2025: The Year to Test the Constitutionality of the Espionage Act?

IMPRISONED WIKILEAKS PUBLISHER, Julian Assange, 52, received some quasi-good news on Monday when the High Court in London granted him the right to appeal an earlier order to extradite him to the U.S. on espionage and related charges if the U.S. made certain assurances. Justices Jeremy Johnson and Victoria Sharp found an apparent violation of the U.S./U.K. Extradition Act which “bars extradition if an individual might be prejudiced due to his nationality and due to the centrality of the First Amendment to his defense.” 

Obviously, the First Amendment would be central to Assange’s defense as a publisher and the founder of WikiLeaks, but James Lewis KC, representing the U.S. in the High Court was only able to assert Assange would be allowed “to seek to rely” on the First Amendment, not rely in fact upon it. Fortunately, Assange’s barristers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, didn’t think it was simply odd idiomatic American English rather than the bullsh!t in any language that it truly was. They were also troubled by the fact that Chelsea Manning, an American, wasn’t able to invoke the First Amendment in her defense for leaking classified defense documents, and that the fact she couldn’t, shouldn’t in any event have any bearing on whether Assange can: she had been a government whistleblower who signed non-disclosure agreements and he was a publisher. Finally, the cases Lewis had cited to were largely irrelevant.

Writing for Consortium News, Joe Lauria described the situation thusly:

“He gets to stay in prison another year or more, Joe Biden doesn’t have to worry about a journalist showing up in chains in Alexandria, VA during a presidential campaign and of course Assange could lose his appeal and arrive in the U.S. at a more opportune time for Biden.” 

What Lauria omits is that Trump will likely win and might do the right thing and drop the matter, concluding Assange has paid enough for his ‘mistake’ by his five years in a high-security prison and seven years in exile before that. (Timeline here.) The U.K. doesn’t seem to want to extradite.

Lauria correctly points out that the D.O.J., an executive branch construct, cannot bind a U.S. Federal Court as part of the judicial branch, meaning Lewis couldn’t have possibly gotten a credible guarantee about the use of the First Amendment. The lack of that guarantee though means Assange is necessarily “prejudiced due to his nationality” Majorie Cohn, former president of the National Lawyers’ Guild astutely recognizes. She adds that the D.O.J. likely doesn’t want Assange to invoke the First Amendment in court because it would open the door to litigating the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act. The First Amendment would also show it authorized Assange’s possession of that classified data as a publisher and journalist and failure to allow it to be raised would violate basic tenets of due process in such an Espionage Act.

Assange will remain in prison for months (thru Inauguration Day ’25?) til his new appeal begins.

Fork-Tongued Pols, Knife-Stabbed Allies, and the Spoon-Fed Children

AS U.S. COLLEGES and universities futilely attempt to cope with ‘micro-intifada’ training, comprised of protests, occupations, and violence from pro-Hamas demonstrators in ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampments’ on campus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to save his nation, faith, political career, and legacy. For him, it’s existential. 

There have been rumors since early May that the International Criminal Court may issue an arrest warrant against him and other Israeli leaders for allegedly waging a genocidal campaign in Gaza. News isn’t always true these days, to be sure, but it seems Netanyahu has been fairly restrained and sober in his response to the Hamas threat. And, IMO, he has also been too deferential to the corrupt senile occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, who seems to think the Israeli leader should roll over and play dead, but maybe not before the I.C.C. acts. 

“Israel expects the leaders of the free world to come out strongly against this scandalous step, a step that will harm the self-defense not only of the State of Israel, but of all democracies,” the  P.M. prodded world leaders. Netanyahu, who typically overstates his positions, said that issuing a warrant against him would be an “antisemitic hate crime.” And why not? Isn’t everyone antisemitic these days? And isn’t everything a ‘hate’ crime?

The illicit and corrupt Biden regime says it opposes such an action against Netanyahu because Israel has not recognized the I.C.C.’s jurisdiction, a claim the U.S. also made over I.C.C. actions against itself in Afghanistan. Russia was quick to point out the hypocrisy that the U.S. not only supported, but encouraged the issuance of I.C.C. warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin last year for its military action in Ukraine. Yet neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties either.

