment for Berlin's failure to keep a promise to raise its defense spending to levels matching two percent of its GDP.

Trump's actions, and the concerns of the international academics about the possible demise of NATO, are perhaps best evaluated in the context of an observation made by NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay, that the purpose of alliance was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Ismay's statement, made in 1952 - three years after the founding of NATO - reflected the false pretense upon which the post-war order was based. It also reflected the intellectually vacuous premise of NATO's role in protecting the same as justification for the continued existence of an alliance founded on a lie and sustained on misguided principles sustained by that lie.

Comment: Bottom lines: Fear sells equipment; the threat of war is lucrative; the US needs the money to pay for NATO membership obligations while keeping its greedy MIC satisfied. Doing away with NATO is a do-away of military veneer that currently supports a false economy based on a false premise. Can Trump strip this faux foe policy to the bone?

According to other reports, Germany requested the US reduce its military personnel in-country. The US is obliging the request.

See also:

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Hiliter

Trump signs bill condemning Uyghur camps, meanwhile Bolton's book claims he encouraged them

Andrew Solender
Forbes
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 05:24 UTC
TrumpXi
© Getty Images
China's President Xi Jinping • US President Donald Trump
President Trump signed a bill condemning China's concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslim community just hours after excerpts from former National Security Advisor John Bolton surfaced which claim Trump encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to build the camps.

Xi has drawn international criticism for his persecution of China's Muslim Uyghur population, including detaining around 1 to 2 million in concentration camps.

In the excerpt, reported by the Wall Street Journal, Bolton claims that "according to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps. Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do." He added that Trump called Xi "the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!"

Shortly after the report, the White House put out a statement that Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which
"condemns gross human rights violations of specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China and other purposes, including specified authority to impose sanctions on certain foreign persons."

Comment: 'Stunning and unprecedented!'

Which is BS of course. US candidates always get MAJOR donations from foreign actors. It is the seat of global empire after all!

Very interesting that The Donald knows the 'camps' in eastern China aren't what the media claims they are.

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Arrow Down

CDA Section 230: DOJ to curtail big tech's legal immunities

Allun Bokhari
Breitbart
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
Zuckerberg
© thecut.com
CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg
The Department of Justice is preparing proposals to roll back the legal immunities enjoyed by Big Tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), in measures that will be announced as early as Wednesday, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Via the WSJ:
"The Justice Department is set to propose a rollback of legal protections that online platforms have enjoyed for more than two decades, in an effort to make tech companies more responsible in how they police their content, according to a Trump administration official."
Section 230 gives Big Tech companies immunity from lawsuits arising from user-generated content. If a person is defamed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other big tech platforms like Reddit, those platforms are not legally liable for the content like a traditional publisher might be. This allows social media platforms to host billions of posts from users without a potentially crippling legal risk.

Comment: Objectionable material will always be judged according to degrees of sensitivity within the mindset of the beholder. That is the individual's right and responsibility. Nations are not built on coddling, nor are they stronger when gatekeepers hold power over what is allowed to be seen and what is not.

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Stop

Conspiracy reality: Supreme Court blocks Trump from ending DACA

Pete Williams and Adam Edelman
NBC News
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 18:23 UTC

Comment: It's clear they're all coordinating to thwart Trump - the media, the Democrats, the Pentagon, the 'intel community', Wall Street, Israel-firsters, ALL institutions, ALL agencies...


Dreamer protesters outside US Supreme Court building
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration cannot carry out its plan to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as Dreamers, to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S.

Chief Justice John Roberts was the swing vote in the 5-4 decision, which deals a big legal defeat to President Donald Trump on the issue of immigration, a major focus of his domestic agenda.

Roberts wrote in the decision that the government failed to give an adequate justification for ending the federal program. The administration could again try to shut it down by offering a more detailed explanation for its action, but the White House might not want to end such a popular program in the heat of a presidential campaign.

Comment: On the heels of the Supreme Court's decisions on Monday, this comes as another blow to the Trump administration, which has been hammered non-stop since late May - since late January if you include the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Bullseye

UK's illegal migrants scandal makes a mockery of 'Take Back Control'. Officials haven't estimated how many there are for 15 YEARS

Damian Wilson
RT
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 19:03 UTC
uk migrants
© Reuters / Regis Duvignau
A damning official report has finally put in writing what many of us knew anyway: the Home Office does not have a clue about the scale of illegal immigration in the UK.

'Take back control of our borders' was a cornerstone of the 2016 Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum.

It was reinforced as a slogan when Boris Johnson campaigned in last year's general election, and overwhelmingly succeeded, in getting a new mandate to push the constipated Brexit agreement through Parliament.

But taking back control? It. Just. Ain't. Working.
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Laptop

Who needs 'Russian hackers'? Report reveals CIA incompetence to blame for Vault 7 breach

Nebojsa Malic
RT
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:36 UTC
cia vault 7 report

Screenshot of the first page of the CIA WikiLeaks Task Force's final report
An internal CIA report about the Vault 7 fiasco paints a damning picture of the main US spy agency. WikiLeaks released the CIA's hacking tools, likely leaked by an insider, while CIA chiefs were too busy cooking up Russiagate.

Vault 7 was the name given to cyber attack tools developed by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), and published by WikiLeaks in March 2017. It was the largest data breach in Langley's history, with long-lasting consequences. For example, Chinese cybersecurity companies recently used Vault 7 evidence to show that the US has been hacking China for over a decade.

According to a just-released internal CIA report, "CCI had prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems. Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax."

"Most of our sensitive cyber weapons were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report goes on to say.

