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Posts Tagged ‘John Bolton’

US Efforts To Extend Gaza Truce Are “Objectively Pro-Hamas”, Warmonger Bolton Says Biden Admin ‘Scared To Death Of Left Wing Extremists’

Posted by M. C. on December 4, 2023

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

Monday, Dec 04, 2023 – 04:15 AM

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-efforts-extend-gaza-truce-are-objectively-pro-hamas-warmonger-bolton-says-biden

Former national security adviser John Bolton on Saturday criticized the Biden administration for its attempts to extend the truce in Gaza, calling them “objectively pro-Hamas.”

“I think with the initial pause now behind us, I think Israel’s best judgment here is simply to proceed militarily to achieve the objective it says it wants, which is the elimination of Hamas,” Mr. Bolton told News Nation.

“I think the second-guessing by the Biden administration, the efforts to prolong the pause to turn it into a full ceasefire, are objectively pro-Hamas because it denies Israel the self-defense right it has to eliminate the terrorist threat.”

Israel’s war with the Hamas terrorist group resumed on Friday after a weeklong truce brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States, during which Hamas freed 110 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

A day before the truce ended, Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged for a longer truce on Thursday. He said, “Our immediate focus is working with our partners to extend the pause so that we can continue to get more hostages out of Gaza and more assistance in.”

Also on Friday, the White House blamed Hamas for ending the truce.

“It’s because of Hamas that this pause ended,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, per USA Today.

“They were just simply unable, failed to produce a list of hostages that could help enable that pause extending,” Mr. Kirby added.

“The onus is on Hamas to be able to produce a list of hostages that that they can get out so that we can try to get this pause back in place.”

Mr. Bolton criticized President Joe Biden for trying to limit what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can do. The national security adviser had previously criticized the truce as a “very bad deal for Israel.”

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‘Hitman’ Recruited to Target John Bolton Was an FBI Informant

Posted by M. C. on November 15, 2023

To top it off, it turns out that a key FBI official overseeing this contrived Bolton-assassination plot was Steven D’Antuono

The easiest crimes to solve and make you look good are those you think up yourself.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/hitman-recruited-to-target-john-bolton-was-an-fbi-informant/

by Ken Silva

john bolton national security advisor to the united states and u.s. ambassador marie yovanovitch in kyiv, ukraine.

John Bolton National Security Advisor to the United States (R) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in Kyiv, Ukraine. 24-08-2018

In August 2022, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton in retaliation for the U.S. killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force commander Qasem Soleimani.

But the “hitman” hired to target Bolton was an FBI informant. This was reported Sunday night by 60 Minutes, which glossed over that fact and treated the Bolton-assassination plot as legitimate.

“Lucky for Bolton, the assassin was an FBI informant,” the news show reported, painting the assassination plot as a legitimate threat.

However, DOJ charging papers show that the “plot” was largely contrived, and that Bolton was never in actual danger. Moreover, the DOJ has claimed the man who tried hiring the FBI informant was a member of Iran’s IRGC-QF, but charging papers show that investigators never confirmed that fact.

To top it off, it turns out that a key FBI official overseeing this contrived Bolton-assassination plot was Steven D’Antuono—the same official who led the Detroit field office during the dubious Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot before being transferred to head the DC field office during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest-turned-riot.

According to DOJ charging papers, the man who attempted to assassinate Bolton is Iranian national Shahram Poursafi, who was charged but has not been arrested, presumably because he’s in Iran.

FBI special agent Randi Beck said in an affidavit that he believes Poursafi is a member of the IRGC-QF because he “did not deny” the affiliation, and because he found one picture of Poursafi wearing a jacket with an IRGC-QF patch. The FBI provided no other evidence that Poursafi is actually an IRGC-QF member.

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John Bolton Accidentally Explains Why US Policy On Russia And China Is Wrong

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2023

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/john-bolton-accidentally-explains?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Professional psychopath John Bolton has an article out with The Hill titled “America can’t permit Chinese military expansion in Cuba” which inadvertently spells out exactly what’s wrong with the way the US empire keeps amassing heavily armed proxy forces on the borders of its large Asiatic enemies.

Citing a Wall Street Journal report from last month in which anonymous US officials claim that Havana has entered negotiations with Beijing for a possible future joint military training facility in Cuba, Bolton argues that the US must use any amount of aggression necessary to prevent this facility’s construction, up to and including regime change interventionism.

“The potential of significant Chinese facilities in Cuba is a red-flag threat to America,” Bolton writes, arguing that such activities “could well camouflage offensive weapons, delivery systems or other threatening capabilities.”