And still, Biden has done absolutely nothing to lessen the hostilities. If anything, he has fomented dissent by pandering to pro-Hamas protesters at least in part because they are a target demographic in his inexplicable and reprehensible campaign for president. It is also why he now placates them by bringing Gaza refugees to the U.S. and making them U.S. citizens by executive order, something hardly anyone supports or should support, especially in light of the U.S. border crisis. However, despite his inaction, there has slowly been a reduction in violence at the campuses due to arrests, and the occupations have finally begun to be broken up by police. This was a big breakthrough since most school administrators and educators are, like Biden, so ineffectual or are part of the problem themselves.  

Netanyahu has recently become emboldened to make his own demand for the U.S. to crack down on pro-Hamas student protests, calling a failure to do so ‘antisemitism.’ He’s not wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’s right, because in fact, many of the protesters are Jewish themselves. And never mind Palestinians are Arabs and Arabs are Semitic people, too. 

You’d think Biden would have the human decency to at least be embarrassed by his ineptitude, insincerity, and hypocrisy, but he just plays both sides. His is an existential political journey, too. And one he absolutely must lose, if America is to retain any credibility in the world.

The Biden regime recently urged Congress and the hopelessly feckless and naive new House Speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), to pony up more big bucks hustled from American taxpayers for Israel, but it was a gratuitous insult to also include funds for Hamas, who, after all, instigated this latest round of violence in the Holy Land. (Would Biden’s handlers similarly offer charitable aid to Russia in addition to funding the Ukraine regime, for example?) 

Also insulting was the amount of money was dwarfed by the heaps of cash and weapons the U.S. has bestowed on Ukraine’s corrupt President Volodymyr Zelensky, though in fairness, Israel has always been the recipient of disproportional aid packages, amounting to $3.8 billion annually, thanks to extremely effective lobbying by AIPAC. A cutback is certainly in order, though the timing is unfortunate.  

AIPAC will be spending oodles of money—in a way, offset by American aid in a cynical sort of way—on the U.S. elections, which is another reason the dangerous kook in the White House is attempting to talk through both sides of his mouth. Even with his rapidly progressing dementia, though, Biden groks the threat from the AIPAC website: “[AIPAC] is the largest pro-Israel PAC in America and contributed more resources directly to candidates than any other PAC. 98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2022.” (Emphasis added.) And as between Biden and pro-Israeli Donald Trump, guess who AIPAC will endorse? The only question is whether American Jews will care what AIPAC thinks, given Jews tend to vote  Democrat. They just might not now.

Indeed, Israel clearly learned the business of government from its America masters over the decades, just as Netanyahu learned activism, propaganda, and the art of politics from M.I.T. and Harvard. For anyone not clear on this point need only look at Netayahu’s massive Israeli settlement expansion, turning an obvious provocation into a political fait d’accompli. 

The pledge of additional aid from the U.S. last month may metaphorically become a mirage in the Negev, however. Biden has placed often changing conditions on how the aid can be used by Jerusalem. And for the most part, Netanyahu had obeyed the Big Guy.

For example, Netanyahu held off on initiating an operation to demolish a massive maze of tunnels to Rafah, on the Israeli border town of Gaza and Egypt which was engineered to deliver weapons and supplies to Palestinians to fight Israel. It was considered the last stronghold of Hamas in Gaza. But it is also being used as a lifeline to transport humanitarian aid to Gazans—at least until Israel issued an evacuation call this month in anticipation of its planned offensive. (A fairly accurate, albeit Arab description is here.) 

Some, but not all in the U.S., including Biden, agreed and still agree with the United Nations, that this operation could be a humanitarian disaster, however, and the American regime is now withholding delivery of long-awaited supplies to its best Middle Eastern ally.

For its part, the State Department has concluded it is “reasonable to assess” that Israel has violated international law by pursuing its military operation in Gaza (a belief echoed by an independent task force), yet remarkably didn’t find its offense such that aid should be withheld. Such conflicting messaging is both confusing and angering its recipient. 

Whether the operation would or would not result in a humanitarian disaster is not dispositive of the fact that the U.S. has unequivocally betrayed Israel by withholding aid, pure and simple. It’s not a good look, nor is it promising for international relationships with present and future allies who will no longer trust American promises of international support or military largess.

That it may, indeed, become a humanitarian crisis, also doesn’t address whether and to what extent Hamas has some culpability here, too. After all, Israel was attacked first by Hamas. The duplicity of the Biden regime continues to amaze. Would it, for example, tell its comrades in Ukraine to stop winning, but still send it weapons bought and paid for by weary U.S. taxpayers? 

