Events that have transpired in and around Syria and the Middle East with the defeat of ISIS during the fall of 2018 clearly prove one thing. The US and Israel, and under Trump the two are inseparable, intend to push Russia and China to nuclear confrontation.

The Pentagon is fully behind this, wanting to stop Russia and China before new weapons systems are fully deployed and America’s perceived nuclear advantage is gone forever. There are other reasons as well, indicating insanity among both American and Israeli commands.

Israel has millions of Palestinian hostages while the US has, over the last two decades, built nuclear shelters in Israel for up to 250,000 Jewish citizens, shelters that include ICBM silos with missiles that can hit anywhere in Europe.

In 2009, I reviewed documentation held by Pakistan’s ISI outlining a deal between India and Israel to share stolen American ICBM technology with Israel to receive several long-range missiles capable of hitting North America or China, each with up to 10 warheads. The report showed US Army Corps of Engineers’ drawings for missile silos in Israel capable of housing ICBMs.

American author Jeff Gates sat next to me during the briefing with Pakistan’s top intelligence leaders.

Running the clock back up to October 2018, American and Israeli pilots are now in Ukraine training to defeat the S300 missile system now deployed in Syria. What is not told is that this training is why Russia just demanded that the US remove “White Helmet” personnel from Syria, it is obvious as to the reason, Russia believes the US is planning a wide attack on Damascus under the pretext of an alleged gas attack in Idlib Province.

Russia is trying to defuse a situation that has dire consequences, let me explain.

If Israel and the US choose to use “standoff” weapons to attack Syria and Russian forces inside Syria, legally inside Syria, and it is believed that this is exactly what the US and Israel plan, then retaliatory strikes are within the rules of engagement.

This includes using Russian very long-range air defenses, enhanced S400 or better, which are deployed to protect Russian forces. Potential targets include American B1/B2 heavy bombers out of Qatar, American ships in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Persian Gulf and “coalition” aircraft firing from Eastern Syria or from Iraq or Turkey.

Similarly, Israeli planes firing from inside Israel, or from over Lebanon or the Mediterranean, might well be targeted as well as their home bases inside Israel. Missiles are deployed inside Syria, the Iskandar M system, since March 2016, capable of defeating Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense system and wiping out Israeli command posts on Syria’s Golan Heights or any air bases inside Israel.

It would also be right and proper, in accordance with the rules of war, to do so even though the consequences would be escalation. This is exactly what the United States wants.

It is confusing to many, seeing the US and the Kiev regime working so closely together against Russia, that the consensus has been that Trump is pro-Russian. One might look more closely at the time in the early 1990s when Trump was facing financial collapse.

His flagging empire of failed hotels and casinos, of partnerships with organized crime figures with long histories of human and narcotics trafficking, had reached an end. It was Russian cash, laundered into Trump’s empire, stolen Russian cash from Russia’s commercial banks, that put Trump back on his feet.

Those involved, men like Semion Mogilevich, Russian “boss of bosses” and Trump partner Felix Sater of Bayrock Group, that divided billions in stolen Soviet currency reserves with key American political figures, not just the Bush family, but banking and regulatory oversight personnel as well including two US Senators.

The “New Russia” was to be stripped bare, a “milk cow” for the criminal bosses who had gained control of Washington during the Reagan era, a plan that failed with the political rise of Vladimir Putin.

Thus, when men like Paul Manafort support Russian interests inside Ukraine, it isn’t support or friendship with Russia. When the time came, the same “Russia backers” joined quickly with Kiev, training and equipping extremist militias, backing the Odessa of May 2014 and pushing for sanctions against Russia.

Moreover, the Kiev regime has been the primary conduit for the flood of former Soviet era weapons that has gone to ISIS in Syria and Iraq and the Sarin gas, manufactured at the Lugar Lab in Tbilisi, Georgia, that has been used inside Syria.

One might also consider the recent murder of a Washington Post correspondent by members of Saudi Arabia’s security services. It is impossible to not compare this with the alleged poisoning of the now hale and healthy Skripal clan. As proof of Russian complicity or even of the event itself dissolved into the world of imagination, American sanctions moved into high gear.

