Unlike with Russiagate, there is little coverage, let alone outcry, in the Western legacy media.
Remember when legions of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers and opinion-makers accused Russia of meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, and the storm of outrage it sparked? Yet after three years of digging, the Special Counsel’s investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election.”
Russiagate was ultimately much ado about nothing, a largely manufactured storm in a teacup. But the damage inflicted was immense, as the late, great scholar of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics Stephen F Cohen warned in his prescient article, “The Real Costs of Russiagate”, published in The Nation in March 2019:
Nearly three years of Russiagate’s toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy—damage done not by an alleged “Trump-Putin axis” but by Russsigate’s perpetrators themselves…
Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin “attacked our elections” and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere—national, state, and local. If true, or even suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to “secure our elections from hostile powers”— a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems—can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process…
Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized “Putin’s Russia,” thwarted Trump’s necessary attempts to “cooperate with Russia” as somehow “treasonous,” criminalized détente thinking and “inappropriate contacts with Russia”—in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war.
Fast forward to today, seven years after that article’s publication, NATO is trapped in a proxy forever war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine that threatens to escalate into a regional war or perhaps even a nuclear war. And it is the US and Israel, not Russia, that are meddling, often openly, sometimes brazenly, in the electoral and political processes of democratic countries around the world. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is little outcry in the mainstream media.
In the space of just 12 hours on Sunday night, the Trump administration intervened directly and overtly in the political and electoral processes of two supposedly sovereign nations: the United Kingdom, a fellow five-eye intelligence partner, and Colombia, once considered Washington’s “Israel in South America”.
In the case of the UK, Trump posted a tweet confirming that Keir Starmer was going to resign — hours before the prime minister finally fell on his sword. Piers Morgan described the tweet as the “ultimate humiliation” for a totally isolated Starmer:
This is almost a fitting end for a man who essentially served as a sleeper cell agent for both US and Zionist interests. As Declassified UK uncovered in 2023, five years after the fact, Starmer had joined the highly secretive Washington-based Trilateral Commission between 2017-18 while he was Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, becoming one of only two serving British MPs to have been a member, according to available records.
Labour leader Keir Starmer was photographed with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo had said in 2019 that the Trump administration “will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. Which is precisely what they did, with Starmer’s assistance, as @zei_squirrel outlined in a tweet yesterday:
But the job was not yet finished, points out zei_squirrel:
Corbyn remained popular among the Labour mass base. So he put himself forward as a candidate for leader to replace Corbyn as a[n] orthodox Corbynite. Some may be cynical, [Starmer thought,] like that damn squirrel on twitter, but I know what to do to ease peoples’ minds: I will make 10 firm concrete socialist left pledges, from nationalization to abolishing tuition fees, and I will put my signature underneath each of them and vow to be a “competent” version of Corbyn that will win the election and implement the same policy platform…
Exactly as I and some others said he would do, [Starmer] immediately began ripping up the “ten pledges” he made and that he was elected on. And then he began waging an all-out total war on the entire socialist left in the party, including Corbyn himself who was expelled for “anti-Semitism”, meaning for Starmer’s Israel lobby masters. And he revealed what he always already was, a neocon neoliberal Blairite Zionist Israel First… degenerate war criminal.
Starmer’s two-year tenure as prime minister has been an abject disaster for both the British Labour Party and the British people. His accomplishments include scaling back the ancient right of trial by jury, launching a full-frontal attack on lawful speech, approving the nationwide deployment of facial recognition systems, implementing digital identity through the back door and, worst of all, lending unwavering UK support to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and beyond.
Starmer’s downfall, however humiliating, is not quite a fitting enough end for a senior human rights lawyer who facilitated some of the worst war crimes of this century. Like his mentor, Tony Blair, who wielded arguably more influence over Starmer’s relatively short-lived government than anyone, what Starmer deserves is to be arrested and frog-marched to the Hague so that he can be charged and judged in accordance with the Nuremberg principles.
All of this, however, should not take away from the fact that Trump once again intervened directly and overtly in the domestic political processes of the UK, a supposed allied nation and intelligence partner, at a very delicate moment in its history. While Trump 2.0 has made a habit of meddling in other nation’s business, that habit is now getting out of control — especially on the American continent.
Washington’s recent electoral meddling in Colombia is a case in point. First, Trump issued two endorsements for the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in the weeks leading up to the run-off election. Then, on Sunday night US Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated De la Espriella on his electoral triumph before the results of the preliminary count had even been announced.
As Drop Site News notes, “Rubio’s early recognition has drawn criticism from observers who argue it seeks to shape international perception and build consensus before any official results are made public.”
Rubio’s tweet was quickly retweeted by Stephen Miller, one of the main driving forces behind Trump’s Shield of the Americas. The initiative has drawn inevitable comparisons with Operation Condor, the US-coordinated campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the late 70s and early 80s.
Colombia’s outgoing President Gustavo Petro has alleged that Israel also interfered directly in the election, citing alleged irregularities in the country’s vote counting process. Again, from Drop Site News:
With preliminary results showing 49.3% for Abelardo de la Espriella and 49% for Gustavo Bolívar Cepeda, Petro noted that neither candidate can be declared president until the official scrutiny process is completed, which under Colombia’s electoral system determines the final result.
- He cited changes to the national registry’s server IP addresses, which he said indicate the electoral software may have been compromised.
- Petro claimed that “the only entity in the world capable” of carrying out the alleged cyber interference is “the state of Israel.”
Petro alleged several additional irregularities in posts on X, including:
- Lawyers being blocked from entering the main vote counting center in Bogotá.
- Unsigned E14 polling forms being uploaded by election authorities.
He called for: An independent forensic audit of the electoral software. A recount of all polling stations. Judicial oversight of the scrutiny process.
For the moment, these accusations are (as yet) unproven. However, there are certainly grounds for concern about the electoral processes, especially given De la Espriella’s fine margin of victory — the smallest difference in the history of presidential runoffs in Colombia, according to Telesur:
- Colombia’s Command, Control, Communications & Computing Centre (C4) networks have heavily integrated Israeli defence technology and systems, particularly through the Israeli company Elbit Systems. As the renowned Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife notes, Israel has long dominated Colombia’s cybersecurity and telecommunications systems, just as it has in Mexico.
- The company in charge of the counting software for the elections, Thomas Greg & Sons, has a long history of dubious practices. The company, owned offshore by the Bautista brothers, convicted fraudsters in the US, botched Colombian elections in 2014 and 2022, when 400,000 votes for Petro’s party went missing. The company’s vice-president, Camilo Bautista, was sentenced to nine years in prison in the United States in 1989 for committing what was until then one of the largest bank frauds in US history.
- The role of overseas votes. As in Peru, it appears that overseas voters have played a decisive role in awarding the election to the far-right, Trump-endorsed candidate. Petro and others have suggested that massive electoral fraud was committed in these votes, particularly US-based consulates.
It is impossible to know to what extent fraud has played a part in the victories of both Keiko Fujimori in Peru and De la Espriella in Colombia. What we do know is that both elections took place under unprecedented pressure and interference from the US.
Further, Petro’s allegations that Israel tampered with Colombia’s national voting registry come just weeks after French authorities tied the Israeli tech firm BlackCore to digital interference campaigns targeting elections featuring leftist, pro-Palestine candidates in France, Scotland, New York City, Angola, and Togo. French investigators have not identified who commissioned the operations…
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Nick Corbishley 