Military Madness > Provocative Joint Naval Exercise by Russia and China

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‘Highly provocative’: US sent destroyers after stunning Russia,

China joint naval operation off coast of Alaska

By Isabel Keane

August 6, 2023 9:20am  Updated

China and Russia conducted a joint naval operation near the coast of Alaska earlier this week in a “highly provocative” move amid the war in Ukraine that triggered a robust US military response.

Eleven Russian and Chinese ships neared the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska earlier this week near the maritime boundary Russia shares with the US, but the fleets never entered US waters, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fleet of ships have since left, and were tailed by four US destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, officials confirmed to the newspaper.

“It is a historical first,” Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a retired Navy captain, told the oulet. “Given the context of the war in Ukraine and tensions around Taiwan, this move is highly provocative.”

China and Russia conducted a joint naval operation near the coast of Alaska earlier this week.

AP

A spokesperson for the US Northern Command confirmed to the paper that the two American adversaries carried out a combined naval patrol near Alaska, but did not confirm the number of ships or their exact location.

“Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat,” the command said in a statement.

The exact time and location of the near invasion have not been made public, and information about the event is still being declassified.

Eleven Russian and Chinese ships neared the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska earlier this week,

but never entered US waters.

AP

Republican Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan confirmed the incursion took place “within the last few days,” and that while the US military had a strong response, such an incident was unprecedented.

“First, this is unprecedented, not just for Alaska, but for America to have 11 warships jointly being operated by the Chinese and Russians — who are increasingly working together — essentially doing freedom of navigation and navigation operations incursions into Alaska’s area,” Sullivan told KTUU.

The incident was “yet another reminder that we have entered a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Beijing and Moscow,” Sullivan wrote on the X platform, which was formally known as Twitter.

That's the official narrative. Unofficially, America and NATO are forcing Russia and China together and don't seem the least bit concerned about that. Such arrogance can be very costly.

The fleet of ships have since left, and were tailed by four US destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft.

Xinhua/Sipa USA

Sullivan, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has repeatedly asked military leaders to increase the assets available to defend Alaska.

“After last year’s incursion, I mentioned to several leaders in the military, hey, we need to prepare for this happening again. And when it does, we need to have a much more robust response,” Sullivan said.

In September, a single US Coast Guard cutter was on the scene when a flotilla of seven Russian and Chinese ships were near the Aleutian Island chain, prompting what Sullivan called a “tepid” response.

As it stands, Russia has greater assets than Alaska — something Sullivan says stands as a reminder that there’s still work to do for Alaska.

The exact time and location of the near invasion have not been made public, and information about the event

is still being declassified.

ZUMAPRESS.com

“I think it just underscores the need for the continued build up of not only forces in Alaska, but the infrastructure that can handle them, particularly infrastructure like the deepwater port of Nome, and a greater naval, Coast Guard and Marine Corps presence in Alaska,” he said.

Again, that's the official narrative. The US Navy has been left out of the Ukraine war for the most part, and they need to move their assets too.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC told The Journal the patrol wasn’t aimed at Washington.

The Russian Embassy in DC did not immediately return request for comment.

China had become Russia’s most important trading partner since the nation invaded Ukraine almost 18 months ago, but had not been tied to its war effort, the article noted.

Military Madness > Secret Ops by America's Military against Russia

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America's Illegal and Immoral Destruction

of Nordstream Pipelines in the Baltic Sea

Longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersch who broke the Watergate story, released what has become a scathing reveal on America’s direct involvement on the Nord Stream pipeline attack. The article published on Substack on February 8th of this year, paints in detail how the USA planned to take out the NordStream pipeline well in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hersch writes in his now famous article:

“Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”

Hersch details the plot and strategy on exactly how the USA carried out the NordStream bombing.

Why have the managing editors of America’s leading newspapers sidelined Hersch’s assertions?

Could it be because Deep State owns all the Mainstream Media outlets in America and most of the world?

The link above takes you to Seymour Hersch's detailed revelation, a long but quite astonishing read that is well worth the time and effort to absorb. The sabotage was nothing less than an act of war. Now, there are reports of American troops in Ukraine operating some of the weapons systems against Russia. This is also an act of war! 

I have been saying for nearly a year now that the war in Ukraine is actually a proxy war between America and NATO on the one side and Russia on the other. Ukraine is simply providing the theatre and the casualties.

Don't be surprised if this doesn't explode into a World War far worse than anything mankind has ever seen. The stupidity of the NATO-Washington coalition makes it almost impossible to avoid. I suspect it will occur later this year or early next.

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Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine?

In the wake of the leaks and a drip-drip of info over the last year,

one lawmaker is demanding clarity from the White House.

