I bash John Bolton on Iranian television.
Category Archives: Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy
Keith Preston: Nikki Haley originally part of ‘Never Trumper’ camp Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
Nikki Haley, the outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, was a member of the “Never Trumper” movement opposed to Donald Trump’s rise to power, an American analyst in Virginia says.
Haley announced Tuesday she was resigning after nearly two years in the post. The former South Carolina governor – one of the few women in the Trump cabinet – gave no reason for her exit.
Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, told Press TV on Tuesday that Haley had been a vocal critic of President Trump. “She was originally in what they call the Never Trumper camp,” Preston said.
Never Trumpers were a group of established Republicans opposed to Trump’s presidential campaign. They believed the real estate mogul-turned-politician posed a serious threat to America’s national security.
American Dissident: Noam Chomsky on the State of the Empire Reply
Chomsky is interviewed by Jeremy Scahill. This is a good takedown of the liberal class. A good discussion of Trump’s foreign policy as well.
The world laughed at U.S. President Donald Trump at the United Nations, but the imperial declarations he issued are no laughing matter. Trump may come off as a buffoon, but his global agenda is consistent with the bipartisan empire machine that runs the United States. This week on Intercepted: Famed dissident Noam Chomsky breaks down the Trump presidency; the defeat of the U.S. in Afghanistan; what he believes is a just position on Syria’s civil war; and the agenda of Vladimir Putin and Russia. He also discusses the impact of big social media companies and explains why a life of resisting and fighting is worth it. Jeremy Scahill analyzes Trump’s U.N. speech and gives context to the seldom-discussed bipartisan support for much of Trump’s global agenda. Dallas hip-hop artist Bobby Sessions talks about police killings and this political moment. We also hear music from his new EP, “RVLTN (Chapter 1): The Divided States of AmeriKKKa.”
Keith Preston: Saudi, UAE, US behind Recent Terrorist Attack in Iran Reply
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst said the triangle of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the US was behind the recent terrorist attack in Iran’s southwestern city of Ahvaz, adding that Saudi Arabia has been consistently involved in providing support for terrorist activities across the region.
“It is quite likely that the perpetrators of the attack have received support from Saudi Arabia. This would certainly be in keeping with Saudi Arabia’s past history in the region,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim in an interview.
He added, “A likely strategy that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pursuing is to increase the hostilities toward Iran to the point that the United States will engage in military intervention against Iran, and on behalf of the (Persian) Gulf states.”
The following is the full text of the interview.
The National Endowment For Democracy Reply
By Keith Durant
Brief History
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was founded in 1983 after being conceived by President Reagan and ex-CIA Director and then Vice-President Bush. It was created to take the place of the CIA after it’s fall from grace and worldwide condemnation for attempted of accomplished coups in many countries on 4 continents.
It was decided that a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) would keep America’s hands clean and could still accomplish all of the same goals.
In a White House memo it’s goals were stated quite plainly. “We need to examine how law and Executive Order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale, as well as what we can do through substantially increased overt political action.”[1]
At the March 1990 NED board meeting, President Carl Gershman called the “victory of the democratic opposition in Nicaragua… a tremendous victory for the Endowment as well.” The board minutes continued:
What’s Going On With Venezuela? 4
A reader writes:
“I have a news item that might interest you. It is a 47 page report (with references) from the Human Rights Commission by one of their independent experts sent to investigate Venezuela. In the report he names the US, Canada, EU and Columbia and specifically Barack Obama and Donald Trump as needing to be charged with crimes against humanity. He documents how the media, IMF, World Bank, Standard&Poors, Moody and Fitch, as well as internal named opposition, NGO’s, international monetary exchange criminals colluded. He references work by Abby Martin and the Real News in some of his sources. Here is one of his recommendations:
The Independent Expert recommends that, until the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court address the lethal outcomes of economic wars and sanctions regimes, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, the Russell Tribunal and the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission undertake the task so as to facilitate future judicial pronouncements.”
https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/G1823931.pdf
The Economic War against Venezuela Reply
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report about Venezuela on August 30 explaining that the country’s situation is the result of an economic war, a financial blockade and a media attack that reinforces a supposed ‘humanitarian crisis’.
Trump’s Foreign Policy Within The Bigger Picture of Globalism Reply
In episode 9 of Unraveling Political Theory, welcoming back Tim and Keith from a temporary absence, they will be discussing Trump’s foreign policy and the idea of globalism. They discuss Zionism and Israeli influence on US policy, China and the ongoing geopolitical battle with the US, and the many political dynamics at play within the Trump administration. Coming to terms with different political movements and what they represent is at the core of what this podcast is all about.
Keith Preston: Trump wants UN to serve American interests Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
US President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of the United Nations is not surprising because he represents the view that the world body must serve US foreign policy, says an analyst in Virginia.
