(WMR)—Pentagon sources have told WMR that they are alarmed at the rapid pace at which the Obama White House has moved to increase tensions with China so quickly on the heels of a breakdown in U.S. relations with Russia.
Just a few weeks after the Treasury Department announced directed sanctions against senior officials of the Russian government, as well as Russian corporations and banks, the Justice Department criminally indicted five military officers of the cyber-war division of the Third Department of the People’s Liberation of Army of China, Unit 61398, for hacking into the computer systems of Alcoa, Westinghouse, U.S. Steel, the United Steel Workers’ Union, Solar World AG, and Allegheny Technologies and stealing trade secrets. The indictments are the first ever brought by the U.S. government for criminal hacking by officials of a foreign government. The action not only places U.S. citizens, including U.S. military and intelligence personnel, in jeopardy for possible retaliatory indictments and possible arrest by China but also may result in Russia-like sanctions being placed on Chinese government officials and businesses if the five Chinese officials on the FBI’s “Wanted List” are not handed over by Chinese authorities to the U.S. The five Chinese military officers are Wang Dong, Sun Kailiang, Wen Xinyu, Huang Zhenyu, and Gu Chunhui.
Obama, according to Pentagon sources, has brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to their lowest level since early on in the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s. The Pentagon appears to have been largely bypassed in recent White House decisions that would increase military tensions between Washington and both Moscow and Beijing. The decision to impose tough economic sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine crisis and the indictment of the five PLA officers came just hours prior to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s heralded trip to Beijing, where he inked a major pipeline deal with China and other agreements bringing the two Eurasian economic and political giants closer together. The move by Obama against China also comes after Obama’s saber-rattling tour of Asia designed to put China on notice that it is the target of Obama’s military “pivot to Asia.”
Obama has moved U.S. forces into confrontational positions with Russia’s military in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. In addition, mercenary forces with the firm Academi, formerly Blackwater and Xe Services, have been reported fighting alongside Ukrainian military and neo-Nazi militia forces in eastern Ukraine. The CIA, using proxies within the non-governmental organization community, has began agitating against the Putin government from within the ranks of feminist, LGBT, and anti-conscription pressure groups in Russia.
But first and foremost, Obama has decided to replace governments friendly to China in Southeast Asia with ones more hostile to China and friendlier to the United States. No sooner had the CIA and its Thai allies used judicial contrivances close to the Thai royal family to oust the democratically-elected prime minister of Thailand, Yingluck Shinawatra, from power but the CIA’s historical dirty fingerprints were found in a catastrophic plane crash in Laos. Top Lao government officials, including Defense Minister and deputy premier Defense Minister Douangchay Phichit, were killed when their Ukrainian-made AN-74TK-300 aircraft crashed while en route from Vientiane, the Lao capital to Xiangkhoung near the Plain of Jars, an area not heard of by most Americans since the days of the John Kennedy administration. Also killed was Public Security Minister Thongbane Sengaphone, Vientiane Governor Sukhan Mahalad, and Lao Communist Party Central Committee Secretary and head of the Committee’s Commission for Propaganda and Training Cheuang Sombounkhanh.
Almost immediately, CIA media outlets, some connected to Radio Free Asia, began reporting on an inevitable power struggle among the secretive Lao Politburo. The Voice of America began interviewing “experts” who maintained that the Thai military was merely fulfilling its traditional role of government busting based on the arcane Martial Law Act 1914. President Obama, who has used the 1917 Espionage Act, more than any previous president combined, to stifle critics with jail terms has obviously discovered a country with a draconian act that rivals that of the 1917 American law.
The crash was fortuitous for the Obama administration. Naval and coast guard vessels of China and Vietnam had clashed over disputed waters in the South China Sea. Laos has maintained a steady neutrality between Vietnam and China, the two Communist allies of Laos.
The death of Douangchay, a powerful member of the Politburo of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, the Communist party that has ruled Laos since 1975, was expected to set off a power struggle between pro-China and pro-Vietnamese factions within the party. Apparently, the Obama administration decided to go for broke after successfully deposing Yingluck, who is of Thai-Chinese heritage and maintained friendly relations with China. Somewhere deep within the bowels of the Obama national security apparatus is a Presidential Finding authorizing an operation against the Lao government aircraft.
Douangchay was due to attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defense Ministers meeting in Myanmar to discuss regional security issues with his Vietnamese, Thai, and other ASEAN counterparts. The “constitutional coup” in Thailand coupled with the wiping out of the senior security ranks of the Lao government placed the ASEAN defense ministers’ conference into a quandary.
Douangchay was seen as close to Russia, Vietnam, and China while steering a middle course between the three. His death opens the possibility of a bloc more friendly to the United States and Vietnam coming to the helm in Laos.
No sooner had Laos recovered the bodies of the senior Laotian officials from the crash site, Thailand’s largely U.S.-trained and -supplied military announced they were imposing martial law in Thailand, effectively ending the rule of the democratically-elected government, headed by acting Prime Minister Niwatthamrong Boonsongphaisan since Yingluck’s ouster by a politically-motivated Thai court intent on throwing the populist-based Pheu Thai Party out of power.