A big takeaway is that Rafah was a figurative bomb waiting to explode for years, and should’ve been shut down by Israeli Defense Forces earlier. As it stands on Friday, Israel’s Security Cabinet has voted to expand the Rafah operation while keeping settlement talks with Egyptian mediators open in an effort to obtain the release of at least 128 hostages still held by Hamas since Oct. 7th, the day its terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,139, taking 200 hostage.

 Egypt waits and worries as to what comes next. After translating it into Hebrew, Netanyahu gave Biden an unequivocal middle finger and sent the I.D.F. to the Palestine side of Rafah to conduct aircraft strikes, which apparently killed ‘terrorists.’ 

As an aside, I don’t recall common usage of the word ‘terrorist’ until Netanyahu arrived on the public scene in the early ‘90s, even though tensions in the region have been present since the establishment of Israel in 1948. He overstates things, so one can only hope, in a perverse sort of way, that they really were terrorists.

Notably on Friday, the U.N. General Assembly voted, 143-9, for a resolution to confer to the “state of Palestine” certain rights and privileges reserved only for member states, which, of course, ‘Palestine’ is not. In fact, most people probably don’t even know the U.N. recognized Palestinian ‘statehood’ for its own purposes back in 2012, allowing it observer status in the Assembly. It’s sort of an international legal fiction. 

But a U.N. member? The U.S., and obviously Israel, voted nay. True statehood would have to be recognized bilaterally with other states. And full U.N. membership will still need to go back to the Security Council. Joe Lauria of Consortium News explains it well, here. 

The problems with the U.N. resolution are myriad. It defies principles in the U.N. Charter, for one thing. It renders definitions of terms in major international documents into a mockery of law and language, for another. It also essentially rewards terrorism. And it renders the U.S. financially liable for yet another U.N. undertaking—and one it doesn’t even support. And now an Israeli envoy is demanding the U.S. cut U.N. funding, which is actually a good idea. It starts to look a lot like NATO and the foolhardy plan to invite Ukraine to an outdated relic of history at enormous cost to the U.S., both fiscally and politically. 

Sadly, a two-state solution was always rejected by the Palestinian Authority and its military arm, Hamas. Now it is an impossibility, and renders statehood an impossibly fluid concept for the rest of the world. Optimistically, the U.S. may, at least, shed itself of the burden of paying for the U.N., albeit, as it recklessly shifts the money to any of a number of corrupt or hostile states.

As it turns out, back in the U.S., just as many of us suspected, CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other agitpropists such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation are behind the bedlam. Most of their useful idiots don’t even know what they’re protesting about, other than evil ‘Zionists,’ transparently meaning all Jews. Ask the protesters, donning their designer unisex keffiyehs, for example, what river and sea it is that they refer to in their chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.’ They have no idea. 

The protesters just tear down the American flag on campus and replace it with a Palestinian one, but we shouldn’t wonder why. After all, they saw former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her comrades feverishly waving Ukraine flags or watched her unceremoniously and disrespectfully rip up a State of the Union Address delivered by President Trump inside the House chamber. They don’t know any better.

What these student protesters do know is they’re getting paid (!), given tents in which to occupy the campus grounds, and that their demands are being largely met by the Biden regime. An extremely enlightening article about this is here. 

Their demands for delicious hot meals and regular heath monitoring from school administrators are largely being ignored, though. And why not? It turns out, most aren’t even matriculated, so the schools have no obligation to cater to them. And those demanding passing grades and degrees have done little to earn them. Between this, Covid, and the Occupy movement, this will surely be the stupidest generation ever produced! 

The protesters whine about not having their voices heard, especially by the free-speech advocates they so detest, but it is their acts that makes them repelled. In that regard, they are zealots like those they are defending—they demand one listen to them and by extension, do as they say, without delay or contradiction, or else…  Whatever happened to debate clubs or moot courts? They must’ve gone the way of five-and-dime stores and integrity.

Deep Six-ing ‘Vault 7’ and Other WikiLeaks News

JUST IN CASE you were getting any ideas about leaking anything unsavory about Brandon at the White House, forget it. Whistleblowers are being condemned to hideous fates and to illustrate this, a former C.I.A. coder was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his breach.

Josh Schulte leaked top secret C.I.A. cyber-intelligence that found its way to WikiLeaks and was released as ‘Vault 7’ which the spy agency said was the largest such leak in its history (a “digital Pearl Harbor”), and placed its personnel, programs, and assets at risk, jeopardizing national security. 