Russia, Turkey agree to buffer zone borders Reply
Keith Preston: US government complicit in Saudi crimes in Yemen Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
The administration of US President Donald Trump’s unconditional support for Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s many crimes in Yemen makes Washington a complicit in the onslaught, says an American analyst.
Keith Preston, director of the Attackthesystem.org, made the remarks during an interview with Press TV about the White House’s continued backing of the Saudi-led military aggression against Yemen despite international outrage.
Earlier this week, as the months-long offensive by the Saudis and their regional allies to capture Yemen’s important port city of al-Hudaydah continued, Saudi commanders announced Wednesday that they had been able to block two key supply routes into the city, The Washington Post reported.
That was bad news for millions of people in Yemen who are struggling with hunger and deadly cholera outbreaks, as the city acts as a gateway for 70 percent of food and medicine supplies sent to the conflict-ridden country.
This is while the Saudi-led coalition has had the port city under aerial and maritime blockade since the beginning of the war in March 2015.
Despite all this, however, the Trump administration certified to Congress on Tuesday that the Saudis and their allies were “making every effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”
The official notice was required for the Pentagon to be allowed to continue delivering weapons and intelligence to Riyadh despite the international view that civilians have now become the main target of the war.
“The American government is completely complicit in this in the sense that the American government, who is not only the world’s primary backer of the Saudi regime in terms of money, weapons and diplomatic support, but the United States has actually given the green light to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for the war in Yemen,” Preston told Press TV.
Referring to reports that US military forces are working closely with their American peers on the battlefront, the analyst said the cooperation was part of an Israeli-American plan to “undermine the influence of Iran in the region and by extension nations that are aligned with Iran.”
“This is a humanitarian catastrophe and the United States has escalated the humanitarian issue by attempting to restrict aid to Yemen as well,” he said, calling the situation in Yemen as one of the “most serious human rights problems in the world today.”
9/11 Was the Consequence of Imperialism, Not Conspiracies 5
I don’t really buy into any of the views that claim 9/11 was an inside job carried out by the Bush administration, or by foreign governments like England, Israel, or Saudi Arabia.
US senator claims Britain’s MI6 is planning a fake chemical weapons attack on Syria Reply
By Laura Vozella
The Independent
Fresh off a sitdown with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Virginia state senator Richard Black turned up on Arab TV last week making an extraordinary claim about one of the US’ closest allies.
Mr Black said Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was planning a chemical weapons attack on the Syrian people, which it would then blame on Mr Assad.
“Around four weeks ago, we knew that British intelligence was working towards a chemical attack in order to blame the Syrian government, to hold Syria responsible,” Mr Black said on Al Mayadeen, an Arab news channel based in Beirut.
Mr Black said later that he meant the British were planning not to carry out an attack themselves, but to either direct rebels to do so or stage a phoney attack, with actors posing as victims.
“From what I can tell, they have been planning a fake attack, not a genuine one, but one where they actually move people out of a town and they have trained people to portray victims of a gas attack,” Mr Black said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And the plan is to use the White Helmets who have always been involved in these notorious deceptions, to portray an attack.”
Mr Black also said some chemical attacks previously reported to have occurred in Syria were British fakes, pulled off with help from volunteer first responders known as “White Helmets”.
“From what I can tell, they have been planning a fake attack, not a genuine one, but one where they actually move people out of a town and they have trained people to portray victims of a gas attack,” Mr Black said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And the plan is to use the White Helmets who have always been involved in these notorious deceptions, to portray an attack.”
Keith Preston: US policy toward Iran reflects Saudi, Israeli influence Reply
By Keith Preston
The newest sanctions to be imposed against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have been announced by the United States represent the ongoing efforts of the Trump administration to escalate hostilities with Iran.
A Fitting Tribute to John McCain Reply
This was made earlier Saturday before McCain’s passing. This is seriously great stuff.
Who Cares About Dirty Brown Genocide? Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
The scene was apocalyptic, like something out of a George Romero movie gone horribly wrong. Tiny bodies littered the shattered concrete, stained pitch black with soot and blood. Some of them were as still and stiff as calcified ventriloquist dummies, breathing nothing but smoke. Some of them rived in agony, mangled limbs throbbing and kicking, eyes rolled back in their battered little skulls as they screamed in agony to an indifferent god. The landscape that surrounds them is a bleak, smoldering, landfill overpopulated by a seemingly random collection of twisted metal and charred body parts; Arms, legs, heads, jagged fragments of bones and bubbling molten globs of shredded viscera, and every here and there a haunting sign of the casualties battered innocence; A doll with a heat warped plastic face, the busted half of a pink plastic lunchbox, and at the center of it all, a boy no older than 7, sitting upright, covered in his playmates blood, with an oversized UN-blue backpack still strapped to his bony shoulders, staring a thousand yards into an abyss that no one that young should ever see. They were children. They were all just children. And they were obliterated by an American bomb.
