The New York Times has published an anonymously
sourced report titled “U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid”
about the “placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system
at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before” which
could potentially “plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military,” with
one anonymous official reporting that “We are doing things at a scale that we
never contemplated a few years ago.”
Obviously this is yet another
serious escalation in the continually mounting series of steps that
have been taken into a new cold war between the planet’s two nuclear
superpowers. Had a report been leaked to Russian media from anonymous Kremlin
officials that Moscow was escalating its cyber-aggressions against America’s
energy grid, this would doubtless be labeled an act of war by the
political/media class of the US and its allies with demands for immediate
retaliation.
To put this in
perspective, The New York Times reported last year that
the Pentagon was pushing for the US Nuclear Posture Review to include the
strategy of retaliating against serious Russian cyberattacks on American power
grids with nuclear weapons.
So that’s scary enough.
What’s even scarier is the information that the Times buried
way down in the 21st to 23rd paragraphs of its report:
“Two
administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in
any detail about the steps to place ‘implants’ — software code that can be used
for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
“Pentagon and intelligence
officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about
operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility
that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he
did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian
foreign minister.
“Because
the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military
activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be
necessary, they added.”
In an article titled “Pentagon Keeps Trump in the Dark About its Cyber Attacks
on Russia“, Rolling Stone‘s
Peter Wade described this jarring revelation as follows:
“New
laws, enacted by Congress last year, allow such ‘clandestine military activity’
in cyberspace to go ahead without the president’s approval. So, in this case,
those new laws are protecting American interests… by keeping the sitting
president out of the loop. What a (scary) time to be alive.”
So
Trump is in a bit of a bind now. The escalation has already been put in place,
which will likely see an equal response from Moscow if it isn’t scaled back.
But scaling it back would mean a whole new wave of shrieking alarmism from the
political/media class about the conspiracy theory that just won’t die no matter
how much evidence is mounted against it: that Trump is a controlled puppet of
the Kremlin. All as he’s working to build the case for re-election in 2020.
Stephen F Cohen, professor
emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University and
one of America’s leading experts on US-Russia relations, has been warning for
years that exactly this would happen. In an April 2017 interview on Democracy Now,
Cohen warned that placing political pressure on a US president to never step
back from escalations during a showdown between nuclear superpowers could have
potentially world-ending consequences should mounting tensions see a situation
similar to the Cuban missile crisis again.
“I
think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least
since the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said. “And arguably, it’s more
dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we—and then, meanwhile, we
have in Washington these—and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump
has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being
politically crippled by the worst imaginable—it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and
think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason.
This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed
treason.”
“Imagine,
for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said.
“Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He
would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was
to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option
was nuclear war.”
People rarely take time to deeply reflect on the uniquely important
fact that our species came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation during
the Cuban missile crisis. We learned long after it was all over that the only
reason a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine didn’t discharge its payload on the US
Navy and set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR was
because one of the three men in the sub needed to authorize the weapon’s use
stood against the other two and refused. That man’s name was Vasili Arkhipov, and he’s responsible for the
fact that you and everyone you love exists today. There’s a good PBS documentary about the event on
YouTube if you’re curious.
President Kennedy was
constantly going back and forth in communication with the Soviets during the
Cuban missile crisis, and any number of things could have gone cataclysmically
wrong during that exchange had Kennedy not made certain concessions at certain
times and known when to hold back instead of pressing forward. He made a
series of diplomatic moves that would not be possible in this current paranoid,
leak-prone climate, including secretly recalling the USA’s Jupiter missiles from
their position in Turkey at Khrushchev’s request.
For
all the outrage that liberals display whenever a high-profile Republican utters
the phrase “deep state”, it sure is interesting that the Commander-in-Chief has
found himself in a situation where he is at the whim of a collective of
warmongers who are advancing pre-existing agendas against a nation they
perceive as a geostrategic threat to US hegemony. It begs the question, who is
really in charge?
The US
war machine is the most powerful military force in the history of civilization,
and the alliance of nations that it upholds is functionally the most powerful
empire that the world has ever seen. Because so much power depends on the
behavior of this gargantuan war engine, it is seen by those with real power as
too important to be left to the will of the electorate, and too important to be
left to the will of the elected Commander-in-Chief. This is why Americans are
the most propagandized people in the world, this is why Russia hysteria has
been blasted into their psyches for three years, and this is why we are all at
an ever-increasing risk of dying in a nuclear holocaust.
UPDATE: Trump now seems like he might be denying that
what The New York Times’ sources said is happening is
happening. It’s unlikely that the Times would
fabricate a story whole cloth, so if Trump is in fact denying the story then
either the sources are lying about what they’re doing in their own purported
jobs, or Trump is still being kept in the dark, or Trump is just lying.
“Do
you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the
United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia,” Trump
tweeted. “This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate
for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country. ALSO, NOT TRUE!
Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever
it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true
cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/06/no_author/russia-experts-2017-prophecy-about-the-nuclear-threat-of-russiagate-is-coming-true/