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had recommended a life sentence for  Schulte for “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.” They also argued for a terrorism enhancement on his sentence. Read 23-page sentencing recommendation in U.S. v. Schulte (S2/3 17 Cr. 548 (JMF)  here.

Oh, and by the way, there’s his possession of child porn, too, along with his “complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

That’s the official narrative.

On Thursday, Judge Jesse Furman at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan sentenced Schulte to 400 months for espionage and 80 months for child porn. Schulte, now 35, has been biding his time at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years awaiting his fate at his new digs.

It can’t be any worse, if you’re to believe his observations at his sentencing hearing that the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn is “New York’s very own Auschwitz…something only the SS could come up with,”  along with a lengthy description of the horrors of his detention, which Judge Furman found “offensive.”

Indeed, Schulte’s pre-sentencing detention has been lengthy. He had been tried once before in 2020, but after a week of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked on eight counts pertaining to the theft and transmission of documents. U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty then declared a mistrial.

Undoubtedly a mistake on his part, Schulte represented himself on retrial, where he was convicted on nine counts.

Schulte, the government said, had used a ‘backdoor’ password to access the digital C.I.A. assets on offline servers in 2016, then deleted digital logs of C.I.A. servers, to cover his tracks. For months, he transmitted files to WikiLeaks.

He was portrayed as a disgruntled and maladjusted employee by the government rather than a politically motivated whistleblower which is par for the C.I.A.’s course.

And there was the cheap thriller trick of coincidentally finding child pornography—from Russia, no less!— linked or pointing to the defendant in the course of investigating the underlying crime. (Truth be told, I have no idea if the child porn was Schulte’s, having not seen the evidence, but given the C.I.A.’s usual playbook, I would not be inclined to give the agency the benefit of the doubt, and would, instead, give Schulte a truly fair and honest presumption of innocence.) 

WikiLeaks published the trove of over 7,000 pages in 2018, when Schulte was 28. Among the information in Vault 7 were details on how the agency used malware to hack iPhones, Android devices, and Samsung smart TVs of private consumers, as well as foreign governments and terrorists. As Courthouse News described it:

“Throughout the trove of agency materials, a variety of covert techniques, malware and programs used to collect audio and video streams live from their user’s devices are given names worthy of a tawdry suspense novel. One such covert program exposed in the Vault 7 leak was Weeping Angel, which offers hackers a window into the private citizen’s world by way of their Samsung smart televisions.

“The espionage tools revealed how professionally groomed CIA hackers and other officials, including those of foreign governments, engaged in a training system and frequently exchanged information on how to bypass password protections, antivirus software and other forms of encryption methods with relative ease.”

At the time of Vault 7’s publication, I recall thinking how awful it was that the government was spying on its citizens like that without first obtaining a warrant. That’s not a secret that should be kept from the citizenry, and frankly, there is way too much classification anyway. 

Undoubtedly, back in the U.K., WikiLeaks’ founder and publisher Julian Assange and his counsel have watched this case closely. The big takeaway for them—aside from the obvious—is just how heinous the detention facilities in the U.S. are. After all, Assange’s appeal to not be extradited to America the Beautiful is how hideously he’ll be treated. Schulte constitutes Exhibit A.

Meanwhile, an Australian senator, David Shoebridge, and an member of parliament, Josh Wilson, have requested “an urgent, thorough and independent assessment” of the dangers to Assange’s health should he be extradited, according to Consortium News. CN has been the best source of news on the WikiLeaks publisher, who has been shunned by the ‘woke’ MSM. 

This request was made in advance of Assange’s scheduled final extradition hearing at the High Court in London on Feb. 20-21. If he is sent to the U.S. to answer for espionage and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charges, he faces a fate that at best, will mirror Schulte’s, despite the fact all he did was publish factual information given to him by a whistleblower—who was in a position to provide accurate information—about U.S. state crimes, corruption, and wholesale violations of its citizens’ constitutional rights.  

First Amendment Lawsuits: Bring ‘Em On!