Responsible Statecraft

APRIL 18, 2023

Written by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has flooded the docket in recent months with resolutions designed to get U.S. troops out of overseas missions he believes have not been approved by Congress, is now demanding that President Joe Biden tell the American people just how many American military personnel are operating in Ukraine today.

His new Privileged Resolution of Inquiry, which forces Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military inside Ukraine and to hand over “copies of any and all documents outlining plans for military assistance to Ukraine,” comes a week after leaked Pentagon documents showing previously unreported U.S. Special Forces inside the war zone.

According to the document there were 97 special forces from NATO countries operating in Ukraine as of March, including 14 U.S. special forces. When asked by the Guardian newspaper for confirmation/clarification, the Department of Defense said,  “We are not going to discuss or confirm classified information due to the potential impact on national security as well as the safety and security of our personnel and those of our allies and our partners.” The Pentagon has not denied the authenticity of the documents, however.

While “14 special forces” sounds like a drop in the bucket, these revelations are a drip-drip of other pieces of information over the last year that, when added up, leave more questions than answers, and the bottom line is that the American people have a right to know, says (Ret.) Lt. Col. Daniel Davis.

“It is entirely appropriate that the American people know, authoritatively, whether any U.S. troops are engaged in military operations within Ukraine — and to demand a change if we don’t like the answer,” Davis told me yesterday when I asked him about the Gaetz resolution.

“American history is rife with too many examples of presidents secretly employing U.S. troops without the consent or knowledge of our people. It almost always goes sideways when presidents go covert with our troops.”

We know from reporting last year, beginning in June 2022, that the CIA had a strong presence in Ukraine, engaging a network of commandos and spies among European partners set up to provide critical weapons and military intelligence to Ukraine. According to the New York Times, “even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the massive amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces.”

Ken Klippenstein and Jim Risen reported in October 2022 that “there is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine” than publicly known. They reported for the Intercept that several former and current intelligence officers told them that the covert operations were being conducted “under a presidential covert action finding,” for which only a handful of Congressional lawmakers have been notified.

In November, the administration announced it was sending a team of military “weapons inspectors” into Ukraine to keep track of weapons shipments, but that they would be away from the fighting. Also that month, the DoD confirmed that it would be setting up a new joint forces command called the Security Assistance Group Ukraine, or SAGU, based out of U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany and led by a 3-star general to “handle weapons shipments and personnel training.”

In February of this year, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon wanted to revive pre-Ukraine war orders that would allow them to insert commandos in the form of “control teams” to direct Ukrainian operatives to counter Russian disinformation and monitor troops movements on the ground. This would require the U.S. personnel to be in Ukraine or in a neighboring country. Washington had been operating such teams in Ukraine under Section 1202 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act until the invasion last year.

Nick Turse, who has written extensively about U.S. covert operations in other parts of the globe, said the recent leak showing special ops forces in Ukraine “is hardly a surprise. ” 

“U.S. Special Operations forces deploy throughout the world, often with next to no transparency or real oversight,” he said when asked about the Gaetz resolution. “Under little-known authorities, special operators conduct shadowy missions — sometimes indistinguishable from combat — unbeknownst to the American people and most members of Congress.”

What we don’t know much about is how many trainers and intelligence personnel might be working under contract for the U.S. government on the ground in Ukraine. There have been hints that they are there. Of course, some American experts, like Alexander Vindman, who are frustrated that the U.S. military is not more directly involved, have been calling on Biden to send contractors into the fight from the beginning.

Others have said “operational contractors” should be inserted into Ukraine, not to fight, but to help the Ukrainians train and operate the sophisticated weaponry Washington is sending over there. Are they there now? It is hard to tell. We know there are plenty of private military contractors in Ukraine today from all over the West working in extraction, training, and humanitarian aid, but they are, as far as we know, freelancing, not on the U.S. dole. 

The use of contractors, whether they be Americans or third party, has been widespread since the U.S. launched a Global War on Terror after 9/11. According to the Congressional Research Service, as of the end of 2022, there were approximately 22,000 contractor personnel working for the DoD throughout the US Central Command’s area of responsibility.

“It is highly probable that contractors are a significant part of the U.S. personnel presence in Ukraine,” speculated Ted Carpenter, who wrote about the topic recently for RS.

 “My expectation is that they would be used for the operation and maintenance of the more advanced (and twitchy?) weapons systems that NATO has given to Kyiv,” he shared on Monday.  “Another interesting question is how many DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and Pentagon personnel, as well as contractors, might be helping Ukraine with targeting information for attacks on Russian forces. Some of the operations have seemed far too sophisticated for the known capabilities that Ukraine possessed when the invasion began.”

