"With feature-length hyperbole—not a wisp of subtlety allowed—Dr. Strangelove made the case that a deep strain of madness had infected the entire US national security apparatus. From the “War Room” that was the Pentagon’s holiest of holies all
the way to the cockpit of a B-52 hurtling toward its assigned Russian target with a massive nuclear bomb in its belly, whack jobs were in charge.
...
US officials and major media outlets have concurred in classifying the Russian president as uniquely dangerous. For example, a recent front-page news article in The New York Times—not an editorial or opinion piece—described Putin as beset by “
grievances, paranoia and [an] imperialist mind-set” (that is, as an embittered nutcase).

Putin’s ostensible paranoia in combination with Russia’s gigantic nuclear arsenal would seem to justify a hair-on-fire response from Washington national security officials. Certainly, the danger of nuclear weapons use today greatly exceeds that of 20
years ago when the Bush administration argued that the Iraqi nuclear threat justified a Ukraine-style invasion.

The Biden administration’s insouciance regarding Russian nukes therefore qualifies as, at the very least, odd. According to my colleague at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Anatol Lieven, “The greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe
that humanity has ever faced is now centered on the Crimean peninsula.” His understanding of all things Russian greatly exceeds my own, but that assessment strikes me as about right. And while Planet Earth dangles on the edge of an abyss, the US
response is to debate whether or not to supply Ukraine with F-16s.

As far as I can tell, Biden administration policy regarding that embattled land rests on one crucial assumption: In the face of an open-ended, incremental US escalation, the Kremlin will ultimately submit. In turn, Ukraine’s inevitable victory will
endow Europe with peace and security until the end of time.

How that assumption meshes with the conviction that Putin is mentally unbalanced isn’t clear. Counting on an irrational actor to behave rationally is an inherently risky proposition. "


https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-war-russia-putin/










On Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 4:43:11 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

On Wednesday, March 8, 2023 at 7:40:17 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/us/politics/nord-stream-pipeline-sabotage-ukraine.html?

"WASHINGTON — New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded

investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months.

U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.

The brazen attack on the natural gas pipelines, which link Russia to Western Europe, fueled public speculation about who was to blame, from Moscow to Kyiv and London to Washington, and it has remained one of the most consequential unsolved mysteries

of Russia’s year-old war in Ukraine."

The New York Times published an article with the headline of
"Sabotaged Pipelines and a Mystery: Who Did It? (Was It Russia?)" last September.

It chose to totally ignore Seymour Hersh's long article suggesting the pipeline bombings were deliberately planned action directed by the US.

Well, despite the silence of most US corporate media, the issue are not going away by itself. So, someone has to take the blame to counter the report by Hersh. Viola, a new but otherwise unknown and untraceable "pro-Ukraine" group was named. And

again the New York Times is dutifully repeating the new finding.

While the New York Times has considered itself the paper of record. Looking from the outside, one has to ask "What is the record of the paper".

A pair of writer, Howard Friel and Richard Falk did challenge the New York Times record.
They together published a 2004 book entitled "The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misrepresents US Foreign Policy." The authors examined NYTimes record before the US invaded Iraq under false pretense and found the paper wanting.

" On May 26, 2004, the New York Times issued an apology for its coverage of Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction. The Times had failed to provide what most readers expect from the US newspaper of record: journalistic accuracy and integrity

about important matters of US foreign policy.

But the Times’ coverage of Iraq was worse than they were willing to concede. In fact, for at least the past fifty years the editorial policy of the Times—from its coverage of the 1954 Geneva Accords on Vietnam to the issue of torture in Abu Ghraib�

�has failed to incorporate international law into its coverage of US foreign policy. This lapse, as the authors demonstrate, has profound implications for the quality of the Times’ journalism and the function of the press in a country supposedly
governed by the rule of law.

In this meticulously researched study, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal how the Times has consistently misreported major US foreign policy issues, including the bombing of North Vietnam in response to the Tonkin Gulf and Pleiku incidents in 1964-65,

the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s elected president, and the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. " (Back
cover, 2007 paperback edition)

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