The Western world is going to have to find a way to deal with communist Chinese aggression. China is on the move, in the South China Sea, against India and also against Japan. Once Covid-19 had escaped from Wuhan in October Peking took a deliberate decision to suppress news of the leak from the West. It’s also clear that the virus was then spread deliberately. Very obviously the US is being targeted at the moment, in the hope that that the pro-Peking Democrats will win in November.
Whilst the original release may have been accidental, China’s subsequent actions amount to a war crime, for which her leaders must be held accountable. Xi Jinping, the Chinese kingpin, should be given a fair trial and executed, in the nicest possible way of course. No country has any excuse for developing bio-weapons.
I am not leaving out of account the role of the ‘von’ Obama administration in China’s bio-weapons program, exposed for the first time by colleagues on this website. Barack ‘von’ Obama may have a case to answer. To have CDC and the CIA supporting a Chinese bio-weapons program was outrageous.
Recent months have seen Chinese aggression against India in Kashmir, part of which is still illegally occupied by China, having been seized in the Sino-Indian War. (I prefer that expression to “Indo-China War”, which risks confusion with the war in Indo-China!)
In addition to occupying Tibet and part of India, China has taken over Hong Kong and continues to claim the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. As I explain in Spyhunter the eponymous Captain Spratly was British and the islands belong to us.
The Chinese have also been bullying the poor old Aussies. Peking’s record in Africa is shameful, with wholesale exploitation of the continent’s vast natural resources. Unlike the West, China does not pay market prices, preferring cosy deals with dictators, who are then rewarded with access to offshore high-yield trading programs.
There are very few independent states in Africa, which swapped British and European imperialism for Chinese neo-imperialism using assets like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. China also relies upon cut-price oil from client states like Iran and Brunei.
The Hong Kong takeover was predictable. As I have been pointing out since 1997 the Sino-British agreement was never incorporated into Chinese domestic law. The agreement was scarcely worth the paper it was printed on.
Hitting back
How do we hit back? A short war with China would be one answer, but there’s little appetite for that. The Indians have had precious little support from the West in standing up to Chinese aggression. A powerful Allied coalition could be assembled, including Russia, India, the UK, South Korea, Vietnam and Australia, but American support would not be forthcoming until after the election.
The PLA hasn’t been involved in large-scale combat operations since the Korean War. Most of the air combat missions in that war were flown by ex-Luftwaffe Me262 pilots, so the PLA Air Force has had hardly any experience of air combat. The last time the PLA Navy was in action was in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which was scarcely a combat operation.
The Chinese will find fighting the West and its allies a little more difficult than shooting down helpless men, women and children in an unarmed airliner. The PLA only seems to like combat where the other side doesn’t have guns!
More realistically, given the lack of leadership in the West, we could start with shutting down the trading programs and strangling China’s access to cheap raw materials and oil. The UK and US should recognize Taiwan and break off trade and diplomatic relations with Peking.
It’s time to remind ‘Johnny Chinaman’, no offense intended, who won the Opium Wars! Keeping quiet about Coronavirus may turn out to have been Peking’s biggest mistake.
JFK Jnr
Not the least extraordinary development in an extraordinary year has been the assertion that John F. Kennedy Junior, President Kennedy’s only son, survived the 1999 plane crash and is still alive. The story appears to be doing the rounds. He was apparently considering a run for the US Senate seat about to be vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the seat eventually held by Hillary Clinton. It had previously been held of course by JFK Jnr’s uncle, Robert Kennedy, before his disgraceful assassination in 1968 by the DVD.
As is well-known, JFK Jnr departed Runway 22 at Essex County Airport in Fairfield New Jersey on the evening of July 16th 1999, at the controls of his own Piper Saratoga aircraft, accompanied by his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. He was due to arrive at Martha’s Vineyard, en route to Hyannis Port, but failed to arrive.
The wreckage was located by US Navy divers on July 20th. JFK Jnr’s body was found still strapped in his seat. If he is still alive, who died, bearing in mind that three bodies were recovered?
Any death of a Kennedy has to be looked at with care. Everybody knows about the assassinations of JFK Jnr’s illustrious father and uncle. Not so widely known is that another uncle, Joe Kennedy Jnr, was assassinated on August 12th 1944, when his Consolidated PB4Y Liberator aircraft was destroyed in mid-air. It was laden with explosives, the idea being for the pilots to bail out, before the aircraft continued to the U-Boat pens at Heligoland under radio control.
The explosives were detonated prematurely, almost certainly from the accompanying De Havilland F-8 Mosquito aircraft, which promptly landed at RAF Halewsorth, under the command of the very dodgy Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, no offense intended. The investigation into that incident was led by John McCone, later appointed by President Kennedy to head the CIA, triggering his assassination.
The NTSB ruled that the cause of JFK Jnr’s crash was pilot error. Normally we needn’t pay too much attention to NTSB reports – after all, these are the clowns who concluded that TWA800 crashed due to an internal explosion when the critical fuel tank was blown inwards.
However, I have always been inclined to go with the NTSB’s conclusion. They normally get it right with light aircraft – usually, they only foul up with airliners. The flight was ill-advised. The Saratoga is a single-engine airplane only and Kennedy had only 36 hours or so on the type, of which less than a third were at night.
