In the war against Russia, Penny Wong (lead image, left) , the Australian Foreign Minister, has done more fighting with her feet than with her mouth.
Last August 5, at a meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers in Cambodia, Wong walked out during a speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, declaring through a spokesman: “Minister Wong could not sit through Lavrov’s attempt to justify the murder of innocent Ukrainians.”
When Australians fighting on the Ukraine side of the front are killed, Wong chooses to say nothing at all.
At least four Australian soldiers had been reported in the Australian media to have been killed by the end of last December; at least of one of them had been serving in the Australian Army. To evade Australian law prohibiting Australians from combat in foreign mercenary units, three were classified as medics. In each death Wong’s ministry announced it was providing “consular assistance to the family”.
By the end of February, the number of Australian KIA (Killed in Action) was still at four.
Last week, Boris Rozhin’s Telegram site, known as “Colonel Cassad”, announced details of the death of a fifth Australian and the wounding of an American. They were shot while travelling together in a civilian car in an unidentified location.
When the combat death of the fifth Australian was announced on May 6 by the Russians, Wong was asked to confirm his name and state of origin, and also to provide a count of Australians killed in the war so far. Wong’s spokesman said “we’re looking into your query.” Wong and her aides then went silent, and have refused to answer several follow-up emails.
It’s a silence of lambs trying to dissemble in wolves’ clothing.
The pro-war English writers supporting the arming of the Ukrainians with depleted uranium ammunition* have no brains.
The anti-war English writers opposing depleted uranium ammunition have no spines.
Has the kingdom of the English ever been so self-deluded on the page and so depleted on the battlefield?
Yes once, four hundred years ago, when King James I sent the first ambassador to the Mughal empire of India ruled by Jahangir ((lead image, left and right) to exchange gifts and threats for exclusive trading rights. The ambassador was Sir Thomas Roe (left), between September 1615 and February 1619. But Roe spent most of his years in India squatting over the toilet bowl with chronic dysentery and complaining to his friends at court in London and to his superiors at the East India Company at his lack of cash to impress the Indians and his lack of force to coerce them.
To solve these problems when Roe was upright, he plotted piracy at sea, sabotage and extortion on land against the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and French — and a protection racket against the Indians which they dismissed with a laugh. This is how the English empire began in India – with a dysenteric bang. It is still ending with a dysenteric whimper. In between, a great deal of English shit which they turned into Indian gold.
Now that King Charles III has his own Indian for prime minister in London, Rishi Sunak (right), he is also plotting to replace India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at next year’s election in New Delhi. But that’s a story for another time.
For the time being, the new king has been compelled to remove the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the queen’s crown during last week’s coronation; that’s because Modi is demanding its return.
The announcement from Buckingham Palace didn’t admit the king’s hand had been forced by the Indians. “Some minor changes and additions,” according to the king’s spokesman, “will be undertaken by the Crown Jeweller, in keeping with the longstanding tradition that the insertion of jewels is unique to the occasion, and reflects the Consort’s individual style.”
The diamond remains locked up in the Tower of London; Modi hasn’t got it back yet.
To an alien from another planet, where curiosity starts with naivety, the question is being asked why earthlings calling themselves the state media of Russia report analysis of an attack on the most obvious symbol of their state from two Americans who have spent their active service careers sworn to defeat what that symbol stands for — one of them in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the other in the US Marine Corps (USMC).
Having retired years ago, and lacking access to the secret CIA and USMC intelligence which was once their stock in trade, everything they know about Russia comes – they sometimes admit – from Russia.
The naïve but curious alien might therefore be forgiven for asking the earthlings to explain why the following headlines in the Russian state news agency Sputnik could possibly be believable – at least to an alien: “Former CIA Officer Reveals Possible Motive Behind Kremlin Drone Attack”; and “Scott Ritter on Kremlin Strike: Zelensky Gov ‘Now a Legitimate Target’”.
How could these two retired warfighting soldiers against Russia possibly know?
The answer to this, the alien acknowledges, he can’t answer directly. So he has asked twelve naïve questions in this TNT Radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.
Pushkin House is the only London platform for anti-Russian propaganda which publishes an annual financial report revealing where its money comes from. The organisation calls itself a charity, according to UK law, whose “principal aim”, it claims in its regular filings to UK Companies House, “is to serve as an independent centre exploring the great richness of Russian culture, language and civilisation.”
