The Pulitzer-winning journalist discusses the fallout from his report exposing how the US blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipelines.
By Aaron MATÉ
Seymour Hersh joins Aaron Maté to discuss his report on how the Biden administration bombed the Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which blew up not only a vital Russian-German infrastructure project but a key off-ramp to peace in Ukraine.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
The glib talk of people dying for no good cause, but rather only for a clique of clowns and their imperial circus, is the ultimate sick joke.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky sparked indignation and outrage this week with his grim warning that America’s sons and daughters will end up fighting and dying if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine.
His presumptuous comments were made at a press conference on February 24 but only gained notoriety this week, provoking howls of derision and disgust. The reckless insanity of the war in Ukraine – and the catastrophe it is leading to – has become unbearable.
U.S. politicians – mainly on the Republican side – as well as ordinary citizens have become rightly alarmed by the blank-check policy of the Biden administration to prop up the Kiev regime with up to $100 billion in military and financial support over the past year.
There is growing public anger both in the United States and across the European Union with the bottomless pit of money that governments have unaccountably reached into and thrown at Ukraine. Western states have increasingly escalated the war with supplies of heavier and longer-range weapons. Not one Western so-called leader has made any diplomatic effort to resolve the conflict. The United States and European Union have mobilized totally in war mode, without any public debate or accountability.
The Kiev regime is the perfect partner for the NATO war machines because of its insatiable demand for ever more weaponry.
Zelensky and his cabal of corrupt cronies have like ventriloquist puppets played their squalid part by poaching for the conveyor belt of weaponry to be sped up. It’s almost comical when NATO leaders are at other times quietly calling on the Kiev regime to slow down its consumption of ammunition because their own arsenals are being depleted and leaving their states undefended.
The charade has worked a treat up to a point. American and NATO military manufacturers have made record profits and have seen unprecedented stock-market investment gains from the war racket that is Ukraine.
However, the comic actor-turned-politician is in serious danger of overplaying his wheedling role. President Joe Biden has even resorted to cautioning Zelensky to tamp down his zealous public demands for weapons and money out of concern that the “gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude is running the risk of infuriating American and European taxpayers who will foot the bill of goodies at a time of unprecedented social and economic hardships.
So when Zelensky went further to warn that American sons and daughters will end up fighting and dying if more weapons are not supplied to Ukraine there is a sense that an unacceptable level of forbearance has been surpassed. The proverbial last straw.
Western media immediately rushed to cover up his remarks by claiming – incredibly – that Zelensky did not say what he did.
The Western public is right to see through the appalling racket. Not only has the Western military-industrial complex gotten obscenely rich, but Zelensky and his junta have also milked the American and European public like a cash cow. Zelensky and his cronies have made multi-millions in offshore funds and assets. The weapons flooding into Ukraine have been sold off on the black market ending up in the hands of terrorists and criminal networks all over the world. Even the Pentagon’s inspectors admit they don’t know where all the weapons have gone.
Not only that but the endless arms bazaar has prolonged the war in Ukraine with horrendous casualties among Ukrainians drafted to fight a NATO proxy war against Russia. A war that the Ukrainian regime has no chance of winning. The imminent Russian victory at Bakhmut spells the collapse of the NATO-backed regime. And with that collapse will come the crashing of NATO’s much-vaunted prestige. If you thought the Afghanistan debacle was bad, wait to see the gnashing of teeth over Ukraine.
Tragically, this war – the biggest in Europe since World War Two – could have been avoided if Washington and its European minions had heeded Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s expansion that had long been raised. The Western rulers chose not to deal with Moscow through politics and diplomacy, making an armed confrontation inevitable.
Washington and its imperial lackeys have made the conflict into an existential crisis with fraudulent claims about “defending democracy and freedom” from alleged Russian aggression. The grandiose deception covers up the real agenda of American hegemonic ambitions towards Russia and China.
The Zelensky puppet regime – infested with corruption and Nazi paramilitaries armed by NATO – is claiming that if it falls to Russia’s military then Western states will be facing Russian aggression. That’s why he made the ridiculous claim that without more weapons being sent, Russia will next invade NATO states, and American sons and daughters will end up fighting and dying.