The heavily-redacted document actually dates back to October 2017 and was only made public Tuesday by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), in an effort to pressure the new Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe into imposing new security measures. While the CIA ineptitude is the obvious takeaway, no one seems to have noticed the real bombshell: the timing of the breach and its implications.

The report says the CIA "did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017." Now, what all was happening between March 2016 and a year later? You guessed it: Russiagate!
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Star of David

PM said to present Gantz with 4 annexation options, including only symbolic move


Times of Israel
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 17:12 UTC
netanyahu friedman
© David Azagury/US Embassy Jerusalem
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, center, and then-Tourism Minister Yariv Levin during a meeting to discuss mapping extension of Israeli sovereignty to areas of the West Bank, held in the Ariel settlement, February 24, 2020.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly presented Defense Minister Benny Gantz with four scenarios for annexing West Bank lands, ranging from a symbolic move all the way to extending sovereignty over all areas slated for Israel under the Trump administration's peace plan.

Netanyahu and Gantz met Wednesday for further talks on planned annexation ahead of July 1, when the premier has pledged to begin moving forward with annexing parts of the West Bank. Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin also took part in the meeting.

Quoting a senior official briefed on the meeting, Channel 13 news reported that Netanyahu and Levin showed Gantz and Ashkenazi maps detailing the areas Israel would annex under four possible scenarios.

This included annexing the roughly 30 percent of the West Bank US President Donald Trump's peace proposal designates for Israel — covering the Jordan Valley and all 132 settlements — or only a small symbolic chunk of it. The report did not provide further details on the different scenarios.

Gantz and Ashkenazi stressed during the meeting that they oppose annexing lands where large numbers of Palestinians live, and that any Palestinians in the annexed areas should be offered citizenship, according to various Hebrew media reports. They reiterated that annexation should not be unilateral but part of a broader diplomatic move that would include benefits for the Palestinians, the Channel 13 report said.

Comment: Annexation: fine when Israel does it (according to the U.S. and other vassals of Israel), height of evil when Russia does it - never mind that Crimea was Russian to begin with and Israel created ethnic colonies through theft and murder.

See also:

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Piggy Bank

UK to redirect aid from Africa to Ukraine and others 'vulnerable to Russian meddling.' But that's NOT British 'interference'?

Neil Clark
RT
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:37 UTC
africans ukrainians
© REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi; Sputnik / Stringer
The UK government's decision to merge its Department for International Development with the neocon-run Foreign Office is bad news for hungry children in Africa, but good news for Russophobes.

Black Lives Matter? Well, not if they're in Africa, it seems. Having assured of us of its "anti-racist" credentials, the UK government is set to cut aid to the world's poorest nations in order to boost spending in states near Russia in pursuit of Cold War 2.0 objectives.

In a statement explaining the decision to scrap the DfID as a separate department, PM Boris Johnson said: "We give as much aid to Zambia as we do to Ukraine, though the latter is vital to European security. We give 10 times as much aid to Tanzania as we do the countries of the Western Balkans who are acutely vulnerable to Russian meddling."

Where to start with this hogwash?

For a start, aid is supposed to be about helping those who need it most. All of the world's 10 poorest countries are in Africa. Now we can argue about the level of foreign aid, but if we accept that it is morally right for the world's richer nations to help the poorer ones, then by any objective assessment, it's Africa where the focus should be.


Comment: Yes, but that's just for the sake of argument. Whether the aid provided to poor nations actually does much good is another question - along with the harm it can cause. For example, food aid can make poor nations dependent on foreign sources of food, destroying local food production. That said, to earmark this money for a fiction like "Russian aggression" is total nonsense and an even greater waste of money.

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Better Earth

Too bad, so sad: Canada loses bid for UN Security Council seat

Amanda Connolly
Global News
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:14 UTC
United Nations
© Reuters/Carlo Allegri.
UN headquarters, New York City, USA
Canada has lost its high-profile bid for one of the rotating seats on the United Nations Security Council.

The loss marks the second consecutive failed quest for one of the two seats available in the category for member states from western Europe and other countries, something Canada has now sought and failed to win under two very different governments.

A total of 128 votes were needed to secure a two-thirds majority.

Norway secured 130 votes while Ireland got 128.

Canada received just 108 votes, even fewer than the 114 first round ballot votes that it received in 2010 when the former Conservative government ran and failed to win the same seat.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had frequently billed the seat as an avenue for Canada to exert greater influence on the world stage at a time when international institutions like the UN are under significant scrutiny and international relations are anything but harmonious.

Comment: At least there's some tiny justice in the world!

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Light Saber

Tucker Carlson shows murder charge is nonsense in Rayshard killing

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:01 UTC
Tucker Carlson Garrett Rolfe
© Fox News
Tucker Carlson discusses Officer Garrett Rolfe's actions
The much longer video establishes clear context, showing no excessive use of force in this incident

The (white) officer who shot and killed (black) Rayshard Brooks is now up on murder charges for shooting and killing him. But this charge is completely unfounded. Tucker Carlson showed a much fuller account of the situation, and when viewed in context, it becomes immediately clear how utterly politically charged the murder rap is, as well as the extreme tribalism and racism on display - not that of the police officer who killed Rayshard, but of the black liberals who run the government in Atlanta. Keep in mind that this is a tragedy for Rayshard, but that he brought that tragedy on himself by fighting the police. This is extremely straightforward and ought to give a very clear example of how the issue at hand is definitely not unfair treatment of black people by white police officers in the United States, but rather, radical leftism.

The tragedy goes in several directions. Here are some of the most important ones:
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