“For example, hypersonic cruise missiles, already harder to detect, track, and destroy than ballistic missiles, are natural candidates for installation in Cuba, a prospect we cannot tolerate, along with many other risks, like a Chinese submarine base,” he adds.

All of which are arguments that could be made pretty much note-for-note by Russia and China about the ways the US has been threatening their security interests with war machinery in their immediate surroundings.

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A Mindless ‘Strategy’ of More Militarism for Its Own Sake

Posted by M. C. on May 10, 2023

If strategy is matching means to ends, Bolton has completely failed to do that.

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/a-mindless-strategy-of-more-militarism

DANIEL LARISON

John Bolton answers the question of guns vs. butter exactly as you would expect him to:

First, Washington and its allies must immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels relative to gross domestic product [bold mine-DL] and sustain such spending for the foreseeable future. Federal budgets need substantial reductions to eliminate deficits and shrink the national debt, so higher military spending necessitates even greater reductions domestically. So be it.

Bolton offers up this terrible idea as one of the “critical elements” of a strategy for opposing China and Russia. The whole of Bolton’s “strategy” amounts to calling for more militarism and expanded security commitments without any definition of the goals that the U.S. is supposed to be pursuing. If strategy is matching means to ends, Bolton has completely failed to do that. That’s not surprising, since Bolton is an ideologue and policy arsonist rather than a strategist, but it is telling that his idea of a “strategy” just boils down to demanding more weapons and then threatening others with them. It is a mindless “strategy” of more militarism for its own sake.

U.S. military spending is already at record high levels in real terms. The current topline number is an outrageous and indefensible $858 billion. Hardliners still have the gall to claim that this is inadequate. Even though the U.S. spends as much as the next nine states combined, we are told that even this insane amount of spending is too little. Six of those nine states are allies or clients, and India is a partner of sorts. The U.S. spends almost three times as much as Russia and China combined.

Going to Reagan-era levels of military spending as a percentage of GDP (between 6.1 and 6.8%) means nearly doubling U.S. military spending to something like $1.5 trillion per year. There is no legitimate reason to expand the military budget that much. The U.S. already spends far too much on the military given how extraordinarily secure it is. We don’t need to spend as much as we do, and spending more isn’t going to buy us additional security in any case. Further ramping up military spending is just stoking arms races for the sake of stoking them. It will not make anyone more secure, and it could very easily make the U.S. and its allies less secure than they currently are if it makes a major war more likely.

There is also no chance that most allied governments are going to engage in similar splurging.

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John Bolton’s Prominence In The Media Proves Our Entire Society Is Diseased

Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2023

Bolton sets himself apart from his fellow Iraq war architects by arguing that the actual invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein “was close to flawless,” and that the only thing the US did wrong was fail to kill more people and topple the government of Iran.

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/john-boltons-prominence-in-the-media?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Caitlin Johnstone

In order to narrative-manage the public conversation about the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, those who helped unleash that horror upon our world have briefly paused their relentless torrent of “Ukraine proves the hawks were always right” takes to churn out a deluge of “Actually the Iraq War wasn’t based on lies and turned out pretty great after all” takes.

Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haas — who worked in the US State Department under Colin Powell when Bush launched his criminal invasion — got a piece published in Project Syndicate falsely claiming that the US government and his former boss did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, and that “governments can and do get things wrong without lying.”

Former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum cooked up a lie-filled spin piece with The Atlantic claiming that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression” and suggesting that perhaps Iraqis are better off as a result of the invasion, or at least no worse off than they would otherwise have been.

Neoconservative war propagandist Eli Lake, who has been described by journalist Ken Silverstein as “an open and ardent promoter of the Iraq War and the various myths trotted out to justify it,” has an essay published in Commentary with the extraordinary claim that the war “wasn’t the disaster everyone now says it was” and that “Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.”

But by far the most appalling piece of revisionist war crime apologia that’s come out during the 20th anniversary of the invasion has been an article published in National Review by the genocide walrus himself, John Bolton.

John Bolton @AmbJohnBolton

Lumping everything together as “Iraq War” critics do is a disservice to the careful analysis of what America accomplished, or didn’t. It is not one indivisible, 20-year-long block of granite that can be judged only all or nothing. In fact, the brunt of nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/…https://t.co/964nxyKhS3

5:08 PM ∙ Mar 17, 2023


51Likes16Retweets

Bolton sets himself apart from his fellow Iraq war architects by arguing that the actual invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein “was close to flawless,” and that the only thing the US did wrong was fail to kill more people and topple the government of Iran.

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Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech – or Be Destroyed – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022

In totalitarian societies, wrote Hayek, truth is not something that is discovered by learning, education, self-study, research, and debate and discussion. Instead, it is “something to be laid down by authority . . .” 