RS has put in a request to the DoD press office to ask just how many contractors might be in Ukraine today. In the meantime, Gaetz said in a statement he will press on with his own quest for a clear number of U.S. troops there. “There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine.”

Military Madness > Sex, lies and trade deals: how a businessman bribed half the US Navy

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Leonard Glenn Francis is a Malaysian businessman who infiltrated the greatest power on the high seas and built a billion-dollar empire by providing officers with sex, champagne, and security. And now, he’s ready to talk.

 “Manilla, 2007. The chauffeured Mercedes crawled south for half an hour in the interminable traffic – the turbid waters of Manilla Bay on the right. The middle-aged men packed inside the cars were in an exuberant mood … Leonard Glenn Francis was taking out the senior commanders of the US 7th Fleet. These were the most powerful navy officers in Asia, and they controlled the movements of around sixty ships and submarines, 150 aircraft, and 20,000 sailors in a huge operational area, stretching from Hawaii to India …”

“The men moved quickly through an air-conditioned lobby and through a curtain at the back. On the other side, Filipino women – many just students – sat in rows in a kind of fish bowl, identifiable not by their names but by the numbers attached to their skimpy outfits … Always the … big boss or Lion King to these navy officers, Leonard dominated the action …”

“The afterparty was in the $4,000-a-night McArthur Suite at the Manilla Hotel … It was General Douglas McArthur’s home and operational command during World War II. The men piled into the Spanish-Mission-style room with wooden ceiling beams, marble tiles, an ornate chandelier and heavily draped curtains. Leonard … stocked the suite with $10,000 bottles of Dom Perignon … The two-bedroom suite was filled with McArthur memorabilia. In the suite’s study, two ornately carved wooden chairs – the only objects to survive the Battle of Manilla, stood in front of a desk … One of the men, quite drunk by now, opened a case on the desk containing a replica of McArthur’s famous corn-cob pipe and grabbed a woman.”

Fat Leonard, as he came to be known, recalls the scene as follows: “Being warriors, they had been at sea for such a long time – the aviators, your nukes … they’re, uh, captains of ships. They’ve got this inner side of them that is a beast that needs to come out … We went there and picked up a bunch of karaoke girls and booked them out and brought them back. They are like rockstars. They are living their life – living their dreams – things that they will never ever, ever again do in their lifetime. Nobody would give them that kind of party that I do … You know, they just started stripping and having sex right there … The pipe was used as a dildo on the hooker, making a mockery of General McArthur’s memorabilia … they totally desecrated and insulted,” he says, laughing.

“It was a mass orgy … That’s how deep we were with the navy … The entire command – the chain of command – had to be in your pocket. And that’s what happened. Everybody was in my pocket … I had them in my palm and was just rolling them around.”

As he says in the trailer to the interview, “I had the navy by their balls … I turned my guns against them because they betrayed me.”

Fat Leonard was a Malaysian businessman who bribed numerous officers and others in the US Navy until he was arrested. He paid for prostitutes and orgies for naval officers, ranking all the way up to admiral. He threw lavish parties and $30,000 dinners, sent gifts for the officer’s wives – little things like Chanel and Gucci handbags, Cohiba Cigars – the nice stuff that no officer or his wife should have to live without.

In return, the officers he corrupted made sure their ships docked at ports across Asia that Fat Leonard controlled. Since the 1980s, Leonard made bank by provisioning the Navy at extortionate rates for fuel, food, even security, by providing what he called a “ring of steel” around the ships – as if the US Navy should need help defending itself. The ring of steel was nothing but a line of barges tied up around the military ships to prevent an assault like the one that happened in 2000 in Yemen’s harbor when two Al-Qaeda operatives rammed a boat full of explosives into the side of the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors and injuring another 37.

2001 became a very good year for Leonard after 9/11 for the “husbanding” monopoly of his provisioning company called Glenn Defense Marine Asia. You might say Leonard got fat off his contracts with the US government from that period on, living in a $130-million mansion in Singapore where he kept 20 cars, including Rolls-Royces and militarized Hummers, all proceeds from his US Navy contracts.

Fat Leonard was a larger-than-life character in more than just weight (where he took the scales up to 160 kilograms – a whopping 352 pounds on his six-foot-three frame). He wore Stars-and-Stripes ties, had Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless The USA’ as his ringtone, ate sloppy joes and rooted for US baseball teams, so the people he served really liked him. And he liked the USA because it was very good to him – without most people in government knowing it was being very good to him. Fat Leonard loved to contract with the US military.

