|
|
|
March 11, 2023 Antiwar rally 2 pm Saturday in Albuquerque; LANL pits delayed, endorse the "Call for Sanity"; Ukraine update; the Nordstream investigation (and likely impeachment) "imperative" Dear friends -- Good afternoon. This is "Thursday's Letter" (two days late), to our New Mexico members and others who are interested. Forward it to your friends! *** Please support in any way you can the ANSWER Coalition's anti-war rally on Saturday, March 18th in Albuquerque, at 2 pm on the corner of San Mateo & Gibson just outside Kirtland Air Force Base. Forward the flyer image, send out their Facebook link, announce the rally in meetings, publicize it in whatever other ways you can, come (with your friends!) if you live reasonably near, or organize a public event in your own community! *** We expected to send out a detailed review of the Administration's budget request yesterday, but no detailed budget request was provided. By law, it is due on the first Monday in February. As a federal official said to me last year when the budget was delayed, "We thought that when this administration came in, the grown-ups would be back. Boy were we wrong." *** If you don't want the U.S. to rush into the production of plutonium warhead cores ("pits") in service of a new arms race with Russia and China, by building and operating a factory complex in Los Alamos, please endorse the Call for Sanity, not Nuclear Production. Ask your friends and groups you can influence to do so also! The many people who have been endorsing LANL as the sole pit factory have failed -- as was obvious would happen. LANL pit production is now delayed at least four more years, and we know of no one in government who thinks LANL can do this whole mission. It can't. Having a pit factory at LANL, given LANL's inherent inadequacies and problems, means the U.S. will build two factories. Making LANL into a pit factory was never the "lesser of two evils." It was a fantasy, and the result is deplorable from every perspective except contractor profits and arms racing. *** Go to our Ukraine page for news and analysis, and share it with your friends! PLEASE! There are a lot of appalling misconceptions about this war in our communities. As Caitlin Johnstone said the other day, "We're going to have to wake up sooner or later, and because of the stakes involved it is very important that we do everything we can to try and make sure that it is sooner." It hardly needs to be said but it is virtually impossible to understand what is going on in the world by using a cell phone alone. A decent-sized screen, keyboard, pointing device, and sound are going to be necessary. Of course, time spent with legacy media -- in print or on a screen -- on this highly-propagandized topic is much worse than wasted. All of us are susceptible to polished propaganda that reaffirms our group's preferred narratives and our own preexisting biases, reduces or prevents cognitive dissonance, and lowers anxiety. Thinking is required, not just emotion. Once false ideas are implanted they can be very hard to excise. Since our last letter we posted the following articles and interviews, the best and most accessible we have seen and heard during that time: Mar 11, 2023 Mar 10, 2023 Mar 9, 2023 Mar 8, 2023 *** In the absence of a plausible alternative theory or body of evidence that might dislodge the observed circumstantial evidence (see our Ukraine page; a search there using "Nordstream" will pick up most of the articles; be sure and add this one from September) and Seymour Hersh's account, we must take the Hersh account of the operation very seriously. (Other anonymous eyewitness accounts have also surfaced, of unknown veracity, which we have not posted.) The individuals Hersh names as alleged masterminds and supervisors of this deed need to be made to testify before Congress, under oath, as an early step in a much-needed investigation. If, after this investigation, serious allegations (or worse) of guilt remain, articles of impeachment can be drafted. This process is necessary to retain something like a constitutional government. This process would culminate in impeachment if merited, then trial in the Senate, and if parties are found guilty, removal from office. If a major act of war and environmental terrorism has been perpetrated by a small cabal in the executive branch -- not only against Russia but also our close allies, Germany especially -- without approval by Congress, this is a vastly more serious "high crime" than the collection of presidential actions collectively called "Watergate," or any of the predicates for presidential impeachments in this century, if not ever. We need not worry about the prospect of the inexperienced Kamala Harris assuming the presidency. A presidential election looms. It is the process of investigation and impeachment on these grounds which would chasten any short-term, caretaker Harris administration. We believe Biden is today not much more than a short-term figurehead, which is also what Ms. Harris would be. As former senior CIA analyst and presidential briefer Ray McGovern has assessed -- correctly in our view -- it will be impossible to create peace in Ukraine while the cabal who brought the 2014 coup, and then very intentionally provoked this multifaceted war against Russia with the idea of winning it, remains in office. This is true a fortiori if they also masterminded the destruction of these pipelines, as Hersh is hardly alone in alleging. At a minimum this cabal includes Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and Jake Sullivan. Other high officials were also involved, according to Hersh (as they would need to be). Should the current President be eased from office for other reasons (two are available: mishandling of classified information, and mental debility) or should he retire from public life in 2025 without running again, the Nordstream co-conspirators and their many ideological allies will remain powerful. Investigation and as warranted impeachment are necessary to at least partially excise the rot and keep it from growing further. Other crises have already begun. Our embedded neocons, which now control foreign policy, comprise a millstone around the country's neck. We can't afford them. Ask yourself, what would the kind of people who blew up this pipeline not do? Here's one thing our out-of-control national security state might do: use "lower yield" nuclear weapons to avoid military defeat, on the theory that battlefield nuclear use would not escalate. In fact this past Thursday (March 9), STRATCOM Commander General Anthony Cotton said there was a “strategic gap or challenge” in the availability of low-yield, non-ballistic nuclear weapons that do not generate a radar signature -- i.e. low-flying, tactical nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. "Deploying such a weapon would deter our adversaries’ perceived advantage of limited use." ("U.S. faces low-yield nuclear weapon shortfall against Russia and China, STRATCOM commander says," Dan Parsons, Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, 3/10/23, paywall). U.S. citizens who aren't willing to think seriously about the implications of this bombing and what needs to be done about it have not really come to grips with what peace in Ukraine, and peace with Russia and China, will require. It hardly needs to be said that there will be no nuclear disarmament, or cooperation on climate issues, while one war rages and another is threatened. Absent impeachment, a general strike, economic collapse, or a combination of these, it is difficult to see how the U.S. national security state can be brought back within constitutional limits. Absent curtailment of the national security "Deep State," all attempts at social justice, environmental protection, and economic sustainability will fail. Absent a resolution of these serious allegations, no one will even know the extent to which the U.S. government is legitimate ("conforming to the law or rules"). In other words there is at this point, a legal and moral investigation -- and if warranted, impeachment -- imperative. That's it for now, thank you all so much for your efforts. Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