This was the latest chapter in the endless horror story called the Yemen Civil War. But it’s not a civil war. A civil war requires two sides on the same playing field. Whats going on in Yemen ceased to be a war at all long ago. This is a slaughter, a genocide, a holocaust. It’s latest victims were children on a school bus, coming home from a picnic, miles away from anything resembling a military installation. Over 40 dead, scores injured, many if not most of them under 10. This was a deliberate act of terrorism perpetrated by our “allie” Saudi Arabia with the full aid and support of these fine United States. We supplied the weapons. We fueled the planes. We provided the precise logistics that told our proxies exactly who they were murdering. We did everything but pull the goddamn trigger. And as usual nobody in this timezone or the next could be bothered to really give a shit.
Keith Preston: Why North Koreans want to have economic sanctions lifted Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
American political analyst Keith Preston says the North Koreans want to have international economic sanctions lifted against them to follow the Chinese model of economic progress.
Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Thursday while commenting on a statement of US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley who said on Wednesday that Washington would not wait indefinitely for North Korea to make progress on denuclearization.
Death to America? 1
This is an interesting assessment of what is right and wrong with the United States from an English perspective, written in early 2016 before the election of Trump.
By Sean Gabb
Talking about the future is often a sure recipe for looking like a fool. However obvious it may seem to us, nearly everything that happened in the past was unexpected at the time. I am not aware of anyone in 1639 who believed the Stuart State was about to collapse. Nor do I think anyone in 1788 predicted the occurrence and course of the French Revolution. The course of the Great War repeatedly took all the clever men by surprise. The difficulty with looking ahead is partly that most of the facts are unknown, but partly that the facts already established will be seen out of focus. We always tend to see the world through the twin lenses of unreasonable fear and of wishful thinking. For the world as it is, facts already established provide some correction. For the world as it may be, the only correction is to wait and see.
I will, therefore, not predict the decline of American world power. On the one hand, the country does appear to be in decline. It suffers internally from an increasingly predatory and freakish system of government, and from a national culture that is malign in its values and intrinsically worthless. None of its military interventions in the past quarter century has achieved its stated purpose, and all have been disastrous for the foreign peoples they were supposed to help. The military and diplomatic power of American has declined. It is no longer even clear that the Dollar will keep its hegemony. To put it mildly, the demographic changes now taking place are undermining the equilibrium and cohesiveness of the United States as it has been known since the 1870s.
Counting the Dead in Yemen Reply
By Daniel Larison
The American Conservative
Kareem Fahim investigates the war on Yemen’s weirdly static official death toll of 10,000 casualties and finds that it is certainly much higher:
The overall death toll may have reached alarming levels, according to one independent tally. Data collected by ACLED, a group that studies conflicts, puts the death toll at nearly 50,000 people in the period between January 2016 and late July 2018.
That number includes combatants but excludes people not directly killed during the fighting — thousands of civilians who have died of malnutrition or cholera, for instance. Last year, Save the Children estimated that 130 children were dying every day because of “extreme hunger and disease.”
China is Treating Africa The Same Way European Colonists Did Reply
By
Forbes
The reason China is in Africa is simple; to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did during mercantile times, except worse. The corporations owned by the Chinese state are trying to turn Africa into another Chinese continent. They are squeezing Africa for everything it is worth.
This is the view several African politicians have. The Zambian politician Michael Sata was one of them. At least he was before being elected President of Zambia in 2011. He wrote a paper presented to Harvard University in 2007 that said “European colonial exploitation in comparison to Chinese exploitation appears benign, because even though the commercial exploitation was just as bad, the colonial agents also invested in social and economic infrastructure services Chinese investment, on the other hand, is focused on taking out of Africa as much as can be taken out, without any regard to the welfare of the local people.”
The War on Qatar That Almost Happened 1
By Daniel Larison
The American Conservative
Alex Emmons reports that the Saudis and their allies intended to invade and take over Qatar last year, but pressure from Tillerson prevented this from happening:
The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
If this report is correct, it confirms that the Saudis and Emiratis are even more reckless than we already knew them to be.
Keith Preston: ‘Arab NATO’ Proposal Unlikely to Get Off Ground Reply
My latest interview with Tasnim.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst said an initiative by the US administration to develop an alliance with the Persian Gulf and Arab allies is expected to fail as there are sharp disagreements between the member states of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council on Iran.
“The prospects for the formation of a Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance are hindered by multiple obstacles. There are sharp disagreements between the member states of the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council on Iran,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim.
He added, “It is unlikely that the proposed member nations of a Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance will find that they share enough common interests and common objectives to make such an alliance viable”.
The following is the full text of the interview.
