Freedom Rider: Russiagate and the surveillance duopoly

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Margaret Kimberley

Republican and Democratic Party dueling over Russiagate provides us with a teachable moment. It should teach us to disrespect and discredit the law enforcement system as it exists in this country. We must oppose the surveillance state altogether and we should not be tricked by duopoly theatrics into thinking that either of the evil twins are acting in our interests.

Local cops plant drugs and weapons in order to arrest and convict anyone they want. They kill an average of three people every single day. Cash bail keeps the poor in jail not because they are necessarily dangerous, but because they are poor. Those are just some facts in the litany of oppression used by law enforcement against mostly poor, black people. But there is another order of wrong doing that engulfs the whole world.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) created a system which determines when the federal government may spy on anyone suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign agent. FISA set up a rubber stamp kangaroo court with only a handful of warrants being rejected in the forty year history of this law.

FISA authority was used to keep Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page under surveillance in 2016. Republicans claim that the warrant was granted as a result of the Christopher Steele opposition research dossier that was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. No one knows if this assertion is true, but the fight over declassifying the memo predictably turned into political theater. Republicans said the memo would end the suspicion of Trump collusion with the Russian government and Democrats asserted that the system would fall apart if the memo was ever declassified and released.

If Republicans are correct the FISA warrant was problematic and the case for collusion is tainted. Democrats now make the case for declassifying their own memo and continuing the foolish spectacle of irrelevance. Despite the drama, both assertions are beside the point. The larger and more important issue is that the American justice system is decidedly unjust.

Prosecutors are among the worst criminals in this country. From small towns to federal courthouses they wield power that few can circumvent. Rich people need not worry because they exist in a bubble with laws of their own making. Public officials bow down to them and happily violate statutes in order to keep them happy. It is all rotten and the case for and against Trump is an opportunity to discuss how few rights we have and how the system is rigged against all but the apex predators at the top of the food chain.

Instead of making the case for tearing up this monstrosity, otherwise intelligent people are pointing fingers and choosing one disreputable side over the other. Every Republican voted to extend the FISA program. They were joined by Democrats like Congressman Adam Schiff, who leads the case for collusion, and who has made a name for himself by stoking the Russiagate fire. Schiff cried the loudest against releasing the Republican memo and claimed that declassification would pose a threat to the nation. When he had the chance to do something for the judicial system he joined with the people he allegedly opposes and supported continuing the FISA travesty. Our individual rights are obviously of little concern to Schiff. Then again he is a former prosecutor so little can be expected of him in this regard.

Russiagate is a sinkhole of political confusion and that is precisely why it was created. It began with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a lackluster effort meant to continue the neo-liberal agenda, make war, and do little else. She had nothing to offer voters and hung her hat on making Trump look like “Putin’s puppet.” Had she done a minimal effort there would have been no need for pay offs to British spies or whipped up Russophobia. The entire Democratic Party was complicit in the debacle and they welcomed a tale of collusion in order to deflect the blame they so richly deserved.

The sorry spectacle continues as Republicans are equally determined to keep Trump in office and make their dreams of kleptocracy and diminished governmental authority a reality. Democrats are looking to explain away a string of electoral failures and maintain the illusion of being the inclusive party when they are merely shadows of the hard right Republicans.

Let all the memos be released. There should be no sanctity bestowed upon government secrets. They are a ruse meant to cover up for worldwide gangsterism. Defending the FBI, CIA, NSA or any of the other “intelligence community” agencies is to be a dupe of the highest order. Police in Baltimore and other cities may plant drugs and weapons on suspects, but the mega-killers lie about weapons in entire nations and cause death and suffering on a mass scale.

Sooner or later Russiagate will play out. Whatever the result, this country will still be the one that locks up more of its people than any other. It will still be a threat to world peace. When the wheels of injustice grind on, only fools will have chosen between the two corrupt parties.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

A False Agenda for Humanity

Posted on February 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

Humanity has, for millennia, been led down the road of an entirely false agenda. So much so, that every aspect of society is almost the precise reverse of what it should be.

Just a glimmer of awareness reveals that the true potential of the majority of mankind remains locked away, unable to exert any influence on the course of events on our planet.

Given the scale of this imprisonment, it becomes apparent that the world has been moving on a trajectory invented and directed by a false intelligence, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the intelligence of natural planetary consciousness.

I use the word ‘intelligence’ because its hard to find the right word to describe that which is very clever, but lacks the ability to feel love or compassion; and is often ruthless without ever showing emotion. Intelligence should have a more human ring to it, but the word has been hijacked by the spying networks: the CIA, FBI, MI5 for example, all call themselves ‘intelligence agencies’. Not exactly warm-blooded institutions!

Within the hierarchies of banks, corporations, the military, governments, the media and various global trading organizations, one will find a plethora of quasi-humans in line to get their hands onto the levers of the central control system. The top-down pyramid which steers the daily agenda for millions of mortals caught-up in the 9 to 5 treadmill. Yet, those climbing the employment ladder within these same institutions, more often than not lack any awareness of what is going on above their heads.

We should consider the following question: at exactly what point within this typical corporate pyramid, does the ordinary mortal metamorphose into the ranks of the subhuman control master? Which floor serves as the subtle switch-point where the 9 to 5 worker ‘just doing a job’ shifts into a dedicated trainee in the art of ‘power over the people’ management?

I am not proposing to answer this, as it is a largely hypothetical question; but I suggest that the process whereby the false agenda for humanity is able to be maintained, year in year out, relies heavily on the unquestioning cooperation of those who, at some point, change their identity – or have their identity changed – from just ordinary workers to corporate clones. In other words those who see the world entirely through the lens of the corporation they work for.

The renowned social psychiatrist/psychologist Dr Erich Fromm, in his last major thesis ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’ traces the decline of the sentient human at the hands of a ‘corporate intelligence’ which is specifically designed to dehumanize those climbing up its ranks. So that by the time they reach the top, such people have become robotic, in virtually every action they undertake.

Here lies the mechanism whereby the human becomes less than human; the less than human becomes inhuman; and the inhuman becomes a biological robotic clone and proponent of Transhumanist Artificial Intelligence – which takes the false agenda for humanity ever nearer to its ultimate goal.

Perhaps not ultimate, but far enough to ensure that humanity as we know it, is superseded by another form of ‘intelligence’ that has nothing to do with nature or the exigence expressed in natural human emotions of love, joy, pain and sorrow.

Cyborgian artificial intelligence is just that: artificial. Art put in reverse so as to eliminate the godly, the beautiful, the spontaneous – all that which gives expression to what it really means to be human.

But consider the fact that it is people suffering these type of symptoms who are in the driving seat of world affairs; running governments, banks and technocratic institutions like the European Union. The mentality is that of a corporate trained control freak – and the greater the power on hand, the greater the ego fueled top-down control manipulation becomes.

The structural design of the neoliberal/neoconservative capitalist Leviathon is not an accident. It is a deliberate formula for the entrapment of mankind. One which puts into reverse – and thereby completely distorts – the true hierarchical themes of nature and the cosmos. In just the same way as Hitler inverted and reversed the design of the original swastika, an ancient peace symbol from Southern India, into a twisted symbol of war.

The symbols that adorn all top-end corporate chains and industries, follow this same pattern. They are nearly all based upon ancient archetypal forms. Forms that symbolized man’s desire to give expression to the powers of nature, as well as the cosmic influences that were mythologized into gods and pantheistic forces of power and influence. Symbols that expressed higher aspirations of bygone civilisations.