It isn’t just the Left. I see John Bolton is rearing his ugly head.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/12/thomas-dilorenzo/why-the-left-must-destroy-free-speech-or-be-destroyed/

By Thomas DiLorenzo

In Hayek’s famous 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, he warned that the intellectual and political classes of the democracies of that time were embracing some of the same ideas that inspired Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Russia:  comprehensive government planning, hyper regulation of industry,  nationalization, welfare statism, and collectivism in general.  He did not predict that these societies would end up “in serfdom,” however, as some have mistakenly claimed.  Quite the contrary.  In his first chapter he clearly stated that he hoped the ideas in the book would help these countries to avoid that disastrous fate.  He hoped the ideas of the book would be a roadblock on the road to serfdom.

The eleventh chapter of The Road to Serfdom is entitled “The End of Truth,” about the historical imperative in all totalitarian states throughout history to destroy freedom of speech so that the only true belief is “the social plan” imposed by the state, whatever that may be.  This is achieved by relentless institutionalized lying and propaganda, coupled with harsh censorship of all contrary ideas or even questions about the propriety of forcefully imposing one single “social plan.” This is American society today, in other words, in case you haven’t noticed.  (Socialism, Hayek said, has always been about substituting the plans of politicians for the plans that all of the citizens make for themselves.  It’s not a matter of planning versus no planning, but who is to do the planning).

The significance of propaganda in totalitarian countries, Hayek wrote, is that “If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading people of this or that.  The skillful propagandist then has power to mold . . . minds in any direction he chooses . . .”  Jeff Deist, among others, has commented that America today has become a “post-persuasion society” and he is right, almost eighty years after Hayek issued this warning.  The Left is no longer willing to seriously debate anything – at least for the time being while they control the universities, all three branches of government, the media, (laughingly-named) “entertainment” industries, and more.  Even dopey Prince Harry publicly denounced the First Amendment in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with Hollywood Leftists like his wife shortly after divorcing himself from his family and moving to Hollywood.  If you disagree with their latest version of socialist totalitarianism (“woke-ism” coupled with green hysteria and calls for worldwide central planning), then you can be canceled, smeared as a racist, a white supremacist, or even fired from your job and prevented from getting a new one.

The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda are even more profound.  It is “destructive of all morals” because it “undermines one of the foundations of all morals:  the sense and respect for the truth.”  An avalanche of Official Lies has always been the tool of “various theoreticians of the totalitarian system,” wrote Hayek, citing Plato’s “noble lies” and “social myths” championed by the French philosopher Georges Sorel.  The ends justify the lying means to totalitarians everywhere.  When was the last time a “White House spokesperson” did not lie in public?  (See my 1992 book, Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, with James T. Bennett).

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John Bolton Touts Experience as Coups D’État Planner

Posted by M. C. on July 14, 2022

Social media was abuzz after the longtime Republican official’s exchange Tuesday with CNN host Jake Tapper.

Consortium News

By Common Dreams Staff
Longtime Republican official John Bolton admitted during a televised interview Tuesday that he has helped plan coups outside of the United States.

Bolton, who served as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, appeared on CNN to discuss the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

After Bolton claimed that Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election that provoked last year’s Capitol attack were not part of “a carefully planned coup d’état aimed at the Constitution,” host Jake Tapper said that “I don’t know that I agree with you, to be fair, with all due respect. One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”

Bolton responded that “I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but, you know, other places, it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he did.”

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Biden To Spend $1.7 Billion For Healthcare…In Ukraine!

Posted by M. C. on July 13, 2022

The Biden Administration has announced an additional $1.7 billion in aid to Ukraine to pay its healthcare sector. As the seemingly endless US money spigot to Ukraine seems to be left open, how long until Americans without healthcare begin to object? Also today: new CPI numbers are out…and they’re devastating! Also: John Bolton casually admits plotting coups overseas while in government. Apply today to be a 2022 Ron Paul Scholar: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/…

1.7 Billion PRINTED, INFLATIONARY dollars. What about US?

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Why Not Cooperating Is One Of The Most Influential Things You Can Do

Posted by M. C. on March 21, 2022

Your ability to say “No!” may be your greatest power.

This is especially true when you are in a situation in which you are part of the minority. Your lack of cooperation can be far more easy to leverage than being cooperative and gently trying to sway opinion.

So I ask again — In your own life, how can you be as uncooperative with evil as possible?

By Allan Stevo

Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin helped lead the impeachment movement against Trump. Accordingly, his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a swamp-dweller, will not be getting a promotion that former Vice President Joe Biden recommended her for at the Federal Reserve Bank. A few other political issues also caused strife, but the decision came down to one man and it was not Biden.