It is anything but independent. That’s because the organisation, which has lasted in London for almost seventy years in promotion of Russian culture, has been making large financial losses promoting war against Russia, and the Ukrainian destruction of Pushkin and everything else Russian in body or in book or monument form. Supporting the Ukrainian side in the war, however, has cost the trust which owns Pushkin House’s headquarters and operations a deficit in 2022 of £117,627. It’s the biggest financial loss in the Trust’s history.
It would have been much greater, however, if not for the financial backing of the British government. It has given more than two-thirds of the donation and grant income received in each of the past two years. The government has replaced Alexei Navalny, who appeared as a major donor in 2018 when the auditors called the source of the money “Future of Russia”, a political party which, under British law, cannot legally give money to charities like Pushkin House.
The British government is just as uninhibited. But in the UK, attacking Russia and backing the regime in Kiev either make a lawful tax-deductible charity, or else they are an illegal violation of the Charities Act.
A Berlin court judge has dismissed a charge of threatening public order by a speech by Heinrich Buecker (lead image, left) last year for which he has been prosecuted for “publicly approving a crime of aggression”. Buecker is a well-known Berlin anti-war activist and critic of the German government’s war against Russia in the Ukraine. His speech was given in a Berlin park last June 22 on the 81st anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
In a 90-minute courtroom session on April 27, guarded by five armed police, Judge Marieluis Brinkmann (right) of the Tiergarten District Court of Berlin (at rear of lead image) interrupted and stopped Buecker testifying in what the judge dismissed as “a history lesson”; refused to accept from his defence lawyer mainstream German media publications and Bundestag reports as evidence that Buecker’s opinions had been circulating widely in public before he spoke at the Berlin rally; and would not allow legal argument on Article 5, the free speech provision of the German constitution known as the Basic Law.
Instead, Judge Brinkmann ruled that an earlier conviction and fine for Buecker in the Tiergarten District Court in January should be dismissed because his speech had been a private one in front of Buecker’s “fans”, not a public speech at all.
This is a new interpretation of law for which there is no German constitutional precedent. Article 5 draws no distinction between private and public speech; or the size of the audiences which are covered by the constitution; “every person,” the text says, “shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources.”
The Berlin judge also broke German court precedent and judicial practice by announcing in her ruling a finding of fact and law about which she had refused to allow any evidence or argument to be presented and tested in court. In the Ukraine, she announced, Russia is waging a “war of aggression in violation of international law.”
In her ruling the judge signalled that the German authorities want to prevent the Buecker case from becoming a rallying cause for free speech advocates across the country. “They want the issue to go away as quickly as possible,” Buecker said. “They realize it’s becoming too public.”
First, the news from the front as George Eliason reports on his tour this week of the civilian destruction and mass grave sites at Popasnaya, Kremennaya, and Severodonetsk in the Lugansk region. Then from the federal court in Worcester, Massachusetts, a Department of Justice document making fresh revelations in the John Teixeira case that hint at a plea bargain which the US media are covering up. And then from Canada’s west coast, guest Chris “Gorilla Radio” Cook on what the US has already made of Canada, and what will happen when the Ukrainian diaspora faces the capitulation of the regime in Kiev and Lvov.
The war and US war sanctions have reversed the destruction of the Russian farm economy forced during the 1990s by the US “reformers” in the Yeltsin administration led by the recently exiled Anatoly Chubais.
Now, however, under government orders for self-sufficiency in food production, protection from US biochemical warfare against the Russian food chain, and revival of Soviet seed breeding centres, the American, German, French and Dutch agro-industry exporters which have profited in Russia for thirty years are being locked out.
Not only in Russia and in the Ukraine – the Axis faces long-term competition in Europe, Asia and Africa in the future.
“We are defeating the Americans and Germans on the battlefield,” observes a veteran farm industry source in Moscow. “We are going to do the same on the farm field. Do you remember what Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] said a long time ago – ‘we will bury you’. And you have been saying that’s what you are going to do to us.”
Once upon a time, one of the leading literary figures in the UK defended Russian culture by staging a play in a London theatre in 1920 and again in 1926. J.M. (James) Barrie, famous then and now as the creator of Peter Pan, was the playwright; the play he wrote was called “The Truth about Russian Dancers”.
Not one Englishman or Scotsman (for that was Barrie’s race) dares to do such a thing today.
Barrie’s play followed after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the attempts by the British government in military operations, economic sanctions, and propaganda to attack the new Kremlin regime, kill Vladimir Lenin, and replace the Red government. These military operations didn’t end until the British army withdrew from Russia in September 1920, five months after Barrie’s play had concluded its popular stage run.