The big-chiefs of corporate globalization adorn their high-rise totems and plush office suites with the very same symbols, but what do they stand for now?

Quite simply, a crassly materialistic paradigm which has usurped the nature gods of old; declaring itself the new ‘supreme force’ to which mankind must go on its knees in unquestionoing obeisance.

And, as we know, the majority of mankind has been complicit in fulfilling this role, ensuring a self-inflicted avenue of slavery and passive acceptance of the role assigned by the prevailing status quo.

Indeed, there appears to be no end to the butchery and bullying in the cause of keeping the Leviathan rolling forward. The US military – backed by its European ‘allies’ – ranges the planet in support of the ceaseless profligate mining of valuable minerals, to make the fuels that fill the tanks of Big Pharma, Big Agro, Big Army and Big Business. While the public, rather than rising up against mammon, appear to be paralyzed by the spectacle, unable to imagine anything less destructively domineering that might take its place.

I used the words “appear to be” because there is, of course, another emergent energy that tells another story. That breaks through the deception that man is nothing more than a psychopathetic instrument in the hands of all dominant, aggressive and less than human oppressors.

It is not just ‘any’ other energy. It is the long-buried – and steadily more volcanic – energy of liberated spirit. A revivified spirit which is finding its way back into the arteries of an ever-growing number of ex hostages of the status quo, as well as new arrivals on this planet.

Everyday this spirit is gaining further momentum and a stronger equilibrium. Cracks in the false agenda are widening; the confidence of its perpetrators is wavering; the old power base is leaking.

Chinks of light glitter amongst the darkness; the sense of an upwardly rising change is in the air, counteracting the stench of stagnation and decline.

What is this?

We ‘the people’ have arrived at a critical point in this apocalyptic epoch, finding out that we are possessed of power we never knew we had; starting to believe in a Self we never knew we cradled; hearing a voice we never could hear before. Finding in each other, sources of mutual support, not just a shackled fellow prisoner.

As this process grows, so the false agenda is further revealed for what it is, and its chief perpetrators are exposed ever more clearly for what they are. The seemingly inexorable drive towards a cybernetic future, or one populated and run by gender-bent, micro-chipped mock-humans, is being infiltrated by warm-blooded, nature loving true humans. Trees are being planted where concrete was once the only landscape.

We are learning that where our thoughts go – energy follows. And that if these thoughts are full of creativity and life, so will our lives also be. We are learning that we can take charge of our destinies after all. That, at any moment, we could dispense with the false reality of the top down centralized command system, and be free to start our own version of reality. One informed by our love of Truth – a determination to act on this truth – and a growing aspiration to Be rather than to have.

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, actor and international activist.

Saturday Matinee: Ukraine on Fire – The Real Story

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Reid Mukai

A Documentary You’ll Likely Never See

By James DiEugenio

Source: Consortium News

It is not very often that a documentary film can set a new paradigm about a recent event, let alone, one that is still in progress. But the new film Ukraine on Fire has the potential to do so – assuming that many people get to see it.

Usually, documentaries — even good ones — repackage familiar information in a different aesthetic form. If that form is skillfully done, then the information can move us in a different way than just reading about it.

A good example of this would be Peter Davis’s powerful documentary about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds. By 1974, most Americans understood just how bad the Vietnam War was, but through the combination of sounds and images, which could only have been done through film, that documentary created a sensation, which removed the last obstacles to America leaving Indochina.

Ukraine on Fire has the same potential and could make a contribution that even goes beyond what the Davis film did because there was very little new information in Hearts and Minds. Especially for American and Western European audiences, Ukraine on Fire could be revelatory in that it offers a historical explanation for the deep divisions within Ukraine and presents information about the current crisis that challenges the mainstream media’s paradigm, which blames the conflict almost exclusively on Russia.

Key people in the film’s production are director Igor Lopatonok, editor Alex Chavez, and writer Vanessa Dean, whose screenplay contains a large amount of historical as well as current material exploring how Ukraine became such a cauldron of violence and hate. Oliver Stone served as executive producer and conducted some high-profile interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The film begins with gripping images of the violence that ripped through the capital city of Kiev during both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 removal of Yanukovich. It then travels back in time to provide a perspective that has been missing from mainstream versions of these events and even in many alternative media renditions.

A Longtime Pawn

Historically, Ukraine has been treated as a pawn since the late Seventeenth Century. In 1918, Ukraine was made a German protectorate by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Ukraine was also a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 signed between Germany and Russia, but violated by Adolf Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

The reaction of many in Ukraine to Hitler’s aggression was not the same as it was in the rest of the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis. The most significant Ukrainian nationalist group, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been established in 1929. Many of its members cooperated with the Nazis, some even enlisted in the Waffen SS and Ukrainian nationalists participated in the massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar ravine in Kiev in September 1941. According to scholar Pers Anders Rudling, the number of Ukrainian nationalists involved in the slaughter outnumbered the Germans by a factor of 4 to 1.

But it wasn’t just the Jews that the Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered. They also participated in massacres of Poles in the western Ukrainian region of Galicia from March 1943 until the end of 1944. Again, the main perpetrators were not Germans, but Ukrainians.

According to author Ryazard Szawlowksi, the Ukrainian nationalists first lulled the Poles into thinking they were their friends, then turned on them with a barbarity and ferocity that not even the Nazis could match, torturing their victims with saws and axes. The documentary places the number of dead at 36,750, but Szawlowski estimates it may be two or three times higher.

OUN members participated in these slaughters for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, wanting Ukraine to be preserved for what OUN regarded as native Ukrainians. They also expected Ukraine to be independent by the end of the war, free from both German and Russian domination. The two main leaders in OUN who participated in the Nazi collaboration were Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Bandera was a virulent anti-Semite, and Lebed was rabidly against the Poles, participating in their slaughter.

After the war, both Bandera and Lebed were protected by American intelligence, which spared them from the Nuremburg tribunals. The immediate antecedent of the CIA, Central Intelligence Group, wanted to use both men for information gathering and operations against the Soviet Union. England’s MI6 used Bandera even more than the CIA did, but the KGB eventually hunted down Bandera and assassinated him in Munich in 1959. Lebed was brought to America and addressed anti-communist Ukrainian organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The CIA protected him from immigration authorities who might otherwise have deported him as a war criminal.

The history of the Cold War was never too far in the background of Ukrainian politics, including within the diaspora that fled to the West after the Red Army defeated the Nazis and many of their Ukrainian collaborators emigrated to the United States and Canada. In the West, they formed a fierce anti-communist lobby that gained greater influence after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

Important History

This history is an important part of Dean’s prologue to the main body of Ukraine on Fire and is essential for anyone trying to understand what has happened there since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For instance, the U.S.-backed candidate for president of Ukraine in 2004 — Viktor Yushchenko — decreed both Bandera and his military assistant Roman Shukhevych, who was also involved in atrocitites, were both named national heroes by Yushchenko.

Bandera, in particular, has become an icon for post-World War II Ukrainian nationalists. One of his followers was Dmytro Dontsov, who called for the birth of a “new man” who would mercilessly destroy Ukraine’s ethnic enemies.

Bandera’s movement was also kept alive by Yaroslav Stetsko, Bandera’s premier in exile. Stetsko fully endorsed Bandera’s anti-Semitism and also the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Stetsko, too, was used by the CIA during the Cold War and was honored by Yushchenko, who placed a plaque in his honor at the home where he died in Munich in 1986. Stetsko’s wife, Slava, returned to Ukraine in 1991 and ran for parliament in 2002 on the slate of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party.

