Hey, remember how it's shitty to do things like this? Us Americans don't like it when other countries do it to us, right? Maybe let's all stop with this bullshit, huh?
A Russian ship docked in Cape Town last year carrying armaments destined for the “War On Terror - Mozambique Edition.” The US embassy pretended it didn’t have access to that intelligence, and accused the SA government of (supposedly) supplying Putin with weaponry. The rapidity with which these accusations was championed by white supremacist political organisations (including the second largest political party) made it all even more suspicious. We literally had people here (you can imagine which kind) calling for the US to regime change us.
The incident raised more questions than anything - but the white liberal media here in South Africa didn’t bother with those… it merely seemed interested in using the entire affair to attack the ANC. It was pretty clear to people here that there was something bigger going on than merely one measly little Russian ship - and, personally, I suspect that the ANC’s “sudden” concern over what is going on in Gaza is a retaliation against the US for this. They sure as hell didn’t have these concerns when they allowed Israel to buy up South African corporations left, right and centre…
The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.
I want to see an investigation into when the Biden Adminstration knew this was going on. Most of the time possible presidential canadities get briefed on affairs.
Did Trump’s administration tell Biden’s (can’t remember if Biden was being debriefed)? If Trump didn’t tell anyone then he should face international charges.
They also usually have two months of transition planning, which didn’t happen since Trump wasn’t planning on leaving. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Trump era shit continued a while into the Biden administration simply because it took time to get caught up on it all and shut it down.
As an American, I am ashamed that my country’s government does acts of pure evil like this. I’m sorry rest of the world, I wish my voice was more than but a whisper while on a St Patrick’s Day bar crawl in Boston.
In my honest opinion whoever proposed this, approved this, and ultimately executed this should be persecuted for something akin to shouting fire leading to a stampede and deaths.
Actions like this are exactly why we probably shouldn’t have a completely opaque society.
General Jonathan Braga was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 2021, months after the new Biden administration was informed about and canceled the program.
He followed orders and ran an effective disinformation campaign.
Think of the Pentagon as a bureaucracy that just does what they’re told. If the President says they should invade a country X, they draw up the plans, figure out the logistics, and invade country X. If the President says invade country Y, same thing, just with country Y instead of country X. They follow orders, it’s kinda a big thing in the military.
Trump ordered a disinformation campaign in the Philippines, so this guy ran an effective disinformation campaign in the Philippines. If the President wanted to run a disinformation campaign in Russia this would be a guy they’d want to do it.
Follows orders and is good at his job, that’s the criteria needed for a promotion.
Well sorry to break it to you, there’s no international law making disinformation campaigns illegal. It was a bad order to be sure, but not an illegal order.
Soldiers are responsible when following an illegal order. When it’s a bad order, then it’s the person giving the order that’s responsible.
It’s just how military works. They have to follow the law, but not your personal morality. I mean what’s the morality around killing a person because they’re wearing a different uniform? Do you think that’s fine while a disinformation campaigns are crossing the line?
It is what it is. War is a much more horrible thing than a disinformation campaign. So let’s just make war illegal, problem solved!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
Whether Russian, Iranian and Chinese disinformation campaigns against America are legitimate or not isn’t all that relevant. They’re happening and will continue to happen regardless of how legitimate anyone considers them to be.
Eventually there may be treaties countries will agree to stop doing disinformation campaigns. But Russia, China, and Iran aren’t going to sign on to these agreements if they’re the only ones with the capability to conduct disinformation campaigns. Why would they give up their capabilities to disrupt their adversaries if their adversaries didn’t have the capability to disrupt their countries with disinformation? Gotta have Mutually Assured Disinformation before you can get everyone to agree to stop these activities.
Whats funny is the poster here was very likely part of said disinformation campaign. This is an attempt to distract from the moral wrong excuted here with the cover of legality. No laws existed that made the Holocaust illegal yet the post laws and trails are valid and necessary. The acts here should be seen as a form of biological warfare, a crime against humanity with all the reprehensible disgust and reasonable punishment due to those who did not stand up and walk away.
Following orders is not just how it works and the criminality of following illegal orders has been established many times.
This is a crime, regardless of the laws today, regardless of my feelings, it is never acceptable to attempt to infect others with a deadly biological agent directly or indirectly.
Is it a crime to kill a person simply because they’re wearing a different uniform from you?
That’s what the military does, right? They kill people for wearing a different uniform. What’s the morality around that? Is it more or less moral to lie to someone than it is to kill them?
We can debate the morality of the existence of militaries all we want. But people in power in places like Russia aren’t having that debate. They will use their capabilities to expand their power in absence of a force to oppose them. We need military capabilities and that we means we need to have people willing to kill people for wearing a different uniform. God forbid they might lie to people sometimes, right? Killing people we’re fine with, but disinformation crosses the line!
I’m 100% willing to claim that. The expected end result of this is fewer civilians taking the Chinese vaccine (with likely spillover for other vaccine efforts) and thus more disease deaths. That’s a pretty solid justification for war crimes.
Just like “shooting a gun” isn’t a war crime. It’s not the act that’s a crime, it’s the expected results and the victims.
You’re sanitizing this as a “disinformation campaign”, stripping away that the target was civilians and the likely result deaths. If the president ordered a general (this isn’t some nobody private with no agency) to implement a plan of bombings against civilian targets, that isn’t just “a bombing campaign” and following orders is not correct.
In my honest opinion whoever proposed this, approved this, and ultimately executed this should be persecuted for something akin to shouting fire leading to a stampede and deaths.
That would be Donald J. Trump. It’s in the article.
We knew he was bad at managing the pandemic and we know he was bad at foreign policy. This was a two for the price of one deal.
I don’t care if they are considered our enemies; that’s fucked up. Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people. Not the culture. Not the land itself. Doing shit that harms the average person is incredibly vile.
Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people.
Have you noticed how all those nukes the US government maintains don’t target governments but population centres instead? The mass-slaughter of civilians have always been the US way - this time, they just did it with misinformation.
Didn’t say you were… that’s not the point. The point is that the US has always treated civilian populations as perfectly expendable - to be kind of honest, I’m not even sure they don’t see the US population in the same way, either.
They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center. In the 50’s and 60’s missile targetting was shit so they had megaton yield bombs to make sure they got the bases. Nowadays they have lower yield bombs so they can have more bombs that specifically target bases.
It’s no use targeting population centers as those bombs could be used instead to cripple them militarily. It’s just that no country would have a good day if nukes went off anywhere near them.
They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center.
That’s exactly the excuse they used to justify every aerially-delivered atrocity from Hamburg to Hanoi. Britain was routinely doing it in the middle-east nearly a decade before the Nazis did it at Guernica.
If you don’t want to believe me, you can believe Curtiss Le May himself.
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.
The mass-slaughter of civilians was the point then, it’s the point now - the nuclear ballistic missile is simply the logical conclusion to this. It literally allows for mass-murder at the push of a button.
You need to stop confusing the propaganda with the actual reasons.
Maybe the real conspiracies were the ones the DoD made along the way lmao.
Seriously though, I still remember people clowning on sinovac as if having access to a 60% efficacy vaccine was worse than having none at all because hurrrr durrr china copy cat manufacturing.
reuters.com
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