The reason she will not get a promotion?

Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia refused to support her nomination.

Manchin watched West Virginia switch to heavily Republican during his time in office. Manchin is now one of a handful of Democrat office holders in heavily Republican West Virginia, and the only Democrat federal office holder from that state out of the delegation of five.

To illustrate that further, Cook lists West Virginia’s three congressional district as R+22, R+20, and R+27. This is to say, the state is presently very pro-Republican. Some may bemoan that Manchin is in a difficult situation to be a Democrat.

I discourage such whining. It hides reality.

The truth is, Manchin is in a wonderful situation, as are the voters of West Virginia.

That is because, in response to a difficult situation, Manchin has chosen to rise to the occasion.

Manchin has become influential over the past year of the regime, like Republican Senator Rand Paul was during the Trump Administration. Rand Paul, who came to office in the midst of the Tea Party movement, was understood to not be a reliable party line voter, but to be principled and obstinate. Many Senators want to appear independent. Rand Paul really is independent.

Because Rand Paul behaves so independently and at the same time has some political clout, Trump was able to use Paul as the scapegoat to a horrible neo-con who sought to be Secretary of State.

John Bolton, in the book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, recounts a strategy that legitimate President Trump used against him to leverage the well known, public, concerns of Rand Paul.

Bolton wanted to be Secretary of State in 2018 and asked Trump for the position. Trump allegedly told Bolton, “I’d love to have you over there,” if it wasn’t for that “son of a b**** Rand Paul.”

How awful.

How crass!

He said that about Rand Paul!?

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The Oligarchic Empire Is Actually Simple And Easy To Understand – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2021

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-oligarchic-empire-is-actually

Caitlin Johnstone

If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.

You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound. 

Before he became Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he responded that “the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say ‘the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,’ it’s simplistic.”

Bolton is now among the “experts” on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NPFc9YN7LIE?start=323&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You’ll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don’t feel confident talking about something they’ve been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.

Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don’t need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it’s probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.

Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they’re just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called “war on terror”, but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.Nathan Bernhardt @jonbernhardtthe politico reporters snapping off tweets about how “if you haven’t really studied afghanistan, please, you don’t have to tweet about it” are the exact same people who will sell you the next warAugust 17th 2021440 Retweets3,094 Likes

And the same is true of the other aspects of the status quo power structure: they’re meant to look complicated, but what you actually need to know about them to orient yourself in our world is fairly simple. 

The systems of capitalism are very complex by design, and a tremendous amount of thievery happens in those mysterious knowledge gaps on financial and economic matters where only the cleverest manipulators understand what’s going on. But the basics of our problem are quite simple: money rewards and uplifts sociopathy. The more willing you are to do whatever it takes to become wealthy, the wealthier you will be. Those who rise to the top are those who are sufficiently lacking in human empathy to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead.

As a result we’ve had many generations of wealthy sociopaths using their fortunes and clout to influence governmental, media, financial and economic systems in a way that advantages them more and more with each passing year. This is why we are ruled by sociopaths who understand that money is power and power is relative, which means the less money everyone else has the more power they get to have over everyone else. They’ve been widening the wealth gap further and further over the years, a trend they seek to continue with the so-called “Great Reset” you’ve been hearing so much about lately.

You can spend the rest of your life learning to follow the money, studying the dynamics of currency, banking and economics, but what you’ll be learning is more and more details about the way the dynamic I just described is taking place. 

Sociopaths rise to the top, the most powerful of whom understand that things like money, governments and the lines drawn between nations are all collective narrative constructs which can be altered in whatever way benefits them and ignored whenever it’s convenient. For this reason controlling the stories the public tell themselves about what’s going on in their world is of paramount importance, which is why so much wealth gets poured into buying up media and media influence in the form of advertising, funding think tanks and NGOs, and buying up politicians with campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitozSociety Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix. Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative. Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in th…caitlinjohnstone.substack.comJuly 13th 2021184 Retweets466 Likes

These powerful sociopaths tend to form loose alliances with each other and with the heads of government agencies as often as possible since it’s always easier to move with power than against it. So what you get is an alliance of depraved oligarchs with no loyalty to any nation using powerful governments as tools to bomb, bully and plunder the rest of the world for their own power and profit, and using mass-scale media psyops to keep the public from rising up and stopping them.

And that’s it, really. So simple it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Don’t let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what’s going on in your world. You can see what’s going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become. 

Speak. You are infinitely more qualified to comment on the way power is moving in the world than the people who’ve been consistently wrong about everything throughout their entire careers yet remain widely platformed by the oligarchic media. If John Bolton gets a voice, so do you.

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