Stetsko’s book, entitled Two Revolutions, has become the ideological cornerstone for the modern Ukrainian political party Svoboda, founded by Oleh Tyahnybok, who is pictured in the film calling Jews “kikes” in public, which is one reason the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ranked him as one of the most dangerous anti-Semites in the world.

Another follower of Bandera is Dymytro Yarosh, who reputedly leads the paramilitary arm of an even more powerful political organization in Ukraine called Right Sektor. Yarosh once said he controls a paramilitary force of about 7,000 men who were reportedly used in both the overthrow of Yanukovych in Kiev in February 2014 and the suppression of the rebellion in Odessa a few months later, which are both fully depicted in the film.

This historical prelude and its merging with the current civil war is eye-opening background that has been largely hidden by the mainstream Western media, which has downplayed or ignored the troubling links between these racist Ukrainian nationalists and the U.S.-backed political forces that vied for power after Ukraine became independent in 1991.

The Rise of a Violent Right

That same year, Tyahnybok formed Svoboda. Three years later, Yarosh founded Trident, an offshoot of Svoboda that eventually evolved into Right Sektor. In other words, the followers of Bandera and Lebed began organizing themselves immediately after the Soviet collapse.

In this time period, Ukraine had two Russian-oriented leaders who were elected in 1991 and 1994, Leonid Kravchuk, and Leonid Kuchma. But the hasty transition to a “free-market” economy didn’t go well for most Ukrainians or Russians as well-connected oligarchs seized much of the wealth and came to dominate the political process through massive corruption and purchase of news media outlets. However, for average citizens, living standards went down drastically, opening the door for the far-right parties and for foreign meddling.

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was strongest among ethnic Russians in the east and south, won the presidential election by three percentage points over the U.S.-favored Viktor Yushchenko, whose base was asmostly in the country’s west where the Ukrainian nationalists are strongest.

Immediately, Yushchenko’s backers claimed fraud citing exit polls that had been organized by a group of eight Western nations and four non-governmental organizations or NGOs, including the Renaissance Foundation founded by billionaire financial speculator George Soros. Dick Morris, former President Bill Clinton’s political adviser, clandestinely met with Yushchenko’s team and advised them that the exit polls would not just help in accusations of fraud, but would bring protesters out into the streets. (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 19, Number 1, p. 26)

Freedom House, another prominent NGO that receives substantial financing from the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), provided training to young activists who then rallied protesters in what became known as the Orange Revolution, one of the so-called “color revolutions” that the West’s mainstream media fell in love with. It forced an election rerun that Yushchenko won.

But Yushchenko’s presidency failed to do much to improve the lot of the Ukrainian people and he grew increasingly unpopular. In 2010, Yushchenko failed to make it out of the first round of balloting and his rival Yanukovych was elected president in balloting that outside observers judged free and fair.

Big-Power Games

If this all had occurred due to indigenous factors within Ukraine, it could have been glossed over as a young nation going through some painful growing pains. But as the film points out, this was not the case. Ukraine continued to be a pawn in big-power games with many Western officials hoping to draw the country away from Russian influence and into the orbit of NATO and the European Union.

In one of the interviews in Ukraine on Fire, journalist and author Robert Parry explains how the National Endowment for Democracy and many subsidized political NGOs emerged in the 1980s to replace or supplement what the CIA had traditionally done in terms of influencing the direction of targeted countries.

During the investigations of the Church Committee in the 1970s, the CIA’s “political action” apparatus for removing foreign leaders was exposed. So, to disguise these efforts, CIA Director William Casey, Reagan’s White House and allies in Congress created the NED to finance an array of political and media NGOs.

As Parry noted in the documentary, many traditional NGOs do valuable work in helping impoverished and developing countries, but this activist/propaganda breed of NGOs promoted U.S. geopolitical objectives abroad – and NED funded scores of such projects inside Ukraine in the run-up to the 2014 crisis.

Ukraine on Fire goes into high gear when it chronicles the events that occurred in 2014, resulting in the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych and sparking the civil war that still rages. In the 2010 election, when Yushchenko couldn’t even tally in the double-digits, Yanukovych faced off against and defeated Yulia Tymoshenko, a wealthy oligarch who had served as Yushchenko’s prime minister.

After his election, Yanukovych repealed Bandera’s title as a national hero. However, because of festering economic problems, the new president began to search for an economic partner who could provide a large loan. He first negotiated with the European Union, but these negotiations bogged down due to the usual draconian demands made by the International Monetary Fund.

So, in November 2013, Yanukovych began to negotiate with Russian President Putin who offered more generous terms. But Yanukovych’s decision to delay the association agreement with the E.U. provoked street protests in Kiev especially from the people of western Ukraine.

As Ukraine on Fire points out, other unusual occurrences also occurred, including the emergence of three new TV channels – Spilno TV, Espreso TV, and Hromadske TV – going on the air between Nov. 21 and 24, with partial funding from the U.S. Embassy and George Soros.

Pro-E.U. protests in the Maidan square in central Kiev also grew more violent as ultra-nationalist street fighters from Lviv and other western areas began to pour in and engage in provocations, many of which were sponsored by Yarosh’s Right Sektor. The attacks escalated from torch marches similar to Nazi days to hurling Molotov cocktails at police to driving large tractors into police lines – all visually depicted in the film. As Yanukovich tells Stone, when this escalation happened, it made it impossible for him to negotiate with the Maidan crowd.

One of the film’s most interesting interviews is with Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who was Minister of the Interior at the time responsible for law enforcement and the conduct of the police. He traces the escalation of the attacks from Nov. 24 to 30, culminating with a clash between police and protesters over the transport of a giant Christmas tree into the Maidan. Zakharchenko said he now believes this confrontation was secretly approved by Serhiy Lyovochkin, a close friend of U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, as a pretext to escalate the violence.

At this point, the film addresses the direct involvement of U.S. politicians and diplomats. Throughout the crisis, American politicians visited Maidan, as both Republicans and Democrats, such as Senators John McCain, R-Arizona, and Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut. stirred up the crowds. Yanukovych also said he was in phone contact with Vice President Joe Biden, who he claims was misleading him about how to handle the crisis.

The film points out that the real center of American influence in the Kiev demonstrations was with Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland. As Parry points out, although Nuland was serving under President Obama, her allegiances were really with the neoconservative movement, most associated with the Republican Party.

Her husband is Robert Kagan, who worked as a State Department propagandist on the Central American wars in the 1980s and was the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the 1990s, the group that organized political and media pressure for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Kagan also was McCain’s foreign policy adviser in the 2008 presidential election (although he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race).

Adept Manipulators

As Parry explained, the neoconservatives have become quite adept at disguising their true aims and have powerful allies in the mainstream press. This combination has allowed them to push the foreign policy debate to such extremes that, when anyone objects, they can be branded a Putin or Yanukovych “apologist.”

Thus, Pyatt’s frequent meetings with the demonstrators in the embassy and Nuland’s handing out cookies to protesters in the Maidan were not criticized as American interference in a sovereign state, but were praised as “promoting democracy” abroad. However, as the Maidan crisis escalated, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists moved to the front, intensifying their attacks on police. Many of these extremists were disciples of Bandera and Lebed. By February 2014, they were armed with shotguns and rapid-fire handguns.

On Feb. 20, 2014, a mysterious sniper, apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor, shot both police and protesters, touching off a day of violence that left about 14 police and some 70 protesters dead.