ITHE LAWSUITS KEEP COMING when it concerns censorship and the First Amendment. Today Consortium for Independent Journalism, a nonprofit publishing Consortium News (which I regularly read) filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government and an internet ‘watchdog’ called NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. in Manhattan over alleged First Amendment violations. More specifically, CNs’ suit charges that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, which is a component of the intelligence community, with contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report, and abridge the speech of American media which dissent from the official policy positions of the U.S. government. NewsGuard, it is claimed, is “acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints” as to Ukraine, Russia, and Syria, imposing a form of “censorship and repression of views” which differ from that espoused by the United States government and its allies. In other words, agree with your government—or else. 

NewsGuard allegedly uses its software to tag news sites that have been targeted, including all 20,000+ CN articles since 1995, with warnings to “proceed with caution,” or telling NewsGuard subscribers that CN produces “disinformation,” “false content,” and is an “anti-U.S.” media organization. Not only did they tag CN articles, NewsGuard only directly took issue with six of the articles.

Robert Parry, a multiple-award winning investigative journalist, was the editor of CN from 1995 until his death in 2018. Among the stories he covered were the Iran-Contra Affair and this gem (here) Ukraine’s Nazi ‘heroes’ written back in 2015.

Consortium News’ attorney, Bruce Afran, said:“The First Amendment rights of all American media are threatened by this arrangement with the Defense Department to defame and abridge the speech of U.S. media groups. When media groups are condemned by the government as ‘anti-U.S.’ and are accused of publishing ‘false content’ because they disagree with U.S. policies, the result is self-censorship and a destruction of the public debate intended by the First Amendment.”

CN seeks a ruling that the practice by the defendants is unconstitutional and equitable relief in the form of a permanent injunction against such practices. It seeks damages of over $13 million for defamation and for civil rights violations.  The Complaint may be read in full here. (Not too sure the Southern District of New York the best forum, but WTF?)

A Whistleblower Just Got His Wings

Image: credit: Daniel Ellsberg.

CONSORTIUM NEWS reported the sad demise of a friend and board member, Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the lies propagated about the Vietnam War by the American government. Ellsberg was 92. He was in hospice care in California after receiving a grim diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He is survived by his wife, two sons, daughter, grandkids, and a great-grandchild.

Under the Richard Nixon administration in 1971, the Department of Justice ordered the press to cease publishing the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg, who had access to the Papers due to his position with the RAND Corporation, released select portions of the top-secret Pentagon study via The New York Times, though, and was later charged with violating the Espionage Act despite the fact the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the government’s use of prior restraint in a seminal First Amendment case, New York Times v. U.S., 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which remains good law to this day. (Read decision here.)

The Pentagon Papers, officially known as “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” was commissioned by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. The report showed the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had all misled the public about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which was controversial and much more significant than realized. 

Ellsberg’s criminal case was only dismissed after gross prosecutorial misconduct was uncovered. A team, dubbed “the plumbers,” consisting of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, operated sub rosa to burglarize Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to find information to discredit him. (Hunt and Liddy were later involved with the Watergate break-in in 1972 that ultimately resulted in Nixon’s 1974 resignation.) The Pentagon Papers inexplicably remained officially classified until 2011. 

Later in life, Ellsberg rallied against the potential fronts and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and recently, Ukraine and Taiwan. (Read an interview here.) He also became a powerful advocate for this generation of whistleblowers including Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. 

Ellsberg’s passing should serve to remind us that the D.O.J. has only become more hostile to ordinary people and aggressive in its prosecutions of them over time, and clearly cannot be trusted to self-regulate or take corrective measures when needed. Just last month, the F.B.I. was found to be continuing to abuse a powerful and controversial digital surveillance law, Sec. 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which it had promised it would reform, according to an unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document, here.

His passing should also serve as a stark reminder of the risks whistleblowers too often must face to bring some often very serious violations to light. Edward Snowden remains a wanted man in the U.S., subject to immediate arrest by American authorities, and is exiled in Russia, where he and his wife have become dual-citizens. 

Julian Assange is facing a fifth year of confinement in London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he married the mother of his two children, after some seven years exiled in the Ecuadorian Embassy. He awaits a final determination from British authorities as to whether they will extradite him to the U.S. where he faces criminal charges under the Espionage Act. 

Chelsea Manning received a commutation from a 35-year sentence from then-President Barack Obama, has since written her memoir, and is now apparently leading an ordinary life, to the extent a ex-military, formerly suicidal, transgender ex-con and enemy of the state can. 

May they all find peace in life.

What If Putin, Not Biden, Is the Rational Actor?

THE ILLEGITIMATE SOMETIMES-OCCUPANT of the White House, Joey Biden, is rapidly steering the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war with Russia. So far, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has shown remarkable restraint, leaving some to wonder why.