Yingluck anf her exiled brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, himself ousted in a military coup in 2006, are supported by Thailand’s rural-based “Red Shirt” movement. U.S. intelligence contends that the Red Shirts include a number of Communists supported by China through Laos. The suspicious Lao plane crash followed by the Thai military coup have increased U.S. pressure on China’s influence in Southeast Asia.
Obama’s “pivot to Asia” has seen the Philippines invite the U.S. military to re-establish bases in their country, including one in western Palawan island at Oyster Bay. There are also discussions with Vietnam to permit the U.S. Navy to return to Cam Ranh Bay in southern Vietnam. Obama is the first president since Richard Nixon to preside over a massive U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia.
Inn February, WMR reported the following:
Today, Obama has given the green light to CIA operatives throughout Thailand to unseat the Shinawatras from power as a message to Beijing that the United States is reclaiming its long tutelage over Thailand. WMR’s sources along the Thai-Burmese and Thai-Laotian border report and increase in small arms shipments from covert U.S. arms caches in Thailand and Cambodia to the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. The CIA and neocon planners within the Obama administration see Yunnan as the “ground zero” for a major operation against the government of the People’s Republic of China using disenchanted non-Han Chinese minorities who will be bolstered by an outbreak of anti-Han violence by Taliban-armed Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province and Indian- and Japanese-armed Tibetan rebels that will spring into action along the Tibetan-Indian and Tibetan-Nepali border.
One of the major reasons the CIA has decided to launch a coup against the Shinawatras is Yingluck’s government’s thumbs up to a 120-miles per hour rail line that will link Yunnan province with Laos, Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore. Such a rail link will extend Chinese influence over Southeast Asia and put an end to American influence over the region.
Since our February report, WMR has learned that the situation among local tribes on the Lao-Chinese and Burmese-Chinese border is growing more tense with foreign agents increasingly being cited in the region. With the advent of the right-wing Indian nationalist government of Narendra Modi in India, the CIA and the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) will have a green light to step up clandestine operations against China along the Indian-Tibetan and Burmese-Chinese borders. The shadowy Texas-based and Israeli-connected intelligence firm Stratfor has reportedly been providing the Obama administration with strategy advice on handling China in the current South China Sea conflict over maritime zones and islands. Some of this advice calls for the U.S. to establish a military presence in Vietnam. Any such move would bring the United States back into a new Vietnam War, but one not between North and South Vietnam but one between united Vietnam and China. Obama could also be the first American president to welcome home U.S. military body bags from Vietnam since Richard Nixon.
Vietnam had to order recent demonstrations against China over the South China Sea conflict tamped down because they were getting out of control and threatening stability in the country. WMR has learned that the CIA has been using Vietnamese-American citizens to stir up, George Soros “rent-a-mob-style,” anti-Chinese demonstrators, complete with protest signs in English, on the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
The CIA’s machinations in Laos and Thailand, and, shortly, in India, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma, are and soon will be a response to this week’s summit in Shanghai of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, or CICA, started by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, an ally of Putin. Nazarbayev and Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the summit in Shanghai that also saw the following nations in attendance: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Palestine, Republic of Korea, Russia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Absent were Laos, for obvious reasons, but also Obama’s main allies Japan and the Philippines. Obama is clearly trying to re-create the Cold War-era Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an Asian version of NATO that collapsed following the U.S. defeat in the Indochina war.
By ratcheting up tensions with Russia and China, and increasing bellicosity toward North Korea, Obama is the most war-bent president for the Asian region since Johnson and Nixon. However, Obama is much worse than either Johnson or Nixon. These two Cold War presidents knew how to keep the CIA in check. Obama, on the other hand, was psy-oped first in post-CIA coup Indonesia and mentored by CIA handlers ever since. Obama, like a programmable android, does the CIA’s every bidding.
With John Brennan, an Obama control officer, in charge at the CIA, the world may soon be facing World War III: a global conflict between the United States and the forces of global capitalism on one hand and Russia, China, and their allies on the other. It is doubtful that such a conflict would not turn nuclear at some point. So “duck and cover” everyone.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2014 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
I wondered about that bomb blast in China also. Still shouldn’t attribute everything to Uncle Sam maybe he isn’t as all present and all powerful as all that but maybe he is. Whatever the case he is against history and the decolonization process will not be halted even headed up by a president of color.
This time Droneman has bitten off more than he can chew. Russia and China are busy doing business deals amongst themselves and soon with other countries. They are ignoring playground bully US. Since China practically owns the US (almost everything we buy is made over there) it’s a bit foolhardy to pick a fight with them. After a while, all this warmongering ceases to be profitable.
China and Russia’s rise to economic parity with the USA are inevitable given the size of their economies and the wealth of resources at their disposal. It is therefore a futile endeavour for the USA to try to stop their rise and a much better proposition for the USA to cooperate with them in fostering a system of international trade that is not based on the forced appropriation and subsequent monopolization of resources by western corporations which, of necessity, engenders a policy of trying to keep the rest of the world underdeveloped; spreading global wealth more equitably is much better than concentrating it in the hands of Western investors and if only this realisation would dawn on the bankers and CEO’s then all the dangerous ratcheting up of tensions could be avoided.