With Kiev slipping out of control, Yanukovich was forced to negotiate with representatives from France, Poland and Germany. On Feb. 21, he agreed to schedule early elections and to accept reduced powers. At the urging of Vice President Biden, Yanukovych also pulled back the police.

But the agreement – though guaranteed by the European nations – was quickly negated by renewed attacks from the Right Sektor and its street fighters who seized government buildings. Russian intelligence services got word that an assassination plot was in the works against Yanukovych, who fled for his life.

On Feb. 24, Yanukovych asked permission to enter Russia for his safety and the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada), effectively under the control of the armed extremists, voted to remove Yanukovych from office in an unconstitutional manner because the courts were not involved and the vote to impeach him did not reach the mandatory threshold. Despite these irregularities, the U.S. and its European allies quickly recognized the new government as “legitimate.”

Calling a Coup a Coup

But the ouster of Yanukovych had all the earmarks of a coup. An intercepted phone call, apparently in early February, between Nuland and Pyatt revealed that they were directly involved in displacing Yanukovych and choosing his successor. The pair reviewed the field of candidates with Nuland favoring Arseniy Yatsenyuk, declaring “Yats is the guy” and discussing with Pyatt how to “glue this thing.” Pyatt wondered about how to “midwife this thing.” They sounded like Gilded Age millionaires in New York deciding who should become the next U.S. president. On Feb. 27, Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister of Ukraine.

Not everyone in Ukraine agreed with the new regime, however. Crimea, which had voted heavily for Yanukovych, decided to hold a referendum on whether to split from Ukraine and become a part of Russia. The results of the referendum were overwhelming. Some 96 percent of Crimeans voted to unite with Russia. Russian troops – previously stationed in Crimea under the Sevastopol naval base agreement – provided security against Right Sektor and other Ukrainian forces moving against the Crimean secession, but there was no evidence of Russian troops intimidating voters or controlling the elections. The Russian government then accepted the reunification with Crimea, which had historically been part of Russia dating back hundreds of years.

Two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Lugansk, also wanted to split off from Ukraine and also conducted a referendum in support of that move. But Putin would not agree to the request from the two provinces, which instead declared their own independence, a move that the new government in Kiev denounced as illegal. The Kiev regime also deemed the insurgents “terrorists” and launched an “anti-terrorism operation” to crush the resistance. Ultra-nationalist and even neo-Nazi militias, such as the Azov Battalion, took the lead in the bloody fighting.

Anti-coup demonstrations also broke out in the city of Odessa to the south. Ukrainian nationalist leader Andrei Parubiy went to Odessa, and two days later, on May 2, 2014, his street fighters attacked the demonstrators, driving them into the Trade Union building, which was then set on fire. Forty-two people were killed, some of whom jumped to their deaths.

‘Other Side of the Story’

If the film just got across this “other side of the story,” it would provide a valuable contribution since most of this information has been ignored or distorted by the West’s mainstream media, which simply blames the Ukraine crisis on Vladimir Putin. But in addition to the fine work by scenarist Vanessa Dean, the direction by Igor Lopatonok and the editing by Alexis Chavez are extraordinarily skillful and supple.

The 15-minute prologue, where the information about the Nazi collaboration by Bandera and Lebed is introduced, is an exceptional piece of filmmaking. It moves at a quick pace, utilizing rapid cutting and also split screens to depict photographs and statistics simultaneously. Lopatonok also uses interactive graphics throughout to transmit information in a visual and demonstrative manner.

Stone’s interviews with Putin and Yanukovych are also quite newsworthy, presenting a side of these demonized foreign leaders that has been absent in the propagandistic Western media.

Though about two hours long, the picture has a headlong tempo to it. If anything, it needed to slow down at points since such a large amount of information is being communicated. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to watch a documentary that is so intelligently written, and yet so remarkably well made.

When the film ends, the enduring message is similar to those posed by the American interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. How could the State Department know so little about what it was about to unleash, given Ukraine’s deep historical divisions and the risk of an escalating conflict with nuclear-armed Russia?

In Vietnam, Americans knew little about the country’s decades-long struggle of the peasantry to be free from French and Japanese colonialism. Somehow, America was going to win their hearts and minds and create a Western-style “democracy” when many Vietnamese simply saw the extension of foreign imperialism.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocons was going to oust Saddam Hussein and create a Western-style democracy in the Middle East, except that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Moslems and how Iraq was likely to split over sectarian rivalries and screw up his expectations.

Similarly, the message of Ukraine on Fire is that short-sighted, ambitious and ideological officials – unchecked by their superiors – created something even worse than what existed. While high-level corruption persists today in Ukraine and may be even worse than before, the conditions of average Ukrainians have deteriorated.

And, the Ukraine conflict has reignited the Cold War by moving Western geopolitical forces onto Russia’s most sensitive frontier, which, as scholar Joshua Shifrinson has noted, violates a pledge made by Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 as the Soviet Union peacefully accepted the collapse of its military influence in East Germany and eastern Europe. (Los Angeles Times, 5/30/ 2016)

This film also reminds us that what happened in Ukraine was a bipartisan effort. It was begun under George W. Bush and completed under Barack Obama. As Oliver Stone noted in the discussion that followed the film’s premiere in Los Angeles, the U.S. painfully needs some new leadership reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, people who understand how America’s geopolitical ambitions must be tempered by on-the-ground realities and the broader needs of humanity to be freed from the dangers of all-out war.

James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.

Is John Brennan the Mastermind Behind Russiagate?

Posted on February 21, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

The report (“The Dossier”) that claims that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The company that claims that Russia hacked DNC computer servers, was paid by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Trump’s alleged connections to Russia was launched on the basis of information gathered from a report that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The surveillance of a Trump campaign member (Carter Page) was approved by a FISA court on the basis of information from a report that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The Intelligence Community Analysis or ICA was (largely or partially) based on information from a report that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign. (more on this below)

The information that was leaked to the media alleging Russia hacking or collusion can be traced back to claims that were made in a report that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

The entire Russia-gate investigation rests on the “unverified and salacious” information from a dossier that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton Campaign. Here’s how Stephen Cohen sums it up in a recent article at The Nation:

“Steele’s dossier… was the foundational document of the Russiagate narrative…from the time its installments began to be leaked to the American media in the summer of 2016, to the US “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 2017….the dossier and subsequent ICA report remain the underlying sources for proponents of the Russiagate narrative of “Trump-Putin collision.” (“Russia gate or Intel-gate?”, The Nation)

There’s just one problem with Cohen’s statement, we don’t really know the extent to which the dossier was used in the creation of the Intelligence Community Assessment. (The ICA was the IC’s flagship analysis that was supposed to provide ironclad proof of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.) According to some reports, the contribution was significant. Check out this excerpt from an article at Business Insider:

“Intelligence officials purposefully omitted the dossier from the public intelligence report they released in January about Russia’s election interference because they didn’t want to reveal which details they had corroborated, according to CNN.” (“Mueller reportedly interviewed the author of the Trump-Russia dossier — here’s what it alleges, and how it aligned with reality”, Business Insider)

Bottom line: Despite the denials of former-CIA Director John Brennan, the dossier may have been used in the ICA.

In the last two weeks, documents have been released that have exposed the weak underpinnings of the Russia investigation while at the same time revealing serious abuses by senior-level officials at the DOJ and FBI. The so called Nunes memo was the first to point out these abuses, but it was the 8-page “criminal referral” authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham that gave credence to the claims. Here’s a blurb from the document:

“It appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information. But there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.”

