By Caitlin Johnstone
June 26, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- The New York
Times
reports that Ukraine is crawling with
special forces and spies from the US and its
allies, which would seem to contradict
earlier
reports that the US intelligence cartel
is having trouble getting intel about what’s
happening on the ground in Ukraine.
This would also, obviously, put the final
nail in the coffin of the claim that this is
not a US proxy war.
In an article titled “Commando
Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in
Ukraine, Officials Say,” anonymous
western officials inform us of the following
through their stenographers at The New York
Times:
As Russian troops press ahead with a
grinding campaign to seize eastern
Ukraine, the nation’s ability to resist
the onslaught depends more than ever on
help from the United States and its
allies — including a stealthy network of
commandos and spies rushing to provide
weapons, intelligence and training,
according to U.S. and European
officials.
Much of this work happens outside
Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and
Britain, for example. But 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, according
to current and former officials.
At the same time, a few dozen
commandos from other NATO countries,
including Britain, France, Canada and
Lithuania, also have been working inside
Ukraine.
The revelation that the CIA and US
special forces are conducting military
operations in Ukraine does indeed make a lie
of the Biden administration’s
insistence at the start of the war that
there would be no American boots on the
ground in Ukraine, and the admission that
NATO powers are so involved in operations
against a nuclear superpower means we are
closer to seeing a nuclear exchange than
anyone should be comfortable with.
This news should surprise no one who
knows anything about the usual behavior of
the US intelligence cartel, but
interestingly it contradicts something we
were told by the same New York Times not
three weeks ago.
“American intelligence agencies have less
information than they would like about
Ukraine’s operations and possess a far
better picture of Russia’s military, its
planned operations and its successes and
failures,” NYT
told us
earlier this month. “U.S. officials said
the Ukrainian government gave them few
classified briefings or details about their
operational plans, and Ukrainian officials
acknowledged that they did not tell the
Americans everything.”
It seems a bit unlikely that US
intelligence agencies would have a hard time
getting information about what’s happening
in a country where they themselves are
physically located.
Moon of Alabama theorized at the time
that this ridiculous “We don’t know what’s
happening in our own proxy war” line was
being pushed to give the US plausible
deniability about Ukraine’s failures on the
battlefield, which
have only gotten worse since then.
So why are they telling us all this now?
Well, it could be that we’re being paced
into accepting an increasingly direct role
of the US and its allies in Ukraine.
The other day Antiwar’s Daniel Larison
tweeted, “Hawks in April: Don’t call it
a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course it’s a
proxy war! Hawks in June: It’s not their
war, it’s our war!”
This is indeed exactly how it happened.
Back in April
President Biden told the press the idea
that this is a proxy war between the US and
Russia was “not true” and Defense Secretary
Lloyd Austin
said “It’s not, this is clearly
Ukraine’s fight” when asked if this is a
proxy war. The mainstream media were still
framing this claim as merely an “accusation”
by the Russian government, and empire
spinmeisters were regularly
admonishing anyone who
used that term on the grounds that it
deprives Ukrainians of their “agency”.
Then May rolled around and all of a
sudden we had The New Yorker
unequivocally telling us that the US is
in “a full proxy war with Russia” and hawks
like US congressman Seth Moulton
saying things like, “We’re not just at
war to support the Ukrainians. We’re
fundamentally at war, although somewhat
through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s
important that we win.”
And now here in June we’ve got war hawks
like Max Boot
coming right out and
saying that this is actually America’s
war, and it is therefore important for the
US to drastically escalate the war in order
to hand the Russians “devastating losses”.
https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1538849455348359170
So the previously unthinkable idea that
the US is at war with Russia has been
gradually normalized, with the heat turned
up so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice
it’s being boiled alive. If that idea can be
sufficiently normalized, public consent for
greater escalations will likely be
forthcoming, even if those escalations are
extremely psychotic.
Back in March
when I said the only “agency” Ukraine
has in this conflict is the Central
Intelligence kind, empire loyalists jumped
down my throat. They couldn’t believe I was
saying something so evil and wrong. Now
they’ve been told that the Central
Intelligence Agency is indeed conducting
operations and directing intelligence on the
ground in Ukraine, but I somehow doubt that
this will stir any self-reflection on their
part.
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