Compelled to disobey

US service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the US Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the US Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.
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Soldiers, not lawyers

But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust US law as useful guidance.

Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law. Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the US.

“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”

Several emphasized the US political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming US civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.”

Still, the percentage of respondents who said they would disobey specific orders – such as torture – is lower than the percentage of respondents who recognized the responsibility to disobey in general.

~ Full article…

Businessman Salinas Price, currently 93 years old, is a self-confessed tax evader—that’s why he created Elektra—and strikebreaker, but also a rabid anti-communist who boasts of having financed the University Movement of Renewal Orientation (MURO), one of the shock groups of the secret organization of Los Tecos and El Yunque, as he confesses in his memoir My Years with Elektra, in which he boasts of all the far-right initiatives, some Nazi, that he created and sponsored against the left in Mexico.
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MURO & The CIA

Salinas Price doesn’t say so in his book, but his adventures were associated with the CIA, because his friend Navarro Vázquez was a prominent agent of the agency, just when he was the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE), a private organization that he himself founded in 1953, and which came to gather 300 members, including Salinas Price, whose steering committee included representatives of the upper banking and industrial bourgeoisie of Mexico linked to foreign capital.
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A CIA report dated June 7, 1964, signed by the head of the “Station” in Mexico, Winston Scott, details the background, funding and objectives of “Project LIHUFF”, with the agency headed by Navarro Vázquez.

“(The IIES) was founded in 1953 by a group of Mexican businessmen to promote the principles of free enterprise. Since then, it has established numerous contacts and relationships of influence, and has been involved in various anti-communist and other activities. It organized meetings and various types of congresses where it focused on the dangers of communism; it published books, pamphlets, and brochures on communism, as well as the dangers of economic socialism. It organized a student group (MURO), established and maintained contacts in the university, economic, and business fields in Latin America; it significantly boosted the coverage in the press of topics related to private enterprise and the communist threat, and it amassed an archive of basic data on events and individuals linked to communism and socialism that would be difficult for any other private group in Mexico to match.”

In that same document, when referring to the “background” of LIHUFF, it points out that this project “and its sponsors are considered, in the Mexican scenario, as far-right conservatives, however, in the PBPRIME forum (United States cryptometer) they would be considered more as centrists.”

The LIHUFF Project by Rudolph Wichtrich and Navarro Vázquez was highly valued by the CIA in the United States, “Headquarters”, in the context of the anti-communism of the early sixties, in the midst of the Cold War, and especially to exert influence on the government of López Mateos:

“The importance of a group like this, noisy and combative, existing in Mexico is not valued in absolute terms, but in relative terms. As Headquarters is aware, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in power is essentially a delicate reflector of the many political currents and pressures that exist in Mexico. During elections, as well as in appointments and decisions, the PRI weighs its political actions very carefully. When radical leftists are hesitant and active, then decisions tend to be weighted in their favor and oriented according to their viewpoints. In other words, to have some counterweight, even between extremes, the right must be as noisy and active as the left. This is essentially where the Station sees the value of the LIHUFF mechanism. It does not intend for Mexico to embrace LIHUFF’s philosophy or objectives in whole, or even in large part: It seeks for LIHUFF to exert an influence and restrain Mexico from succumbing to the pressures and demands of the radical left. If it weren’t for a few like LIHUFF-2 (Navarro Vázquez’s IISE) and Miguel Alemán Valdés are mobilized through organizations of this type; the political center of gravity would shift unchecked toward the radical left, beyond what the policies of ODYOKE (the United States government) could oversee. This is the only specific value that the Station has seen, and continues to see, in LIHUFF’s activity.”

~ Full article…

The Pentagon announced Nov. 24 that it was investigating Sen. Mark Kelly for “serious allegations of misconduct” after the Arizona Democrat called for U.S. troops to refuse unlawful orders.

Officials are reviewing whether Kelly was involved in a breach of military law, according to a post on X from the Department of War, formally the Department of Defense.

Kelly was among a group of six Democratic lawmakers who put out a video directed at service members telling them they have the right not to obey orders they believe to be illegal.

“A thorough review” of the allegations was initiated to determine further actions against Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy captain, “which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the post reads.

~ Full article…

The shift in American Evangelical attitudes is compounded by the rise to prominence of non-Western Evangelicals, who account for 70 percent of the global Evangelical community. These Evangelicals may share a belief in End Times but do not see that as a reason for supporting Israel.

For many American Evangelicals, the End Times will be marked by Jews once again gathering in the Promised Land, where they will experience persecution similar to the Tribulations. The Evangelicals believe that Jews who survive the persecution and recognize Jesus as their Messiah will be saved.

“Theological emphasis is shifting. We younger Evangelicals interpret the teachings of Jesus as emphasizing compassion, peace, and justice for all, rather than a political alignment with a specific nation,” said a young Evangelical activist.

~ Full article…

So the NY Times starts out by saying, “Yeah, the justification for this horror show isn’t working at all but it isn’t important anymore and we have a new reason we’re trying out and the old one was totally real anyway and ignore your lying eyes.” Stephens says the drug charges are of course true anyway — even though they totally aren’t. Even the DEA admitted:

“…about 8% of U.S.-bound cocaine departed through a ‘Caribbean corridor,’ primarily from Venezuela. …[And] Drug traffickers in South America do not produce or traffic fentanyl.”

So zero fentanyl comes through VZ and practically no cocaine comes through VZ and other reporting shows that even less than 8% of the cocaine is actually produced in VZ. So VZ has as much to do with the drug trade as my great aunt does. (She dabbles but it’s just a hobby.)

Adding insult to injury, the former green beret behind the failed Venezuela invasion plot during the first Trump White House has stated recently that the CIA engineered the so-called ‘Cartel de los Soles’ decades ago. The Cartel of The Suns is the pretend totally-made-up cartel that Maduro supposedly heads. (The US and the CIA love playing pretend times.)

So what is this NEW reason why the NY Times says the US must invade VZ?

“…the larger challenge posed by Maduro’s regime is that it is both an importer and exporter of instability.”

This line of thought should make everyone choke on their coffee. The US or the US media calling any other country an “exporter of instability” is akin to Steve Bannon calling another human “problematic” or Prince Andrew calling someone “sleazy”.

The US is by far the greatest cause of instability in the world. The US has been at war 93% of the years it has existed — 230 of 247 years.

And believe it or not, those numbers don’t even begin to include the endless list of CIA coup’ings, assassinations, color revolutions, economic wars, etc.

Stephens then tries to justify this woefully unhinged statement by saying:

“An importer, because the regime’s close economic and strategic ties to China, Russia and Iran give America’s enemies a significant foothold in the Americas…”

Ummm, please point to the time China or Russia or Iran has launched an assault on the US from their nonexistent bases in Venezuela.

~ Full article…

hat the “Genesis Mission” is literally supposed to be:

We’re being promised a sort of AI and automation super-platform for the federal government. Based on my read of the program laid out in this order, the Secretary of Energy—fracking mogul Chris Wright—is supposed to unify all Department of Energy datasets with those of all federal agencies, and use those to create “scientific foundation models.” Presumably that means the government’s own LLMs, or other LXMs used for scientific research.

Then our federal government is going to use its new AI models to build programs that “automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” We’re getting set-it-and-forget-it federal science, in other words. The AI does the research, and a person can just come along and scoop up the breakthroughs like cream from a milk bucket.

~ Full article…