If the US gets away with this voiding of any meaningful Russian response, then it will feel free to escalate up to and including directly confronting Russia on the ground in Ukraine, he writes
Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, responded to the U.S.’s decision to seize a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic for allegedly violating Washington-imposed sanctions, and quoted the old Arab saying, “It’s time to punch the camel in the nose.”
The seizure of the Russian tanker is the first time the US has exercised its rogue behavior in direct conflict with a major power. If the US gets away with this voiding of any meaningful Russian response, then it will feel free to escalate up to and including directly confronting Russia on the ground in Ukraine. The camel has stuck his nose under the tent. Russia needs to smack the camel and get it to back off. Now. If it doesn’t, the camel will be in the tent before you know it. This means WW3. The end of the world.
U.S. European Command posted on X that the M/V Bella 1 was seized for violations “in the North Atlantic pursuant to a warrant issued by a U.S. federal court after being tracked by USCGC Munro.” (The ship has been renamed ‘Marinera.’)
One U.S. official told The New York Times that the Coast Guard “boarded the Russian tanker after a roughly two-week pursuit.”
The Russian Transport Ministry said on Wednesday: “Today around 3:00 p.m. Moscow time, in open seas outside the territorial waters of any state, US navy forces boarded the vessel, and the contact with the ship was lost.”
The statement continued: “In accordance with the norms of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, freedom of navigation applies on the high seas, and no state has the right to use force against vessels duly registered under the jurisdiction of other states.”
Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, also posted that Bella I had “been trying to evade the Coast Guard for weeks, even changing its flag and painting a new name on the hull while being pursued, in a desperate and failed attempt to escape justice.”
The heroic crew of the USCGC Munro pursued this vessel across the high seas and through treacherous storms— keeping diligent watch, and protecting our country with the determination and patriotism that make Americans proud. These brave men and women deserve our nation’s thanks for their selfless devotion to duty. The world’s criminals are on notice. You can run, but you can’t hide. We will never relent in our mission to protect the American people and disrupt the funding of narco terrorism wherever we find it, period. This is our country’s greatest fighting force at their best. This is America first at sea.
The UK said in a statement that its military provided the U.S. with support during the operation.
TREND FORECAST: So-called international law has been replaced by the Law of the Jungle, where only the strong (nuclear-capable) powers survive, which may motivate countries like Iran to speed up production of their own nuclear weapons.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro offered Trump everything to avoid a conflict. The New York Times reported in October that he promised Trump “a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth,” but that was not good enough for the U.S.
Washington has also lost any moral high ground when it criticizes Russia for invading Ukraine. Imagine the outrage if a country swooped in to arrest Netanyahu so he faces war crimes charges in the International Criminal Court. That would be an act of war and U.S. troops would be deployed.
Gerald Celente has long said that WW III has begun, but it will not become “official” until there is a false flag event that unites the people for war against other nations… just as they did in the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that launched WW II and 9/II which launched The War on Terror. We are headed in that direction.
Indeed, as we have detailed week-after-week, month-after-month, and year-after-year, Europe, especially Germany (who gave us WW I and WW II) are spending trillions of dollars to ramp up their military under the guise that Russia will attack Europe.
And Ritter told Judge Andrew Napolitano that last week was “not a good week” for the U.S. because Washington risked thermonuclear war when it tried to send a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he could be targeted. (Ritter was referring to the major Ukrainian attack on one of his residences that involved 91 drones.)
“It was a CIA-run operation directed by the President of the United States to send a signal,” he said.
He said the Russians recovered some of the chips inside the drones used in the attack that had all of the data that proved that the CIA was “intimately involved. And the Russians handed it to Americans, and they don’t need to say it out loud, they just need to say, ‘Here, we know everything.’”