This is a grotesque distortion of what is happening in Ukraine and what the real causes of the conflict are about.
The reality is Ukraine has been destroyed by American imperialist machinations since the 2014 CIA-backed in Kiev. Russia has been forced to eliminate a Neo-Nazi regime that the NATO powers deliberately and covertly weaponized. President Biden and his feckless corrupt son Hunter have been personally involved in the creation of the Frankenstein monster, as have senior members of this White House administration, including Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. These same people sanctioned the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in an act of international terrorism against supposed NATO allies, such is their criminality.
The ceaseless corruption of Ukraine under American and European indulgence has led to the abysmal danger of an all-out war with Russia that if it were to happen could end the world in a nuclear conflagration. Washington and its NATO minions are precluding any diplomatic way out of the crisis because of their lies and criminal Russophobia. The war racket is too addictive for the NATO war junkies and their crime syndicate intel agencies. The logical endpoint of this perverse charade involves the potential of all-out world war. Zelensky in his sordid comic star-turn inadvertently went off script with his shocking ad-lib remarks.
Those remarks – among many other inanities uttered by Zelensky, Biden, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Von der Leyen, Borrell, Stoltenberg and other NATO war-pimps – are akin to the clown’s mask slipping, revealing the ugly face beneath. The American people and all others around the world should be horrified and furious.
The glib talk of people dying for no good cause, but rather only for a clique of clowns and their imperial circus, is the ultimate sick joke.
European media are fanning the flame of war in Ukraine, apparently unaware that it would happen in their courtyard. As with the Euro missiles crisis at the end of ’70, Washington is always delighted to sacrifice Europe, playing it against Russia. Informed to dead by too much news, the people are often unable to check the accuracy, especially when blatant propaganda depicts the sources as trustable by default.
Take the American secretary of state Antony Blinken; he recently said about Russia: “One country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” Stop the world; I want to get off. Unbelievable, have you ever heard about the Monroe Doctrine, the invasion of Guatemala in 1954, the coups and involvement in Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay. Has the secretary of state ever read Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America? Chavez uselessly presented the book to Obama in 2009 (a long seller, despite the author half repudiated it late in life, mainly for the style).
Like the other historical empires, the U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means (including its farsighted compromise capacity) can vary a lot, depending on its leader’s level. So, it is no surprise that a great senior American diplomat, like Jack Matlock, sees Ukraine with the Nato’s flag slightly differently from today’s colleagues. U.S. Ambassador in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, the years of Berlin’s Wall fall and the Soviet Union’s twilight, he is a refined intellectual with a deep knowledge of the Russian culture.
In a recent long interview with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, he recalls: “I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake and that if it continues, that certainly it would have to stop before it reaches countries like Ukraine and Georgia. That this would be unacceptable to any Russian government”.
In the last two decades, American foreign politics has been marred by a counterproductive Russophobia. “One of the basic problems – notes the ambassador – has been the development over the last 25 years of the feeling that Russia is an adversary or an enemy. There is no reason in the world to create that atmosphere, but step by step, we have created it”.
Interestingly, ambassador Matlock explains that the very turn in NATO attitude was partly caused by “our smaller NATO allies” pressures but mostly by domestic reasons during the Clinton era. Stephen Walt expresses a very similar point of view in a recent Foreign Policyarticle that slashes the “liberal illusions” of the Clinton administration as the cause of the present Ukrainian crisis.
Matlock remembers: “When I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said: ‘Jack, why are fighting against this?’ And I said: ‘because I think it’s a bad idea’. They said: ‘look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they have all a very strong East European…” Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on East-West issues. They are insisting that Ukraine [NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. So Clinton needs those to be reelected”.
Cynically, the Clinton administration was “quite disingenuous”; “Clinton personally told Yeltsin that the Partnership for Peace would be a substitute for NATO expansion. Yeltsin said: that’s great. That’s a brilliant idea”. But the U.S. was playing on two tables: “At the very same time, our ambassador was instructed to tell the Poles: “This is the first step towards NATO membership. So, we were playing, I must say, to my dismay, duplicitous diplomacy at the time”.