There it is. The FBI made a “concerted effort to conceal information from the court” in order to get a warrant to spy on a member of a rival political campaign. So –at the very least– there was an effort, on the part of the FBI and high-ranking officials at the Department of Justice, to improperly spy on members of the Trump team. And there’s more. The FBI failed to mention that the dossier was paid for by the Hillary campaign and the DNC, or that the dossier’s author Christopher Steele had seeded articles in the media that were being used to support the dossier’s credibility (before the FISA court), or that, according to the FBI’s own analysts, the dossier was “only minimally corroborated”, or that Steele was a ferocious partisan who harbored a strong animus towards Trump. All of these were omitted in the FISA application which is why the FBI was able to deceive the judge. It’s worth noting that intentionally deceiving a federal judge is a felony.

Most disturbing is the fact that Steele reportedly received information from friends of Hillary Clinton. (supposedly, Sidney Blumenthal and others) Here’s one suggestive tidbit that appeared in the Graham-Grassley” referral:

“…Mr. Steele’s memorandum states that his company “received this report from REDACTED US State Department,” that the report was the second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who “is in touch with REDACTED, a contact of REDACTED, a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to REDACTED.”

It is troubling enough that the Clinton campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.” (Lifted from The Federalist)

What are we to make of this? Was Steele shaping the dossier’s narrative to the specifications of his employers? Was he being coached by members of the Hillary team? How did that impact the contents of the dossier and the subsequent Russia investigation?

These are just a few of the questions Steele will undoubtedly be asked if he ever faces prosecution for lying to the FBI. But, so far, we know very little about man except that he was a former M16 agent who was paid $160,000 for composing the dubious set of reports that make up the dossier. We don’t even know if Steele’s alleged contacts or intermediaries in Russia actually exist or not. Some analysts think the whole thing is a fabrication based on the fact that he hasn’t worked the Russia-scene since the FSB (The Russian state-security organization that replaced the KGB) was completely overhauled. Besides, it would be extremely dangerous for a Russian to provide an M16 agent with sensitive intelligence. And what would the contact get in return? According to most accounts, Steele’s sources weren’t even paid, so there was little incentive for them to put themselves at risk? All of this casts more doubt on the contents of the dossier.

What is known about Steele is that he has a very active imagination and knows how to command a six-figure payoff for his unique services. We also know that the FBI continued to use him long after they knew he couldn’t be trusted which suggests that he served some other purpose, like providing the agency with plausible deniability, a ‘get out of jail free’ card if they ever got caught surveilling US citizens without probable cause.

But that brings us to the strange case of Carter Page, a bit-player whose role in the Trump campaign was trivial at best. Page was what most people would call a “small fish”, an insignificant foreign policy advisor who had minimal impact on the campaign. Congressional investigators, like Nunes, must be wondering why the FBI and DOJ devoted so much attention to someone like Page instead of going after the “big fish” like Bannon, Flynn, Kushner, Ivanka and Trump Jr., all of whom might have been able to provide damaging information on the real target, Donald Trump. Wasn’t that the idea? So why waste time on Page? It doesn’t make any sense, unless, of course, the others were already being surveilled by other agencies? Is that it, did the NSA and the CIA have a hand in the surveillance too?

It’s a moot point, isn’t it? Because now that there’s evidence that senior-level officials at the DOJ and the FBI were involved in improperly obtaining warrants to spy on members of the opposite party, the investigation is going to go wherever it goes. Whatever restrictions existed before, will now be lifted. For example, this popped up in Saturday’s The Hill:

“House Intelligence Committee lawmakers are in the dark about an investigation into wrongdoing at the State Department announced by Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Friday. …Nunes told Fox News on Friday that, “we are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation. That investigation is ongoing and we continue work toward finding answers and asking the right questions to try to get to the bottom of what exactly the State Department was up to in terms of this Russia investigation.”…

Since then, GOP lawmakers have been quietly buzzing about allegations that an Obama-era State Department official passed along information from allies of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that may have been used by the FBI to launch an investigation into whether the Trump campaign had improper contacts with Russia.

“I’m pretty troubled by what I read in the documents with respect to the role the State Department played in the fall of 2016, including information that was used in a court proceeding. I am troubled by it,” Gowdy told Fox News on Tuesday.” (“Lawmakers in dark about ‘phase two’ of Nunes investigation”, The Hill)

So the State Department is next in line followed by the NSA and, finally, the Russia-gate point of origin, John Brennan’s CIA. Here’s more background on that from Stephen Cohen’s illuminating article at The Nation:

“….when, and by whom, was this Intel operation against Trump started?

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, John Brennan, formerly Obama’s head of the CIA, strongly suggested that he and his agency were the first, as The Washington Post put it at the time, “in triggering an FBI probe.” Certainly both the Post and The New York Times interpreted his remarks in this way. Equally certain, Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier. Early on, Brennan presumably would have shared his “suspicions” and initiatives with James Clapper, director of national intelligence. FBI Director Comey… may have joined them actively somewhat later….

When did Brennan begin his “investigation” of Trump? His House testimony leaves this somewhat unclear, but, according to a subsequent Guardian article, by late 2015 or early 2016 he was receiving, or soliciting, reports from foreign intelligence agencies regarding “suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.”

In short, if these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator and godfather of Russiagate.” (“Russiagate or Intelgate?”, Stephen Cohen, The Nation)

Regular readers of this column know that we have always believed that the Russiagate psyops originated with Brennan. Just as the CIA launched its disinformation campaigns against Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi, so too, Russia has emerged as Washington’s foremost rival requiring a massive propaganda campaign to persuade the public that America faces a serious external threat. In any event, the demonizing of Russia had already begun by the time Hillary and Co. decided to hop on the bandwagon by blaming Moscow for hacking John Podesta’s emails. The allegations were never persuasive, but they did provide Brennan with some cover for the massive Information Operation (IO) that began with him.

According to the Washington Times:

“It was then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama’s, who provided the information — what he termed the “basis” — for the FBI to start the counterintelligence investigation last summer….Mr. Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee on May 23 that the intelligence community was picking up tidbits on Trump associates making contacts with Russians.”

It all started with Brennan. After Putin blocked Brennan’s operations in both Ukraine and Syria, Brennan had every reason to retaliate and to use the tools at his disposal to demonize Putin and try to isolate Russia. The “election meddling” charges (promoted by the Hillary people) fit perfectly with Brennan’s overall strategy to manipulate perceptions and prepare the country for an eventual confrontation. It provided him the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, to deliver a withering blow to Putin and Trump at the very same time. The temptation must have been irresistible.

But now the plan has backfired and the investigations are gaining pace. Trump’s allies in the House smell the blood in the water and they want answers. Did the CIA surveil members of the Trump campaign on the basis of information they gathered in the dossier? Who saw the information? Was the information passed along to members of the press and other government agencies? Was the White House involved? What role did Obama play? What about the Intelligence Community Assessment? Was it based on the contents of the Steele report? Will the “hand-picked” analysts who worked on the report vouch for its conclusions in or were they coached about what to write? How did Brennan persuade the reluctant Comey into opening a counterintelligence investigation on members in the Trump campaign when he knew it would be perceived as a partisan attempt to sabotage the elections by giving Hillary an edge?
Soon the investigative crosshairs will settle on Brennan. He’d better have the right answers.

Thirteen Russians and a Ham Sandwich

Posted on February 20, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Kunstler.com

Remember that one from 1996? Funny, that was the American mainstream media bragging, after the fact, about our own meddling in another nation’s election.

