American Committee for US-Russia Accord

A mere  55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.

Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb.

Western publics have been a caricature of Putin’s style of rule and the Russian political system by media, academics, and experts alike. Putin is either portrayed as an all-powerful dictator or a ruthless mafia don. Although there is occasional leaning in this direction and therefore a small element of truth regarding such aspects of Putin’s rule as is the case in all caricatures, they are gravely mistaken simplifications that distort more than they realistically depict matters as is also the case in caricatures.

Russian media reports prominent sociologist and dissident Boris Kagarlitsky was detained and is being charged with calling for terrorism.

Natylie Baldwin interviews Soviet and Russian specialist Geoffrey Roberts on Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, Europe’s role, Stalin and World War II.

 

One should never use “honest” and “Elliott Abrams” in the same sentence. And the same could be said for Jim Woolsey, who was a bizarre choice, and Bob Gates, who was known for politicizing intelligence for the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s. It is particularly risible that Abrams would be appointed to a position charged with maintaining integrity in U.S. public diplomacy.

There isn’t much you can do about bad journalism except change the channel, write a comment to a faceless person that may or may not get addressed, or toss the newspaper in the trash…

What it means to be a patriot, a scientist, and a heretic.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, yet the nuclear panic of the 1960s feels like history. Jackson Lears, who served as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship during the Cold War, discusses how we have embraced the myth of technological prowess to detach ourselves from the horrors of war. “War is the most unpredictable, least controllable enterprise that human beings are capable of, and yet it’s the one to which we pay the most technological homage,” he writes.

As Strana.UA – the Ukrainian daily newspaper that provides outstandingly well-informed and impartial coverage of the war – has commented, Prigozhin’s mutiny failed because of a complete lack of support in the country’s armed forces, among Russia’s elites and in Russian society.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, eventual membership in NATO was promised to Ukraine and Georgia with the statement that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin “flew into a rage,” and, according to a Russian journalist quoted by John Mearsheimer, warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”

A decade and a half later, Putin sent the message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Tell me you’re not joining NATO, I won’t invade.”

Putin is consistently accused in the West of dangerous melodrama and of historical revisionism when he points to NATO’s broken promise that it wouldn’t expand east if the Soviet Union permitted a united Germany to join NATO.

Richard Haas, the MSNBC fixture and outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), alone is not the problem or even the cause of the problem. However, he perfectly represents the CFR which is the High Church of the globalist American establishment that has gotten us into a very dangerous place over the past forty years.

“Is a meaningful peace agreement possible? My answer is no,” writes the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer.

Legendary defense analyst Chuck Spinney writes, “I think the Vilnius NATO summit will be remembered as a predictable, if ridiculous, effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The summit’s near term goal seems to have been to squirm out of a NATO Article 5 commitment to Ukraine.  But its long term goal seems to have been to rationalize a continuation of NATO’s US-driven, neocon fantasy to weaken and perhaps dismember Russia by enmeshing Russia and Ukraine in an deepening, unending Russo-NATO proxy war of attrition — i.e., attrition to the last Ukrainian…”

While the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development inspectors general have a joint oversight plan for Ukraine aid, Republicans say a special inspector general can provide an additional, more coordinated layer of oversight.

John Sopko — the long-time Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — slammed the administration’s approach to Ukraine aid oversight in an interview earlier this year.

“This is the problem of the three IGs. They can come up with a way to coordinate their work, but the DoD IG cannot look at State programs. The State IG cannot look at AID programs,” Sopko said. “They’re going to try their best, but I think there’s something like 14 or 17 separate U.S. oversight bodies. So you got 17 of those, plus you have like 50-some countries involved, and each one of them has an oversight body. I mean, this is like herding cats.”

The White House yesterday released a statement which read, in part, that, the President has determined “that it is necessary to augment the active Armed Forces of the United States for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility.”