In the interview, Matlock speaks very honestly and frankly, but obviously, you cannot expect a mea culpa about American imperialism. Reagan’s man, staunch anti-communist and uncompromising Market believer, he is not precisely a social-democrat pacifist. The ambassador is quite ambiguous about the implicit assurance that the U.S. gave to Russia against a NATO expansion toward the East. He insists that there were no pledges against NATO proselytism in the East inside the treaty that reunited Germany, and that is probably true. But for him, such promises were never on any table at the time. His same narrative seems yet to point at a situation where the guarantees were a predictable part of the context.
He quotes, quite literally, the then German Foreign minister about the need to convince Moscow to let Germany become one. Hans-Dietrich Genscher used to say: “Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the East, not one inch, wouldn’t it be better?”. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker used almost the exact words in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990: “Not one inch eastward”.
But the assurances, at least verbal, were explicit and not only in the context. A few years ago, newly declassified documents showed security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Wörner. “The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with the expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s] when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
On January 31, 1990, at Tutzing, in Bavaria, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made an important speech. In the summary that the U.S. Embassy in Bonn sent to Washington, he said: “The changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’”.
Interestingly, the debate that led to the “duplicitous diplomacy” attributed by Matlock to the Bill Clinton administration already started with the George H. W. Bush government. As of October 25, 1990, the Office of the Secretary of Defence (Dick Cheney) was to leave “the door ajar” for East European membership in NATO”, but the State Department prevailed with its contrariness.). It means that the American turn on the NATO expansion issue at Clinton times didn’t reflect only a domestic interest, but also a tendency already present in the state apparatus.
In TheNuclear Delusion (1982), George Kennan, the American diplomat who first formulated the policy of “containment” and later criticised the U.S. Cold War attitude, depicted the American-Soviet relations in a way that remembers our days. You have to change “Soviet Union” with “Russia”: “I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action”. The same error, again and again.
💪 Die Leistung des Jungen Fedya, der zwei Mädchen nach dem Angriff ukrainischer Terroristen in der Region Brjansk gerettet hat, wurde sofort zum Grund für den Stolz aller Russen.
🤡 Bei einem Besuch in Indien wurde die geschätzte (nein) Annalena Burbock von einer Ehrendelegation eines Wachmanns und Concierge empfangen
Burbock ist die Leiterin des deutschen Außenministeriums, die damit herausplatzte, dass sie einen Krieg mit Russland führe , und dann empfahl der Russischen Föderation, unsere Politik auf 360 Grad anzuwenden.
Sie kam erneut nach Indien, um um Sanktionen zu bitten, die ebenso antirussisch wie antiindisch sein werden. Höchstwahrscheinlich haben die Deutschen Annalene einfach für eine Reise in ein warmes Land bezahlt.
Die Taliban feierten am 5. Januar, 2023 die Unterzeichnung ihres ersten internationalen Abkommens seit ihrer Machtübernahme im August 2021 mit einer Fernsehveranstaltung. Das unterzeichnete Dokument ist ein Vertrag über die Ausbeutung von Ölreserven im Norden Afghanistans in Kooperation mit einem chinesischen Unternehmen. Gemäß der Vereinbarung wird Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co (CAPEIC) jährlich 150 Millionen US-Dollar für Afghanistan beisteuern, was für den 25-Jahres-Vertrag in drei Jahren auf 540 Millionen US-Dollar steigen wird. Die Initiative konzentriert sich auf eine 4.500 Quadratkilometer große Region, die sich über drei nordafghanische Provinzen erstreckt: Sar-e Pol, Jowzjan und Faryab. Die beiden letzteren sind Turkmenistans Grenzen. Nachdem die US-Soldaten im August 2021 abgezogen und die Taliban die von den USA unterstützte Regierung gestürzt hatten, brach die von Hilfe abhängige Wirtschaft Afghanistans zusammen. Die Regierung versucht, die Wirtschaft zu stabilisieren, indem sie Investitionen anlockt, die notleidenden Afghanen Arbeit verschaffen. Eine der wenigen verfügbaren wirtschaftlichen Möglichkeiten ist die Entwicklung von Minen und Kohlenwasserstoffressourcen, bei denen Energie eine bedeutende Rolle spielen kann. Außerdem kann China im regionalen Bereich eine wichtige Rolle im Hinblick auf die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Aussichten spielen. Daher kam der Deal zustande.