WASHINGTON — A team of American political strategists who helped [California] Gov. Pete Wilson with his abortive presidential bid earlier this year said this week that they served as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s secret campaign weapon in his comeback win over a Communist challenge.

—The Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1996

The beauty in Robert Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russian Facebook trolls is that they’ll never face trial, so Mr. Mueller will never have to prove his case. In the new misrule of law made popular by the #Me Too movement, accusations suffice to convict the target of an investigation. Kind of sounds like going medieval to me, but that’s how we roll now in the Land of the Free.

Readers know, of course, that I’m not a Trump supporter, that I regard him as a national embarrassment, but I’m much more disturbed by the mindless hysteria ginned up Washington’s permanent bureaucracy in collusion with half a dozen major newspapers and cable news networks, who have run a psy-ops campaign to shove the country into a war mentality.

The New York Times published a doozy of a lead story on Saturday, the day after the indictments were announced. The headline said: Trump’s Conspicuous Silence Leaves a Struggle Against Russia Without a Leader. Dean Baquet and his editorial board are apparently seeking an American Napoleon who will mount a white horse and take our legions into Moscow to teach these rascals a lesson — or something like that.

I’m surely not the only one to notice how this hysteria is designed to distract the public attention from the documented misconduct among FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department officials and the leaders of the #Resistance itself: the Democratic National Committee, its nominee in the 2016 election, HRC, and Barack Obama’s White House inner circle. You would think that at least some of this mischief would have come to Robert Mueller’s attention, since the paper trail of evidence is as broad and cluttered as the DC Beltway itself. It actually looks like the greatest act of bureaucratic ass-covering inn US history.

Of course, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was quick to qualify the announced indictments by saying that Russian trolling on Facebook had no effect on the 2016 election, and that the Trump campaign was not implicated in it. Maybe the indictments were just a table-setter for something more potent to come out of Mueller’s office. But what if it’s not. What if this is all he has to show for a year and a half of the most scrupulous delving into this “narrative?”

Meanwhile, the damage done among America’s former thinking class essentially leaves this polity like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz: without a brain. I doubt they will be satisfied by Mueller’s indictment of the thirteen Russian trolls. Rather, it may tempt them to even more violent hysterics and greater acts of lawlessness. The only thing that will stop this nonsense is Big Trouble in the financial system — which the news media and most of the public are ignoring at their peril. It is coming at us good and hard and it will feel like a two-by-four to nation’s skull when it gets here.

Biggest Nunes Memo Revelations Have Little To Do With Its Content

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Consortium News

It’s fitting that the ever-tightening repetitive loops of America’s increasingly schizophrenic partisan warfare finally hit peak shrillness and skyrocketed into a white noise singularity on Groundhog Day. Right now, we’re right about at the part of the movie where Bill Murray is driving over a cliff in a pickup truck with a large rodent behind the wheel.

If you only just started paying attention to U.S. politics in 2017 what I’m about to tell you will blow your mind, so you might want to sit down for this: believe it or not, there was once a time when both of America’s mainstream political parties weren’t screeching every single day that there was news about to break any minute now which would obliterate the other party forever. No Russiagate, no Nunes memo, no Rachel Maddow red yarn graphs, no Sean Hannity “tick tock,” no nothing. People screaming that the end is nigh and it’s all about to come crashing down were relegated to street corners and the occasional Infowars appearance, not practicing mainstream political punditry for multimillion dollar salaries on MSNBC and Fox News.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Americans are starting to look critically at the power dynamics in their country, but the partisan filters they’ve pulled over their eyes are causing mass confusion and delusion. Now everyone who questions the CIA is a Russian agent and the term “deep state” suddenly means “literally anyone who doesn’t like Donald Trump.” Your take on the contents of the Nunes memo will put you in one of two radically different political dimensions depending on which mainstream cult you’ve subscribed to, and it will cause you to completely miss the point of the entire ordeal.

The part of the memo that has everyone talking today reads as follows: “Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”

This refers to a surveillance warrant requested by the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking permission to spy on the communications of Carter Page, a member of the 2016 Trump campaign. The controversy revolves around the claim that this surveillance warrant would never have even been requested if not for the clearly biased, Clinton-funded, and error-riddled Christopher Steele dossier which is acknowledged even by its former MI6 author to be 10 to 30 percent inaccurate.

Combine that with the fact that this has never been made clear to the public, and baby you’ve got yourself a scandal. The FBI knowingly using extremely tainted evidence from one presidential campaign to get permission to spy on another would indeed be a very big deal.

There are some problems with the “BOOM! Bigger than Watergate!” exclamations that pro-Trump partisans have been parading around about this, however. The first is that the memo is only an internal communication between Republican congressmen; it’s not a sworn testimony or legal transcript or anything legally binding. It’s basically just some Republican ideas about what happened. The assertions made therein are reportedly being hotly contested by Democrats with knowledge of the situation, which is in turn being disputed by Republicans.

Another thing putting a damper on the GOP’s “KABOOM!” parade is the fact that the memo’s contents are not even entirely new; CNN reported way back in April of last year that sources had informed them that the Steele dossier had been used to get a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign. Additionally, even if every single allegation in the memo is true, the revelations are still arguably far less earth shattering than the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013 exposing the NSA’s sprawling domestic espionage network, so the expectation that these less significant new revelations would cause a radical transformation in U.S. politics when the Snowden revelations did not seems highly unrealistic.

Nonetheless, there have been some extremely important revelations as a result of this memo; they just haven’t come from the contents of the memo itself. In the same way that cybersecurity analysts observe the metadata underlying hacked files rather than the contents of the files themselves, political analysts have been pointing out that a lot can be learned about the political establishment by looking at its response to the possibility of the memo’s release.

“Memo is clearly not a blockbuster. We can tell so by reading it. Which makes Dems’ frantic efforts to prevent anyone from reading it seem even more bizarre,” observed TYT’s Michael Tracey. “Veracity of memo’s claims aside, we were told that its release would undermine the rule of law. So, just checking: is the rule of law still in tact?” he added later.

“Now it is clear to all,” WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange tweeted. “The claims about how the ‘Nunes’ memo would destroy ‘national security’ were lies. Classification stickers are used by bureaucrats trying to obtain ‘political security’ for their cronies.”

“One effect of the memo – it’s an example of how extensively we overclassify information,” wrote National Review’s David French. “I’m highly dubious that any information disclosed threatens national security in any way, shape, or form. I’d be willing to bet the Dem response is similarly harmless. Release it.”

Indeed, both the FBI and high-profile Democrats have been claiming that the memo’s unredacted release would pose a national security threat, with California Congressman (and virulent Russiagater) Eric Swalwell going so far to call it “brainwashing.” A CNN panelist wandered completely off the paddock and suggested that yesterday may have been America’s last day as a democracy. Why were they all flipping out so hysterically over a release of information that plainly poses no threat to the American people?

In addition to Assange’s assertion that government secrecy has far less to do with national security than political security (a claim he has made before which seems to be proving correct time and time again), there’s the jarring question posed by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie: “who made the decision to withhold evidence of FISA abuse until after Congress voted to renew FISA program?”

Whoa, Nelly. Hang on. What is he talking about?

It would be understandable if you were unaware of the debate over the reauthorization of FISA surveillance which resulted in unconditional bipartisan approval last month – the mainstream media barely touched it. In point of fact, though, the very surveillance practices alleged to have been abused in this hotly controversial memo are the same which was waved through by both the House and the Senate, and by the very same people promoting the memo in many cases.