According to his script, the fantasy and beauty Barrie characterised as the Russianness of Karissima, the heroine of the play, and her company of dancers is pitted against the unimaginativeness and rigid conformity of the British. And so it is today – that is, if you believe in Barrie, Peter Pan, and their lost boys.
Late on Friday evening in New York, early Saturday morning in Moscow, the New York Times published a report by well-known mouthpieces for US and British intelligence on the Pentagon Papers.
This reveals fresh evidence of what the TNT War of the Worlds broadcast last week reported was the way John Teixeira, the alleged leaker of ten secret briefing papers on the Ukraine war from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was profiled by the Pentagon and over nine months of 2022 targeted in an official operation to disclose military secrets, which became public knowledge on April 6.
In this operation, Teixeira was the patsy for a Pentagon attack on Washington, Kiev and other allied officials who are planning to launch a Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces. This, the Pentagon Papers reveal, risks not only Russian defeat of the Ukrainians on the battlefield, but also the destruction of US military dominance in Europe and the international credibility of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) alliance.
The report by Aric Toler of Bellingcat, Julian Barnes, and Malachy Browne of the newspaper, is headlined “Airman Shares Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer than Previously Known.” With Toler’s and Barnes’ long record for fabricating and promoting Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU), British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) source lies, the article means the opposite of its conclusion: “The additional information raises questions about why authorities did not discover the leaks sooner”. This is the alibi of the official leakers – they didn’t fail to discover the leaks later, they launched them from the start.
The Bellingcat group and New York Times now reveal that Teixeira began leaking “sensitive” information in “February 2022, soon after the invasion of Ukraine”. Sensitive means not classified.
The reporters also call the leaks “secret intelligence on the Russian war effort” but they repeat this consisted of “posts containing the sensitive information” and “classified documents”. No direct evidence of what the reporters claim they “reviewed” has been published, neither their classification codes nor other document records. “While it appears that the user [Teixeira] likely posted pictures of some documents, those have since been deleted from the chat group.” In other words, the reporters are claiming they have seen “detailed written accounts” – written by Teixeira. How and from what source the Bellingcat group got this evidence is being kept secret still. How the group knows what Teixeira allegedly wrote and what is or was classified secret, they don’t say.
The reporters also reveal that Teixeira claimed to his chat group of adolescent gamers in September 2022 that he “usually worked with GCHQ [General Government Communications Headquarters] people when I’m looking at foreign countries.” This is now a hint that it was the British signals agency who detected what Teixeira was doing and, according to the standard intelligence-sharing practice, alerted the US counterpart National Security Agency, which then alerted the US Air Force commanding Teixeira’s unit and other agencies. This Pentagon the Pentagon– that’s now the hint that it was the British who first spotted what Teixeira was doing, alerted the CIA and Pentagon. If the latter didn’t know it already.
The reporters did not contact GCHQ directly to ask what they knew, when they knew it, and what they relayed to Washington. Instead, they say questioned the British Embassy in Washington where, they report, “a spokeswoman…declined to comment.”
If this was the sequence of events, it would represent significant mitigating evidence for Teixeira, as well as the legal defence of entrapment when he goes to court on charges of espionage. For the time being, the federal magistrate judge in the Boston proceeding has postponed the plea and bail hearing scheduled for Teixeira on April 19 to allow his defence attorneys time to review the evidence and prepare.
The attorneys are also likely to argue that the indictment of Teixeira under the Espionage Act, 3 requires proof of “intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The New York Timespublication has identified Teixeira’s lawyer as a Boston public defender named Joshua Hanye. Hanye is a highly experienced, 19-year veteran of criminal prosecutions. For Hanye to be vetted and obtain the security clearances required for him to see the top-secret codeword documents alleged in evidence against Teixeira will requires weeks, if not months. For the time being, he has entered no plea in court, and he refuses to speak with the Bellingcat group.
If Teixeira and Hanye are suspicious that Bellingcat and the New York Times are working for the government against him, there is reason in the published report itself. Toler, Barnes and Browne claim that “the Times found an online receipt in Airman Teixeira’s name” for the purchase of an antique rifle. This indicates the reporters have had access to official evidence taken from Teixeira’s personal computer. This is not open-source journalism; this access means government authorization to Toler of Bellingcat for access to prosecution evidence.
Accordingly, in this case everything Bellingcat and the New York Times say should be taken down and used in evidence against them.