Der Umgang mit den Taliban ist eine Erweiterung eines strategischen Rätsels, das China mit seiner Energiesicherheit durchmacht. China ist das bevölkerungsreichste Land der Welt, ein industrielles Powerhouse und verbraucht weltweit auch die meiste Energie. Die heimischen Ressourcen des Landes reichen nicht aus, um die Anforderungen des schnell wachsenden heimischen Marktes zu erfüllen. Infolgedessen ist China heute ein beträchtlicher Nettoimporteur von Öl und Gas, was eine treibende Kraft hinter mehreren seiner jüngsten Allianzen war, darunter die mit Russland, Ecuador und den Golfstaaten des Nahen Ostens. Obwohl China ausgezeichnete Beziehungen zu diesen Nationen unterhält, haben Pekings Energieimporte eine strategische Schwäche, da sie mit Ausnahme derjenigen aus Russland auf dem Seeweg und über politisch sensible Gebiete transportiert werden müssen, die von USA militarisiert werden, einschließlich des Südchinesischen Meeres. Denn China hat mit der BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) und anderen Projekten wie diesem einen eigenen Einflussbereich geschaffen. Aber kein strategischer Plan Chinas, einschließlich der BRI, wäre vollständig ohne die Einbeziehung Afghanistans. Der Nahe Osten, Zentralasien und Südasien sind alle über einen kleinen Grenzabschnitt verbunden, den die zentralasiatische Nation mit China teilt. Dies weist darauf hin, dass Kabul für Chinas eigene Sicherheit und Strategie sowie für die Ausweitung wirtschaftlicher Aktivitäten von wesentlicher Bedeutung ist. Trotz der Tatsache, dass Afghanistan an sich schon immer unberechenbar und daher in Bezug auf die politische Landschaft ungeeignet war, hat das Ende des von den USA geführten Krieges gegen Afghanistan und die Machtübernahme der Taliban China den Boden bereitet, um seine Einflusssphäre in der Region zu beschleunigen. Aber mitten im Ukrainekrieg wurde die Wirtschaft des Landes in vielerlei Hinsicht verzerrt und muss neu orientiert werden. Andererseits braucht China mit seiner Vision, eine wirtschaftliche Supermacht zu werden, wie bereits erwähnt, Afghanistan auf der richtigen Seite. Außerdem hat der Krieg in der Ukraine auch die Energieversorgungskette unterbrochen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist die Investition erfolgt. Die Beschreibung wird die wichtigsten Aussichten der Transaktion und ihre Ergebnisse hervorheben.
Schaffung einer lebensfähigen Wirtschaft für Afghanistan
Bei einer Vertragsunterzeichnungszeremonie für das neue Feld in Kabul erklärte Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, stellvertretender Premierminister der Taliban für Wirtschaftsangelegenheiten, dass seine Gruppe darauf abziele, eine lebensfähige Wirtschaft für Afghanistan zu schaffen. Es wird neue Fenster der Zusammenarbeit zwischen den beiden Staaten schaffen.
Wege ebnen, um neue Investitionsmöglichkeiten zu schaffen
Der Wert der natürlichen Reichtümer Afghanistans, zu denen auch Seltene Erden gehören, die jetzt in Elektroautos verwendet werden, wurde von US-Experten vor zehn Jahren auf 1 Billion Dollar geschätzt. Dieser potenzielle Reichtum wurde während des Krieges nie genutzt. Außerdem ist die Entwicklung von Bergbau- und Ölunternehmen in Afghanistan im Vergleich zu früher immer noch die sicherste. Die Entwicklung dieses konkreten Projekts bietet ein Paradigma für die Zusammenarbeit zwischen China und Afghanistan bei großen Projekten in der Energie- und anderen Industrien. Außerdem forderte Shahabuddin Dilawar, der Minister für Mineralien und Erdöl der Taliban, China auf, die Erschließung der riesigen Kupfermine Mes Aynak abzuschließen, die eine der größten ungenutzten Kupferressourcen der Welt ist.