He had limited flight experience, with barely 300 hours in his logbook at the time of the crash. There was no second pilot, as very frankly there should have been for a night flight over water with passengers aboard.
Whilst a second pilot was not a legal requirement every airman has to consider what is wise as well as what’s legal. Night-flying, particularly at low level over water, can be very disorientating. The NTSB’s conclusions, therefore, weren’t entirely wacky, at any rate nowhere near as wacky as their conclusions about TWA800.
A second pilot could have helped with navigation and would have been able to take over in the event of disorientation, not least if he or she had an instrument rating, which Kennedy lacked. The need for an instrument-rated pilot was even greater as the take-off time was pushed back from 6 pm Eastern until after 8.30 pm Eastern.
The rumors lack one thing of course – a body. It is conceivable that JFK Jnr could have gone along with a plan to disappear, to save his life and that of his wife. It would however have been a complex intelligence operation, involving the US Navy, the Coast Guard and Dr. James Weiner, the Medical Examiner. Remember the bodies of all aboard the Piper were recovered and autopsied.
Is it suggested that the bodies were placed on board after a secret landing or a ditching at sea? Or is the argument that JFK Jnr was never onboard the airplane in the first place?
The only anomalies I have been able to discover are some odd communications between ATC in the Essex County Tower and the pilot, who seemed uncertain of his destination, and the lack of warning as the Piper descended over open water. So far as I know the plane was equipped with a transponder, indeed I don’t see how it could have flown in that crowded airspace without one.
It was visible to radar, yet at no stage was the pilot warned that he was descending dangerously low over open water. Admittedly with no flight plan, ATC could not be certain who the pilot was or to which frequencies his radio had been set. Nevertheless, I would have expected some attempt to warn the aircraft.
It’s an intriguing theory, but I’m afraid I’m not buying. It would have involved too complex and too difficult an intelligence operation to keep secret from the Correa/COREA Group, which controls the CIA and the FBI. There is a simple explanation – spatial disorientation – which fits the facts. It was the case of an inexperienced pilot undertaking a difficult and dangerous night flight in marginal weather conditions for which he simply was not rated.
The flight should have been canceled after Lauren Bessette was held up at work, or they should have taken off on time without her. JFK Jnr should have explained that he wasn’t rated for night flying and that they needed to take off in the daytime, as planned. Lauren could have taken the train.
Of course, if JFK Jnr pops up at a press conference then I’ll revise my opinion! I always do when the facts change! The idea that President Kennedy’s son is still alive is a delightful one, but wanting something to be true does not make it so.
Kim Jong-un
With the supreme leader of the UK, ‘Ritter’ Mark ‘von’ Sedwill, having announced his retirement last week, attention is now turning towards another supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. Monitoring the Cabinet Office of course has helped equip me to understand North Korea, which is run as secretively and as dishonestly as the UK. Indeed it’s not entirely clear whether the government of North Korea is modelled on the UK or vice versa.
Although it’s fairly clear that Kim is still alive, it’s not exactly clear how alive. I maintain my analysis that he underwent surgery earlier this year and that the surgery did not go well. (It would be helpful to know if the surgical team are still alive – one difference between the state medical systems of the UK and North Korea is that unsuccessful surgeons in Britain tend to be sued rather than liquidated, although as we have seen in the Coronavirus outbreak the NHS is not above liquidating patients.)
Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, appears to be in charge. It doesn’t look as though power is yo-yo-ing between Kim and Yo. My tentative conclusion is that Kim is alive but seriously unwell, that executive power has been transferred to Yo, and that they are working on a way to formalize the succession which does not involve Kim standing in a field whilst mortars are zeroed in. (‘Getting a rocket’ has a different meaning in the disciplinary context in North Korea than it does in the UK.) Watch this space!
Kerry Cassidy Show
If you’d like to follow my recent appearance on the Kerry Cassidy Show the link is: https://projectcamelotportal.com/2020/07/10/michael-shrimpton-barrister-spy-hunter
This Week’s Movie Review: Cross Channel (1955, dir. R. G. Springsteen)
This fine old movie has been given an airing in England on Talking Pictures, a satellite TV channel devoted to golden oldies. Made by Republic Pictures, it stars Wayne Morris as Tex Parker, the skipper of a small motor boat caught up in smuggling.
I suppose technically Cross Channel is a B movie, but it’s a little bit better than that. It’s an entertaining yarn, where the White Hats wear white hats and the Black Hats wear black. The villains are villainous and the Good Guys are good. That’s as it should be.
There’s strong support for the lead, not least from Patrick Allen, that great British character actor, playing against type. Above all however, the movie is a tribute to Wayne Morris, a fine actor.
Morris’s career suffered because he volunteered to become a combat flier with the US Navy in World War II, flying F6F Hellcats from the USS Essex (CV-9). He shot down seven Zeroes, which is more than Johnny Depp, although I have to be careful here since we share the same agent! It’s a great shame that Wayne Morris never got the big parts he deserved after the war, but let the record show that he had more than a bit part in the greatest drama of all. He was a fine man as well as a good actor, and I take pleasure in saying so.
Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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Regarding JFK Jr and Sr, today is T-48.
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