The McCabe testimony was in December. FISA was renewed in January. Why is all this just coming out now? If the Republicans truly believed that McCabe said what the memo claims he said, why wasn’t the public informed before their elected representatives renewed the intelligence community’s dangerously intrusive surveillance approval? Was this information simply forgotten about until after those Orwellian powers had been secured?

Of course not. Don’t be an idiot.

This makes the kicking, screaming, wailing and gnashing of teeth by the political establishment make a lot more sense, doesn’t it? Now suddenly we’re looking at a he-said, she-said partisan battle over an issue which can only be resolved with greater and greater transparency of more and more government documents, and we can all see where that’s headed. In their rush to win a partisan battle and shield their president from the ongoing Russiagate conspiracy theory, the Republicans may have exposed too much of the establishment foundation upon which both parties are built.

The term “deep state” does not mean “Democrats and Never-Trumpers” as Republican pundits would have you believe, nor does the term refer to any kind of weird, unverifiable conspiracy theory. The deep state is in fact not a conspiracy theory at all, but simply a concept used in political analysis for discussing the undeniable fact that unelected power structures exist in America, and that they tend to form alliances and work together in some sense.

There is no denying the fact that plutocrats, intelligence agencies, defense agencies and the mass media are both powerful and unelected, and there is no denying the fact that there are many convoluted and often conflicting alliances between them. All that can be debated is the manner and extent to which this is happening.

The deep state is America’s permanent government, the U.S. power structures that Americans don’t elect. These power structures plainly have a vested interest in keeping America’s Orwellian surveillance structures in place, as evidenced by the intelligence community’s menacingly urgent demand for FISA renewal back in December. If there’s any thread to be pulled that really could make waves in the way Official Washington (hat tip to the late Robert Parry) operates, it is in the plot holes between the bipartisan scramble toward unconditional surveillance renewal and the highly partisan battle over exposing the abuse of those very powers.

If we’re going to see a gap in the bars of our cages, that’s a great place to keep our eyes trained, so keep watching. Watch what happens in a partisan war where both parties have a simultaneous interest in revealing as little of the game as possible and exposing the other party. Things could get very interesting.

Remembering Investigative Journalist Robert Parry

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Robert Parry in Washington, D.C. (AP, February 1987)

By Norman Soloman

Source: TheRealNews.com

After Robert Parry died on January 27, I asked another great investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, for some words. “I ran into Bob more than three decades ago when he was the first to warn of the Iran/Contra affair, to little avail,” Hersh replied. “He was widely seen over the next years as a critic of the mainstream media in America. That was not so. He was a critic of lousy reporting, be it in Pravda or The New York Times. He wanted every journalist, everywhere, to do the research and the interviewing that it takes to get beyond the accepted headline.”

What made Bob Parry a trailblazer for independent journalism also made him a bridge burner with the media establishment. He refused to take on faith the official story, whether from governments or news outlets. After winning acclaim, including a Polk Award, as an Associated Press reporter who broke many big stories on deadly US policies in Central America, he spent three years at Newsweek—where he saw top editors collaborating with officials of the George H.W. Bush administration on what should be shared or withheld from the public. Bob left the magazine in 1990, and soon his relations with mainstream media had a whistle-blower quality. His 1992 book Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom named names and pulled no punches.

Midway through the decade, Bob did a stint as director of the Nation Institute’s investigative unit. His writing for The Nation during 1996 included pieces about the CIA and drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras, the bankrolled power of right-wing foundations, and a seven-page expose that is chilling to read more than 30 years later—an investigative report on the Koch brothers.

In 1995, Parry launched a unique journalistic space, Consortiumnews.com, where he worked intensely as publisher, editor, and writer. For the next 22 years, Parry oversaw the website’s scrutiny of elite wisdom. His work, which included authoring six books, won the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation in 2015 and, last year, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

I got to see Bob at work up close, in 1996, when we co-wrote a series on a media darling: “Behind Colin Powell’s Legend.” During interviews, Bob was politely unrelenting. He had a methodical zest for plowing through documents, determined to “master the material.” And he was professionally generous; I wrote just a small proportion of the articles, but he insisted that I share the byline on every one.

Bob was notably non-ideological. What propelled him was a moral core and determination to follow the facts. That devotion led him to expose the lethal deceptions and machinations of Reagan-era figures like Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, and Caspar Weinberger. Three decades later, the same resolve to separate fact from spun fiction put him on a collision course with the conventional wisdom of “Russiagate.”

No one knew better than Bob Parry how intelligence agencies and major media outlets can create a cascading frenzy. Beginning in late 2016, Bob was prolific as he debunked the torrent of hyperbolic claims about Russia that became an ever-present flood across the US media landscape. Some progressive sites went from often posting his articles in 2016 to rarely or never posting them in 2017.

“For years, the mainstream, establishment media have, by their malpractices in covering US-Russian relations from Ukraine to ‘Russiagate,’ been deeply complicit in the unfolding of this new Cold War and its unprecedented dangers,” said Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a contributing editor at The Nation. “Bob Parry, very often alone, exposed those malpractices, especially those committed by the powerful New York Times and Washington Post, misreported story by misreported story, sometimes daily. For this, he was ostracized, slurred, certainly ignored by mainstream media.”

At the end of December, a week after his first stroke left him with badly blurred eyesight, Bob somehow was able to write what turned out to be his final article, brilliant and transcendent, a kind of cri de coeur that is a stunning last testament to “the journalistic principles of skepticism and evenhandedness.” Western journalists, he wrote, “now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many ‘liberals’ who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the US intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.”

At the close of a lengthy tribute that appeared the day after his father’s death, Nat Parry wrote that, “ultimately, Bob was motivated by a concern over the future of life on Earth. As someone who grew up at the height of the Cold War, he understood the dangers of allowing tensions and hysteria to spiral out of control, especially in a world such as ours with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on the planet many times over.”

Robert Parry carried the lantern high. Now others will need to carry it on.

Read Robert Parry’s final article (posted 12/31/17) at https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/

‘New World Order’ is falling apart

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

One of the more welcomed outcomes of the paring back of the U.S. State Department bureaucracy is the elimination of scores of “status quo enthusiasts.” Since the end of World War II, the State Department’s ranks have been populated by foreign service officers and career diplomats who have championed the international status quo.

These minions of Foggy Bottom received encouragement for their protective stance on post-World War II and the Cold War in President George H. W. Bush’s speech on September 11, 1990, which was titled, “Toward a New World Order.” Under the “new world order,” regional and global security concerns would supplant democratic independence movements. The immediate effect of this “order” was brutal crackdowns on secession in the periphery of the former Soviet Union, including Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, as well as in Somalia, the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey, East Timor, Sudan, and Ethiopia. However, in Yugoslavia, which the United States and European Union wanted to see dissolved, secessionists in seven constituent states were encouraged to secede from the federation. That resulted in the bloodiest military conflicts in Europe since World War II.

Leaders of secessionist groups visiting Washington were traditionally shunned by the State Department. These hapless would-be presidents and prime ministers would be lucky to meet with a low-ranking State Department employee. However, if their independence movements were championed by the Central Intelligence Agency, they would get red carpet treatment. Such was the case with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s favorite Balkans “toy boy,” Hashim Thaci, the leader of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and now president of the Republic of Kosovo, which was carved out of Serbia but is still unrecognized by many of the world’s most important nations, including China and Russia.