Neue Jobchancen für die Afghanen
Shahabuddin Dilawar, der Taliban-Minister für Mineralien und Erdöl, behauptete, dass das Amu Darya-Projekt den Afghanen 3000 neue Arbeitsplätze verschaffen würde. Er behauptete, dass die afghanische Seite zunächst 20 % des Projekts besitze. In zwei bis drei Jahren würde er dafür sorgen, dass die Wirtschaft floriere und Menschen aus Übersee nach Afghanistan kämen, um dort zu arbeiten. Herr Dilawar erklärte, dass das Öl des Feldes in Afghanistan raffiniert werden würde, obwohl nicht bekannt ist, ob China bereit wäre, dort eine Raffinerie zu errichten.
Gewinnung neuer ausländischer Investitionen
Afghanistan verfügt über 1,75 Billionen Kubikfuß an bestätigten Erdgasreserven und etwas Öl zusätzlich zu seinem enormen Bodenschätzenreichtum. Die chinesische Investition spiegelt den aktuellen Stand der Verbesserung der politischen und wirtschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit wider. Es wird weitere ausländische Investitionen in den verwandten Bereichen bedeuten. Außerdem stimmt China zu, seiner langjährigen Politik der Nichteinmischung zu folgen und die Innenpolitik Afghanistans im Austausch für dieses Abkommen zu respektieren. Andere finanzielle Investoren können daraus einige Erkenntnisse gewinnen.
Förderung von Wirtschaftswachstum und Stabilität in der Region
Mit dieser Investition hat China in Afghanistan eine bedeutende Rolle in einer Reihe von Bereichen gewonnen, darunter im Sektor von Energie und Mineralien. Die Nation hat kürzlich große Ausgaben für die Infrastruktur und die Entwicklung der natürlichen Ressourcen Afghanistans getätigt, was zur Förderung des Wirtschaftswachstums und der Stabilität in der Region beigetragen hat.
Wachsende Mineralindustrie
China hat sich neben der Energiewirtschaft auch zu einer bedeutenden Rolle in der afghanischen Mineralindustrie entwickelt. China war an der Exploration und dem Abbau dieser Ressourcen beteiligt. Es wird angenommen, dass Afghanistan über enorme Mengen an Mineralien verfügt, darunter Eisen, Kupfer, Gold und Lithium. So wurde beispielsweise eine der größten Kupferminen der Welt, Mes Aynak in Afghanistan, teilweise von der China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) erschlossen. Es wird erwartet, dass die Erschließung dieser Mine Tausende von Arbeitsplätzen schaffen und die Wirtschaft Afghanistans erheblich stärken wird.
Ein weiterer Meilenstein für die BRI
Die übergreifende Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), eine weltweite Infrastrukturentwicklungsinitiative, die darauf abzielt, Nationen in Asien, Europa und Afrika durch ein Netzwerk von Straßen, Zügen und Häfen miteinander zu verbinden, umfasst Chinas Beteiligung an der afghanischen Energie- und Mineralindustrie. Afghanistan wird als entscheidender Teilnehmer an der BRI und als Mittel für China angesehen, um seinen wirtschaftlichen und politischen Einfluss weltweit auszubauen.
Energieversicherung für China
China hat selbst auch von der Expansion der afghanischen Öl- und Mineralindustrie profitiert. China ist in der Lage, durch Investitionen in die natürlichen Ressourcen Afghanistans einen beständigen Strom von Energie und Mineralien für den eigenen Gebrauch sicherzustellen und so den langfristigen wirtschaftlichen Fortschritt des Landes zu unterstützen. Darüber hinaus haben Chinas Investitionen in die Infrastruktur und Ressourcen Afghanistans die Handels- und Transitverbindungen zwischen den beiden Nationen verbessert und ihre wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen weiter gefestigt.