As it stands presently, the U.S. has sent vast sums to the unappreciative and corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, with only a pittance ever reaching those fighting the holy war against those pesky Russians. Weapons as well as money have been diverted, with no auditing or accountability by the U.S.  The latest is Kiev’s demand (no time for a polite request) for American F-16 fighter jets, M1 Abrams tanks, and commitments for almost unlimited artillery and ammunition, along with a few reluctantly donated items, like German-made Leopard 2 tanks from Europe. President Ronald Reagan once said of the USSR and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that we must “trust, but verify” as detente supplanted the Cold War. That’s good advice for today, too.

In contrast to Putin, we know why Biden has delivered the goods to Zelensky: it is his quid pro quo for Ukraine’s enrichment of the corrupt Biden crime family, or alternatively, a money-laundering operation for him. An incidental benefit inures to shareholders of certain defense companies. (To learn which ones will make the biggest killing, refer to the Pelosi stock disclosure down the road, but I digress.)

The problem is, of course, that at some point, Putin’s patience may wear thin and instead of retaliating for Western escalation by, for example, striking at Ukrainian critical infrastructure, he will actually target the West itself. Remember the conflict is really over the threat, real or perceived, of NATO sneaking around lurking in Russia’s national curtilage. A ground war against Europe and the U.S. would be a preposterous undertaking, but tactical nukes would not. (Neither would bioweapons or chemical weapons, but I again digress.)

The Biden regime is under the mistaken assumption that since Putin hasn’t acted capriciously yet, he never will. This has encouraged fanciful and foolhardy plans by the regime to back a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea. Biden’s regime has also contemplated the overthrow of Putin himself, though they clearly don’t see their hypocrisy and haven’t considered the possibility that the devil they know is better than the one they don’t. And they’ve mulled the complete destruction or defeat of Russia. Moscow would most certainly respond to such aggression and escalation by the West, which would possibly involve nukes used against NATO members. 

NATO would, of course, call Putin the devil incarnate, whose red menace wasteland threatens ‘our Democracy-with-a-capital-D,’ and all that is right and good in the world. Americans will be reminded of the so-called Evil Empire and how the U.S. defeated that enemy just in the nick of time before it could blow up the whole world. Anyone who even hints at seeing Russia’s point-of-view will undoubtedly be called a Putin puppet, a Russian ‘useful idiot,’ or just an old-fashioned Communist-Satinist-racist-fascist.

Caitlin Johnstone and Branko Marcetic opine, in “Incentivizing Russia To Hit NATO” and “Mission Creep? How the U.S. role in Ukraine has slowly escalated,” (respectively) on the “slow escalation” of D.C.’s role in Kiev’s fight with Moscow, but by historic standards, these deteriorating conditions have unfolded rather quickly.  The Russian invasion occurred less than a year ago and we are now involved in ways that were unthinkable only a few months ago. Johnstone and Marcetic are correct, in fact, that this effectively incentivizes Russia to react more forcefully each time another red line is crossed. Oddly, they agree with 45th President Donald Trump. And by the West threatening an enlarged NATO and its ‘all for one and one for all’ commitments, it’s apparent that this is reasonably construed by Russia as an existential threat. 

Author and former military intelligence officer who implemented arms control treaties with the former USSR, Scott Ritter, explains in detail for Consortium News just how all the military aid risks nuclear Armaggedon and also fails Ukraine, here. Even The New York Times concedes the regime’s aid to Kiev may be fallacious.

Putin undoubtedly regrets the invasion into Ukraine, but wasn’t able to convince Zelensky that the NATO red line wasn’t simply optional or a polite ask. But all the talk of NATO expansion is, in fact, changing alliances (or truces) that have served as the framework for relatively peaceful co-existence for some time. It shouldn’t make anyone comfortable. Johnstone and Marcetic correctly point out that this isn’t Russia v. Ukraine anymore; it’s Russia v. NATO, thanks to Biden. 

This time it’s not a Cold War were averting, but a hot war we’re instigating, thanks to Zelensky’s stooge, Joey Biden, and the greed that motivates them both. That Putin has been as restrained in his responses as he has been means either that he, not Biden, is the rational actor here, or, alternatively, he has no other option. Better hope for the former despite what it tells us about Kiev’s useful idiot who sometimes occupies the White House, enriching himself while endangering the world.