There are even authoritative sources that say Trump ordered the Khashoggi murder himself. In fact, there is little proof Khashoggi was under any threat from the Saudi government at all but rather only from his history of confrontations with Donald Trump which began immediately after the election. From the UK Independent, December 5, 2016:

“A Saudi Arabian journalist and commentator has been banned by his country for criticising US President-elect Donald Trump. Jamal Khashoggi has been banned from writing in newspapers, making TV appearances and attending conferences, Middle East Eye reports. After Mr. Khashoggi criticised Mr Trump’s Middle East policies at a Washington think-tank on 10 November, an official Saudi spokesman said he did not represent the Kingdom in a statement to the Saudi Press Agency. Speaking at the Washington Institute, Mr. Khashoggi described Mr. Trump’s stance on the Middle East as “contradictory”, BreakingEnergy.com reported. Mr. Khashoggi said that while Mr. Trump has been vocally anti-Iran, he has hinted he will support President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war, a move which will ultimately bolster Iran. ‘The expectation that ‘Trump as president’ will be starkly different from ‘Trump as candidate’ is a false hope at best,’ he added. Mr. Khashoggi was also quoted in a Washington Post article discussing potential changes in the Middle East as a result of Mr. Trump’s election victory.”

Even a cursory examination of recent events, in light of Trump’s vocal support of torture and assassination, points an accusatory finger at the White House. Then we have the real story behind the infamous audio recording.

With Saudi Arabia the story is different. Our sources in the White House tell us that Trump received an audio recording of the incident as early as October 4, 2018 though Trump denials have continued for two more weeks. From the Mideast Eye:

“It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist’s last moments told Middle East Eye. Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said. Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said. ‘The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,’ the source told MEE. The screaming stopped when Khashoggi – who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October – was injected with an as yet unknown substance. Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who has been identified as the head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, was one of the 15-member squad who arrived in Ankara earlier that day on a private jet. Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said. The killing took seven minutes, the source said. As he started to dismember the body, Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music. He advised other members of the squad to do the same. ‘When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,’ Tubaigy was recorded as saying, the source told MEE. A three-minute version of the audio tape has been given to Turkish newspaper Sabah, but they have yet to release it. A Turkish source told the New York Times that Tubaigy was equipped with a bone saw. He is listed as the president of the Saudi Fellowship of Forensic Pathology and a member of the Saudi Association for Forensic Pathology. In 2014, London-based Saudi newspaper Asharaq al-Awsat interviewed Tubaigy about a mobile clinic that allows coroners to perform autopsies in seven minutes to determine the cause of death of Hajj pilgrims. The newspaper reported that the mobile clinic was partly designed by Tubaigy and could be used in ‘security cases that requires pathologist intervention to perform an autopsy or examine a body at the place of a crime’. These are the first details to emerge of the Saudi journalist’s killing. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October to retrieve paperwork.”

What have we learned? We learned that the Saudis regularly use mobile pathology labs for dismembering the bodies of those they torture to death, and of course, this is America’s primary ally in the Muslim world and chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Our sources also tell us that CIA Director Gina Haspel, with a long history of working with Saudi Arabia in developing these “techniques,” was given evidence of the Khashoggi murder, an audio intercept, within hours, from the NSA.

Sources tell us that copies of the horrific murder and dismemberment recording immediately went to Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, to White House advisor John Bolton and Jared Kushner and were listened to repeatedly by President Trump on October 4, 2018.

Two weeks later he admitted to knowing about the recording, never admitting when he knew, and his response was to order new sanctions against Russia and Iran.

It might be noted that Khashoggi worked for the Washington Post, a newspaper particularly critical of Trump policies. Trump has repeatedly openly advocated violence be used against Washington Post journalists, something his Saudi friends seem to have taken to heart. From USA Today:

“Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos on Thursday called President Donald Trump’s criticism of journalists “dangerous,” saying he will consistently stick up for the role of media in democracy.

Bezos, whose companies are a frequent target of Trump’s criticism, didn’t mention Trump by name but assailed the president’s attacks on the media.

‘It is a mistake for any elected official, in my opinion – I don’t think this is a very out-there opinion – to attack media and journalists,’ he told interviewer David Rubenstein in an on-stage interview at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Were one to go “conspiratorial,” perhaps part conjecture but also well within known administration practices and certainly consistent with Washington’s recent behavior, it would not be outlandish to find Trump, along with John Bolton and Gina Haspel, long suspected psychopaths, fully complicit in the Khashoggi killing.

Simply put, it is exactly this kind of thinking, which fits into long established Trump regime methodologies, that puts nuclear Armageddon on the table over the Syrian conflict. None of it involves US strategic interests or even a secret globalist plot. At times the answer can be that simple, that the President and those around him are criminally insane, pathological liars and convinced that destroying the planet might well be the reason they were put on earth.

Assuming otherwise is unsupportable as the evidence of widespread insanity among American, French, British, Israeli and Saudi leaders is unavoidable.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”