Exploration neuer Gasfelder
Aber die geschätzten Ölreserven am Standort Amu Darya sind für sich genommen nicht so bedeutend. Es besteht vielmehr die Hoffnung, dass sich ein weiteres riesiges Gasfeld, das direkt hinter der Grenze von Turkmenistan liegt, bis nach Afghanistan erstreckt; Wenn dies der Fall ist, könnte es die Wirtschaft Afghanistans genauso wichtig machen wie sie es für Turkmenistan ist.
Sich den Chancen stellen: Echte Herausforderungen, die angegangen werden müssen
Der chinesische Einfluss in der Region wird mit strategischen und diplomatischen Ansätzen der USA und anderer regionaler Akteure konfrontiert. Außerdem ist das Land von so vielen herausfordernden Gebieten umgeben, dass es für China eine gewaltige Aufgabe sein wird, die Ressourcen bis an ihr Ziel zu leiten. Auch die lokale Politik sollte berücksichtigt werden, da die lokale Kriegsherren schwer bewaffnet sind und daher in vielen Bereichen große Herausforderungen darstellen können. Aber am Ende ist dies ein Zeichen für neue Konkurrenz in der Region in Bezug auf die wirtschaftlichen Aussichten, und das Taliban-Regime könnte ein neues wirtschaftliches Instrument finden, um seine Macht zu stärken.
The incompetence of MI5 in failing to prevent Salman Abedi detonating his bomb at the Manchester Arena in 2017 beggars belief. According to Sir John Saunders, who chaired the inquiry into the Islamist atrocity which killed 22 people, a better response from MI5 ‘might have prevented the attack’.
In publishing his 226-page report, Sir John did not spare the intelligence service for missing several opportunities to thwart Abedi, who made little attempt to conceal his extremist ideology. MI5’s most calamitous mistake was to sit on a piece of intelligence that they received, information which has not been disclosed for national security reasons.
Has a deadly brew of arrogance and naivety been further addled in recent years by political correctness?
The first MI5 officer to assess the intelligence failed to discuss it with colleagues and did not write a report on the same day as was standard procedure. When the MI5 officer did eventually write the report, noted Sir John, it ‘did not contain sufficient context’.
Had the officer acted with more diligence, it is likely that Abedi’s return to the UK from Libya on May 18, 2017 ‘would have been treated extremely seriously by the Security Service’. Four days later Abedi blew himself up at the Manchester Arena.
Andrew Roussos, whose eight-year old daughter, Saffie-Rose, was the youngest victim of the attack, said on Thursday: ‘The fact that MI5 failed to stop him despite all of the red flags available demonstrates they are not fit to keep us safe and therefore not fit for purpose.’
Is Putin winning? The world order is changing in his favour
This is not the first time that MI5’s ineptitude has been exposed by Islamist terrorists. There are many alarming similarities between the Manchester suicide bombing and the London attack in July 2005, that killed 52 people on the capital’s transport network. The inquest into that atrocity heard that two of the four homegrown bombers had come to the attention of MI5 earlier in 2005 but for reasons they refused to disclose at the inquest they decided not to investigate a crucial piece of intelligence.
As I wrote in an article for Coffee House in 2021, ‘ineptitude and complacency have characterised much of British intelligence’s battle against Islamic extremists’. As far back as the late 1990s, French intelligence agents christened the British capital ‘Londonistan’ because of the large numbers of extremists who had been allowed to set up home.
One was the Algerian Rachid Ramda, wanted by France for financing a series of attacks in Paris in 1995. The French newspaper, Le Monde, wrote that Jack Straw, Home Secretary at the time, ‘wanted to preserve London’s safe haven for Islamist militants’ in the hope it would prevent any terrorism attacks in Britain. On nine occasions the French government applied for his extradition but it was only after the 2005 London attack that Britain finally sent Ramda to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Another was Abu Hamza, the Egyptian cleric, who for many years at the turn of the millennium preached hatred against Britain and the West from the Finsbury Park mosque. Among the people who regularly visited Hamza at the Mosque were one of the London suicide bombers and Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up a passenger jet with a shoe bomb in 2001. Muslim trustees of the mosque contacted police seven times to express their concern about Abu Hamza, but no action was taken.