But now Fat Leonard is mad. It’s not just that his money-making empire came crashing down around his feet in 2013 when he was arrested. He pled guilty in 2015 to all that and is still awaiting sentencing under house arrest in San Diego. No, Fat Leonard is mad because some of the people in his pocket – the highest higher-ups who took his bribes – didn’t get taken down with him, though none of what he did could have happened without them. They remain at large while the legal system shows no apparent interest in them, and that made the usually jolly Leonard, who sounds drunk with power in his interviews, mad enough to speak out publicly.

Oh sure, the corruption scandal led to various naval officers being charged, jailed for a while and demoted, and to broken marriages, the usual falderal that comes with such scandals. But Leonard wants to know, where is the prison time for the high brass that he himself is now facing?

Now that advanced kidney cancer has left him without much to lose, Fat Leonard is crying out publicly. Journalist Tom Wright recently interviewed him, and even Wright admits that, during the first interviews, Leonard’s natural charm conned him into feeling sympathetic toward his tale of a tough childhood and a man who made good by taking care of the US Navy’s most urgent ‘needs’.

“I did like him at one point,” says Wright, “but then … there was some personal cruelties to women in his life … The misogyny that runs through this whole story is shocking … At the very end of our interaction … I challenged him on a lot of these things … That was the last time we talked … and his reactions to it is very, very telling.”

At one point in that final episode, Leonard said to Wright in apparent surprise, “I don’t know why you’re so worried about hookers,” and the hooker they were talking about was the mother of his children. Wright ties his concerns about the misogyny to the kinds of things that happened in the Tailhook scandal in the 90s as becoming endemic in the armed forces back then, because women were new in the US military, and some male soldiers apparently did not know how to comport themselves around them as colleagues in war.

It’s not a salacious connection for Wright to make because the big key to Leonard’s success with the Navy was orchestrating orgies. Leonard’s long success story wasn’t just about the great job he did in providing the ‘ring of steel’. He also did an enthusiastic job of running sex rings for soldiers – a ring of beds, as it were. It didn’t matter that he charged exorbitant fees for providing these illegal services, because those buying were using US government money, not their own, and their participation in such services virtually guaranteed they’d never squeal on Leonard.

Leonard got a taste of his own treatment of women when he was arrested for his crimes. He was stripped, chained, handcuffed, and made to squat.

“Here you are treated like an animal once inside,” he complained.

They stripped away the dignity of a man who claims he had enjoyed the power of steering $20-billion ships to ports of his own choosing, boasting that he could effectively position the US Navy as a civilian by choosing where he’d offer particular services. He was also charged with obtaining classified information from those he corrupted.

Leonard says the real scandal is that some top admirals who benefited from his provisioning remain free, some of them having been allowed to retire honorably, even though he had submitted evidence that incriminated them.

“I feel completely betrayed,” says Leonard. “They asked me to name all those involved or face 50 years in jail and I spilled the beans … I gave them about 40 names. I told basically how deep the bribery was in the US Navy. It basically shook the foundation of the navy … I felt very upset because just look at what I am going through … My entire life has been destroyed. My businesses, my family, everything is gone, you know, being hit like a tsunami … [Yet,] One four-star admiral I named was let off scot-free just because he was appointed by the president and the senate. There is no way they are going to embarrass the government by indicting him. It would have been a humiliation.”

Alas, the good times did not last forever. Fat Leonard’s empire has collapsed, and he is palpably angry because the Epstein-like secrets that he held on military brass did him no good. The protection he thought he had wrapped around himself like a ring of steel failed to hold together.

“I had over 2,800 staff working for me in over 30 countries and everything folded. So many innocent people lost their jobs, many families were destroyed. This was deliberate financial ruin brought upon me.”

Leonard’s crimes and those who joined in them were reported to the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) by a Navy wife who was physically mistreated, yet for years, nothing was done about anything that was reported because Leonard had, via his secrets, essentially bought everyone off while people were still enjoying his services. According to Wright, Leonard even managed to corrupt one of the top NCIS officers – ‘corrupt’ usually meaning, in stories like this, to get someone to partake in these sexual services, thereby assuring Leonard’s protection from the top of the NCIS, lest the officer in question incriminate himself.

As Leonard put it in the initial interview, “Everybody has their needs. And I gave them that sense of confidence, and I also provided them what they wanted … and they could trust me … I played professional. I played sexual – whatever you needed – anything.”

It worked like a well-lubricated machine, concealing its own misdoings… until one day it didn’t.

By David Haggith is an author published by Putnam and HarperCollins. He is publisher of The Great Recession Blog and writes for over 50 economic news websites. His Twitter page of economic humor is @EconomicRecess.

I wonder how many billions of dollars were wasted by the Pacific fleet in this scandal. The military is not nearly controlled enough over their spending. The media seems completely disinterested in this extraordinary case. 

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