Today, one of the most-commonly seen words in State Department Country Desk reports is “secession.” In the past, State Department senior bureaucrats would be raising this development with the secretary of state as a major threat to U.S. interests. The CIA would then be instructed to remedy the situation by providing intelligence support to the countries where secessionist activity was a rising problem. “Support” would range from intelligence assistance to full-blown military aid.

As the United States recedes from the “world’s only superpower” status, to the chagrin of neoconservatives who are pouring into the Donald Trump administration in order to right the capsizing ship-of-state, secessionist activity is seen from the streets of Catalonia, which recently re-elected a pro-independence parliament, to virtual city-states in Mexico, which are increasingly going it alone to offset the breakdown in federal security and law enforcement support.

In the secessionist-minded Republika Srpska, a restive constituent region of the Bosnia-Herzegovina federation, Serbian nationalists have held a banned “statehood” celebration in the regional capital of Banja Luka. Srpska President Milorad Dodik demanded more autonomy for his region, declaring there were two Serbian states, Serbia and Republika Srpska. Present at the banned event were Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin, Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, and former Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic. Joining them was Anatoly Bibilov, the president of the breakaway Republic of the Republic of South Ossetia–the State of Alania in the Caucasus region.

To the consternation of Eurocrats in Brussels and in the Balkans, also in attendance was Aleksandar Karadjordjevic and his wife, the heirs presumptive to the throne of the former Yugoslavia, and Johann Gudenus, the chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which makes up half of the governing coalition of Austria. Dodik awarded a Republika Srpska medal to Austrian Vice-Chancellor Hans Christian Strache, the leader of the FPO faction in the Austrian government. In the past, such an international outpouring of support for a secessionist-minded republic would have resulted in a flurry of diplomatic protests and démarches from the State Department.

After a recent election returned a coalition of pro-independence Catalonian parties to a majority of 70 seats in the Catalonian 135-seat parliament, the neofascist Madrid government of Mariano Rajoy has been put into a quandary. The Catalonian parliament has re-elected former Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont, who was removed by Rajoy after an October 1, 2017, referendum that favored independence. Puigdemont, who is in self-exile in Belgium, where he has the support of the powerful Flemish pro-independence party, faces arrest by the Madrid regime if he returns to Catalonia. The thuggish reaction by the Rajoy regime has engendered sympathy for the Catalonian cause in other secessionist-minded regions of Spain, including the Basque region, Valencia, and Galicia, and around the world.

The case of Catalonia has resulted in popular blowback against Spain from other parts of Europe, including Scotland, which is demanding a second referendum on independence upon Britain’s exit from the European Union. Support for continued membership in the EU has also increased demands for independence from Wales and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom.

Taking a cue from the Madrid government, Nigerian authorities recently arrested Cameroonian Anglophone secessionist movement leader Sessekou Julius Ayuk Tabe, along with some of his aides, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. The arrests came after Cameroon accused Nigeria of harboring supporters of the breakaway region of Ambazonia on the Nigerian side of the border. French-speaking Cameroon considers the English-speaking secessionist movement to be a “terrorist” organization, the usual appellation assigned by Third World dictatorships to pro-democracy groups and movements.

The newly-inaugurated president of Somaliland, Muse Bihi Abdi, was received with full diplomatic honors on his first trip abroad to neighboring Djibouti. What makes this newsworthy is that no country has formally recognized Somaliland’s self-declared independence from Somalia, even though the country has been independent for 19 years. Somaliland, which has its own currency and issues its own passports, maintains an effective government as compared to that of Somalia’s. In the past, Djibouti’s full honors for the Somaliland president would have resulted in a curt diplomatic note from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti for extending de facto recognition of Somaliland. There is now a scramble for military and political influence in the Horn of Africa by the United States, China, France, Turkey, Germany, Russia, Japan, Britain, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar.

The UAE sees Somaliland and a restored independent South Yemen as in its national interests, hence, the oil-rich federation is establishing de facto bases in Somaliland’s port of Berbera, the Yemeni island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, and two key Yemeni islands in the Red Sea: Perim and Kamaran. In the past, the United States, which always wanted Socotra for its own military use, merely because it was once a Soviet intelligence base, would have threatened Yemen and the UAE with reprisals. However, Yemen is a failed state and the UAE is now overshadowing American influence in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden region.

In Mexico, the town of Tancítaro, which lies deep within the drug cartel-controlled state of Michoacán, has decided to establish a de facto city-state. The “avocado capital of the world” is now governed by a “junta,” which is backed by wealthy avocado growers who have hired their own security force to contend with the narco-gangs. Similar quasi-city states have been established in Monterrey, where local businesses have taken over security duties from corrupt police, and Ciudad Nezahualcóуotl (or “Neza”), outside of Mexico City, where the local leftist administration has established its control over the local police, monitoring their every activity for corruption or human rights abuses.

The Algerian government has decided, after years of opposition, to acceding to some of the demands of the minority Berber Kabylie Independence Movement. Amazigh, the Berber language, is now an official language of Algeria. Algeria now celebrates January 12 as Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year. An Amazigh language academy is now planned in Algeria. In the past, the U.S. State Department, influenced by U.S. oil and gas firms active in southern Algeria, would have been aghast at concessions by the Algerian government to Berber nationalists. In what worries Spain, Amazigh is now the third most widely spoken language in Catalonia, after Spanish and Catalan. The Catalans and Amazigh share common ancient roots that have manifested themselves in modern cooperation to advance their statehood goals.

In India, some “scheduled tribals,” the name assigned by the government to indigenous tribal groups, are examining historical documents between British colonial officials and their own past leaders and are discovering they have every right to independence from India. Indian police recently arrested for “sedition” the 83-year-old Ramo Birua, from a village in Jharkhand state, because he called for the raising of the flag of an independent Kolhan state. Birua and his followers cited the rule imposed in 1837 by the British Agent for Kolhan region, Sir Thomas Wilkinson. The “Wilkinson Rule” stipulated that the existing civil and criminal laws of tribal states would be recognized by the British authorities. India’s independence did nothing to change the Wilkinson Rule, thus, “scheduled tribes” across India have a legal right to go their own way. In the case of Mr. Birua, he claims his tribe’s right to sovereignty is ensured by British Queen Elizabeth II, as the heir to Queen Victoria, the British monarch whose royal imprimatur was conferred upon the Wilkinson Rule.

Even within the United States, there is talk of “autonomy” by states from federal intrusions. Colorado is prepared to fight the Trump administration’s stated crack down on marijuana sales. In Colorado and other states that have legalized marijuana, Democratic and Republican officials are prepared to fight the Drug Enforcement Administration in any moves against their legalized medical and recreational marijuana industries. The same applies to federal authority to conduct offshore oil exploration and drilling. California, which has also declared its independence from Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, is standing opposed to drilling in its Pacific waters. Florida successfully persuaded Trump to exempt it from the drilling order, however, Virginia, North Carolina, and other states are seeking similar exemptions. Other matters that are driving states’ rights rebellions against Washington are in the areas of immigration, federal land use, engine emissions standards, voting rights, health care, and public education. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, abandoned by Washington after repeated hurricane disasters, are subtly re-evaluating their previous opposition to independence.

The demise of neo-colonialist busybody diplomats at the State Department has ushered a “global spring,” where both active and long-dormant independence movements are seeing glimmers of hope for their own nation-states.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: CIA

Remembering Investigative Journalist Robert Parry

Read Robert Parry’s final article (posted 12/31/17) at https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/

‘New World Order’ is falling apart