Western Powers Persuaded Ukraine President Zelenskyy To Pull The Plug On A Peace Treaty In 2022

Boris Johnson personally received £50,000 from individuals with links to the Grenfell cladding disaster.
Property developers responsible for flats covered in dangerous cladding donated £2.5million to the Conservative Party after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, shocking analysis published by The Times in 2021 revealed.
The deaths of all 72 people in the 2017 blaze in west London were avoidable and had been preceded by “decades of failure” by government, other authorities and the building industry, inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report concluded.
The tower block was covered in combustible products because of the “systematic dishonesty” of firms who made and sold the cladding and insulation, the report said, with cladding company Arconic and insulation firms Kingspan and Celotex coming in for particularly heavy criticism.
Boris Johnson himself personally received £50,000 from individuals with links to the cladding debacle.
( The London Economic, 06.09.2024 )  ..  thelondoneconomic.com

Britain’s Nuclear Arsenal Permanently Dependent On The U.S.
The UK Labour Party has reinforced the “special relationship” with Washington by agreeing to make Britain’s nuclear arsenal permanently dependent on the U.S.
In one of its first, but little-noticed foreign policy moves, Labour has amended the Eisenhower-era 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) that is crucial to Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system.
Officials deleted a long-standing sunset clause that required it be renewed every ten years.
All references to an “expiry date” have been removed “to make the entirety of the MDA enduring, securing continuing cooperation with the U.S.”, according to a memorandum signed by defence secretary John Healey.
( Richard Norton-Taylor, 03.09.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

U.S. President John F. Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published by the National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.  Kennedy pressured the government of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims.
Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalise inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On 30 May 1961, Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in Manhattan to discuss the bilateral relationship and Middle East issues.
However, a central (and indeed the first) issue in their meeting was the Israeli nuclear program, about which President Kennedy was most concerned.
According to a draft record of their discussion, which has never been cited, and is published here for the first time, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” and “some words were missed.”
He emphasised the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project.
Nevertheless the note taker, Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot, believed that he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power” and also say that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.”
Ben-Gurion tacitly acknowledged that the Dimona reactor had a military potential, or so Talbot believed he had heard.
The final U.S. version of the MemCon retained the sentence about plutonium but did not include the language about a “pilot” plant and  “weapons capacity.”

The differences between the two versions suggest the difficulty of preparing accurate records of meetings.
But whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, President Kennedy was never wholly satisfied with the insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project.
Neither were U.S. intelligence professionals.
( Avner Cohen and William Burr, 21.04.2016 )  ..  wilsoncenter.org

Western Powers Persuaded Ukraine President Zelenskyy To Pull The Plug On A Peace Treaty In 2022 That Would Have Ended The Conflict.
Victoria Nuland, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the principal architects of the Biden administration’s Russia policy, has now opined on what is perhaps the foggiest episode in a war distinguished by a nearly impenetrable kind of diplomatic opacity: the April 2022 Istanbul peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.
Furthermore she acknowledges that there was a deal on the table and that Western powers didn’t like conditions that would have limited Ukraine’s military arsenal, lending credence to the theory that Ukraine’s supporters had a hand in ultimately scuttling it.
To be sure, neither the topic nor the content of Nuland’s comments is new.
She is but the latest in a cavalcade of high-profile insiders, including former Israeli Prime Minister Nafatli Bennett and Ukrainian politician Davyd Arakhamia, whose testimony has shed light on the external pressures possibly informing the Zelenskyy government’s fateful decision to pull the plug on Turkish-brokered talks surrounding a draft treaty that would have ended the Ukraine war.
( Mark Episkopos, 10.09.2024 )  ..  responsiblestatecraft.org

It Was No Accident When Rachel Corrie Was Crushed To Death By Israeli Bulldozer.
Twenty-one years ago, an Israeli soldier drove an 80,000-pound (26,287kg) bulldozer over a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington.
Her name was Rachel Corrie, and she was part of an international team of peace activists who had volunteered to protect Palestinian homes from demolition by illegal Israeli settlers.

Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah.
Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border.
Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months.
Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.

This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.
Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse.
( Benay Blend, 16.03.2024 )  ..  aljazeera.com

The UK Government Prefer War Over Peace In Ukraine-Russia Conflict.
UK Defence Secretary John Healey announced that the UK “will continue to step up our support to help Ukraine achieve victory” in its war with Russia.
Both he and foreign secretary David Lammy have repeatedly said “Labour will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes to win”.
When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukrainian forces conducted an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Healey praised the move as “bold”, saying it put Russian president Vladimir Putin “under pressure”.
Equipment used in that offensive included UK-supplied Challenger tanks sent to Ukraine.
Prime minister Keir Starmer has also told Zelensky he is willing to allow Ukraine’s use of UK-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia.
Despite Labour’s public relations about “change” during the general election, Lammy has consistently said that “with Labour there will be no change in the UK’s financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Ukraine”.
The consequences of this are hard to overstate.
Since Russia’s invasion, inflicting untold misery on millions of Ukrainians, UK governments have been overwhelmingly focused on one thing – “winning” the war.
Yet one thing Whitehall has conspicuously avoided is making serious attempts at promoting a compromise peace that would end the fighting.
( Mark Curtis, 09.09.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Right-Wingers Funded By Israel Supporters Used Anti-Semitism Scam To Discredit Jeremy Corbyn.
An extract from a new book by a centrist journalist, published in the Guardian, shows the Labour right finally admitting – now it has ‘won’ – what the left knew all along: the party right was deliberately and knowingly sabotaging the party’s electoral prospects when Jeremy Corbyn was its leader.
Not because it thought Labour was unelectable, but because it knew he could win and feared that this would prevent it ‘renewing’ the party in Tony Blair’s old image.
And it admits that Morgan McSweeney’s efforts were funded by Israel-supporting multi-millionaires and organised by a man who ‘despised’ Corbyn’s politics – which were for free healthcare and education, social justice, an end to poverty and taking back the nation’s hard-won and hard-built treasures like the NHS, utilities, rail and mail from the privatisers stripping them bare for profit, and recognition, freedom and justice for the oppressed Palestinians.
The party right, funded by hedge-fund managers and supporters of Israel, was deliberately looking to prevent a Labour government and used a whipped-up moral panic about a non-existent ‘antisemitism crisis’ to do it.
( SKWAWKBOX (SW), 16.09.2024 )  ..  skwawkbox.org

The BBC is facing questions about links between a member of its governing board and the Jewish Chronicle after the newspaper was forced to retract a series of articles alleged to have contained fabricated quotes from Israeli officials.
Robbie Gibb, who also sits on an influential BBC editorial standards committee, led a consortium which rescued the newspaper from insolvency in 2020 and was the only director of the company that owns it until last month.
Gibb’s role at the BBC is under scrutiny after the Jewish Chronicle published and then retracted stories by a freelancer reporter, Elon Perry, which included explosive revelations from a document supposedly discovered in Gaza, which allegedly detailed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s plans to escape the Palestinian enclave with Israeli hostages taken during the October 7 attack.
After the Israeli army stated that it had no knowledge of such a document and several Israeli outlets began to question Perry’s identity and professional background, a number of high-profile columnists, including the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, announced that they would no longer write for the paper.
In a letter sent to Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons and posted on social media, Freedland said the episode had brought “great disgrace” on the paper, and suggested that a lack of transparency about its ownership had created issues of accountability.
( Simon Hooper and Oscar Rickett, 18.09.2024 )  ..  middleeasteye.net