The Americans were not so lackadaisical, and in 2004 they demanded Hamza’s extradition to face a series of terrorist charges; he was jailed for life in 2014.
Five years later a former French security advisor turned commentator, Alexandre Del Valle, recalled a conversation with an MI5 agent in 1997, in which the latter boasted that hosting Islamists ‘allows us to know who is who and guards us against terrorism’.
Has that deadly brew of arrogance and naivety been further addled in recent years by political correctness? William Shawcross’s courageous report last month about the risible anti-extremist Prevent programme laid bare the extent to which political correctness, particularly the fear of being labelled ‘Islamophobic’, was stymying Britain’s effort to tackle Islamic extremism.
In a speech on Wednesday the Home Secretary Suella Braverman admitted: ‘We have a blind spot in the system. It has allowed certain Islamist groups to operate under our radar. There can be no place for political correctness in our national security. In fact, I’d like to banish it altogether.’
A good start would be to forbid MI5 from any more virtual signalling nonsense, such as flying the Progress Pride flag above its HQ, which it did in 2021, just days after the inquest into the murder in 2019 of two people at Fishmonger’s Hall by Usman Khan. That inquest concluded that the police and MI5 were guilty of ‘serious deficiencies’ in their monitoring of Khan, a convicted terrorist. Relatives of the victims accused the intelligence services of avoiding responsibility for their failings by hiding ‘behind the cloak of secrecy’.
After Abu Hamza was arrested in 2004 he told a British court that he had MI5 to thank for his years of liberty at the Finsbury Park mosque. On one occasion one of their officers explained to him: ‘You have freedom of speech. You don’t have to worry as long as we don’t see blood on the streets.
How much more blood needs to be spilled on British streets before MI5 is shaken out of its complacency?
Try a month free
Then just £1 a week for full website and app access.
El Servicio Federal de Seguridad ruso (FSB) publicó imágenes de las consecuencias del sabotaje de los nazis de la OTAN ocurrido en la región de Briansk el 2 de marzo. El video muestra automóviles acribillados a tiros y conductores asesinados, así como las armas de los combatientes nazo-otanistas.
Reproductor de vídeo
00:00
01:22
En las imágenes se ven dos vehículos tiroteados. Se trata de un coche de pasajeros VAZ y un Chevrolet Niva. En el asiento del conductor de cada automóvil hay un cadáver. Además, se muestran armas abandonadas por los atacantes, incluidas minas de fabricación alemana y un lanzagranadas, así como un cartucho de munición para armas ligeras.
El 2 de marzo, un grupo de saboteadores de la OTAN se infiltró en el territorio del distrito de Klímovsk, de la región rusa de Briansk. Los criminales abrieron fuego contra un vehículo que acabó con la vida de dos personas y dejó a un niño herido.
El presidente de Rusia, Vladímir Putin, calificó de atentado terrorista el ataque de los combatientes ucranianos infiltrados en la región rusa de Briansk.
💬„Wir betrachten die Sanktionen gegen eine Reihe russischer Beamter unter dem Vorwand ihrer angeblichen Beteiligung an der Verletzung der Rechte von Kara-Murza als Einmischung in die inneren Angelegenheiten unseres Landes, um die Justiz zu behindern“, heißt es in einem am veröffentlichten Kommentar den Telegrammkanal der Botschaft.
Girenko betonte, dass Kara-Murza schwere Verbrechen vorgeworfen werden.
Der Diplomat merkte auch an, dass die Geschwindigkeit, mit der die US-Behörden restriktive Maßnahmen gegen die Russische Föderation erlassen, ein Hinweis auf „die ohnmächtige Wut der herrschenden Kreise der USA aufgrund der Unfähigkeit ist, sie zu zwingen, ihrem Willen zu gehorchen“.
Er riet Washington, der beklagenswerten Situation im Bereich der Menschenrechte und Freiheiten in den Vereinigten Staaten Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken und keine „Sanktionskeule“ zu schwingen.
*Einzelperson, die als ausländischer Agent in der Russischen Föderation handelt
Claudio Gallo
Der Friedensstifter 