They're the ones our parents warned us against. Puppets of the free market & their reptile intelligence growing from exploiting to murderously bellicose and extincting, cancer-like structures. Tumors of the worst kind, indeed.
Despite the claims of Vice President Kamala Harris that there are no U.S. troops in active combat zones today, many remain deployed abroad in dangerous and unsustainable positions across the world. This includes both Iraq and Syria.
The United States and Iraq, however, have apparently reached a deal to begin the removal of 2,500 U.S. forces still stationed in that country. Staged over the course of 2025 and to conclude in 2026, the plan would, if successful, put an end to the U.S. military presence in a nation where many of the internal problems have a direct relationship to the invasion of 2003.
Next door to Iraq is Syria, a country whose own brutal and long-running civil war has also seen over a decade of U.S. intervention, from the ill-conceived Operation Timber Sycamore, the largest known C.I.A. arm and equip program in history, to direct U.S. occupation via bases of significant parts of the east of the country. Meanwhile, a long coordinated regime change campaign targeting President Bashir al-Assad failed after exacerbating the situation on the ground.
Out of this chaotic mess would come the rise of ISIS, something unlikely to have gotten so much traction without all the non-state actors that grew up in the wake of both Iraq and Syrian wars.
But while the U.S. played a supporting role, it was actually a complex patchwork of local forces and Iranian-backed militias that did the majority of the anti-ISIS fighting in the last decade. The U.S. strongly supported the Kurds while opposing to the Syrian government which was also fighting ISIS at the time. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S. worked with Iranian-supported militias against ISIS only to then fear their influence. (...)
One more time for the insular navel-gazers. Disinformation dilemma: US hands are way dirty, too As Biden cracks down on Russian interference in our elections, a look at what the Pentagon has been doing overseas
(...) However, while the United States takes stringent efforts to combat disinformation, particularly from foreign sources like Russia and China, history shows that it plays by different rules itself. Indeed, the National Security State has at times shown a problematic tendency to dabble in the exact same kinds of tactics that they fight so vociferously from other governments.
In recent years the United States has made a number of forays into covert online influence operations. In 2011, there was Operation Earnest Voice, a military program using âsock puppetsâ (fake social media accounts) to spread pro-U.S. narratives.
Similar efforts persist to this day. In 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a study of America-based social media sock puppets. It analyzed thousands of coordinated Facebook and Twitter posts targeting people in Russia, China and Iran. Many of these posts contained sensational rumors, like stories of Iranians stealing the organs of Afghan refugees. Some accounts also impersonated hardliners and criticized the Iranian government for being too moderate. Later investigations linked a number of those accounts to the Pentagon.â
The sock puppet accounts were kind of funny to look at because we are so used to analyzing pro-Kremlin sock puppets, so it was weird to see accounts pushing the opposite narrative,â Shelby Grossman, a staffer at the Internet Observatory and a member of the research team that published the paper, told Gizmodo in August 2022.
Official U.S. documents also suggest a growing willingness to use disinformation as a tool of psychological operations (PSYOPs). An October 2022 SOCOM (Special Operations Command) procurement document requested new tools for âinfluence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levelsâ as well as the same technology used to generate online deepfakes.
To sum it all up is how many Ukranians, Palestinians and Israelis will be sacrificed at the altar of the MIC for money laundering? I am just hoping that we survive all of this considering two nuclear powers very existence is being threatened. See we are forgetting that Israel has nukes too and that is on my bingo card for where the mass destruction starts. And as far as Israel and Palestine goes I say a pox on both of their houses both of them have committed so many atrocities I can't get behind either of them, there are no innocents in that region. If we do avoid Armageddon my other hope is that all of those involved in US foreign policy and their surrogate NATO pay for their war crimes against the Ukranian people.
Hundreds of lawyers from around the world called on the US to end the use of unilateral economic sanctions, saying the tool amounts to collective punishment of civilians and is illegal under international law.
In a letter to President Joe Biden, the lawyers, legal organizations and scholars decried the USâs increased reliance on sanctions to punish and coerce its adversaries and said the measures can lead to economic instability, hunger and reduced access to medicine and essential goods.
âCollective punishment is a standard practice of US foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions,â the signatories said. While the use of sanctions is different from conventional warfare, âits collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly,â they said. (...)
