US Has More Sanctions Against Russia Than Against Ebola

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

We have known since . . . well, when haven’t we known that our public officials are incompetent [more specifically, incompetent at tasks serving the public interest]. Their incompetence is always expensive, but now it risks a worldwide ebola pandemic.

With so little known about a deadly disease, one would think that with ebola on the rampage in three west Africa countries, air flights to and from these countries would be halted.

When riots or kidnappings present dangers in foreign lands, the State Department issues a travel advisory and warns, and sometimes prevents, Americans from traveling to areas of danger. As the ebola danger goes beyond the person himself, one would think public officials would have halted traffic to and from west Africa. In fact, it is harder for a critic of the US government, especially if the critic is Muslim, to enter the US than for a person infected with ebola. Indeed, there are a number of Russians who cannot enter the US because of unilaterally imposed US sanctions. But there are no sanctions against ebola.

Apparently, public health officials have an outdated and incorrect comprehension of ebola and how it spreads. A sufficient number of medical personnel protected against ebola patients’ body fluids but without respirators have now been infected to indicate that the current strain of ebola can spread by air like flu. This also means surface contact.

Airplane cleaning crews at New York LaGuardia are on strike because there are no precautions or protections for cleaners who could come into contact with ebola from an infected passenger. Neither does the next passenger on an outgoing flight have any assurance that he will not be sitting in the seat occupied by an ebola carrier on the incoming flight.

In fact, something like this might have already occurred. A British citizen who has not been to countries where there are ebola outbreaks has just died in Skopje, Macedonia, apparently from ebola. His companion told authorities that they had travelled straight from the UK. The hotel has been sealed off, and the hotel staff and ambulance crew have been isolated. I assume also the traveling companion, but the report doesn’t say. http://rt.com/news/194640-briton-ebola-macedonia-dead/

Five US airports that have flights to the infected west African countries have imposed screening on incoming passengers, such as temperature checks. This is better than nothing, but if, as is believed, the deadly virus has a long incubation period, this screening would only catch people with symptoms, and, of course, there are many reasons for high temperatures, especially during cold and flu season.

So what our incompetent public officials have arranged is screening that will quarantine people who have caught a cold but fail to catch those carrying ebola who have not yet come down with it.

Par for the course.

The US and Global Wars: Empire or Vampire?

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Reid Mukai

GIF by WhatReallyHappened.com

By James Petras

Source: Axis of Logic

Introduction

To the growing army of critics of US military intervention, who also reject the mendacious claims by American officials and their apologists of ‘world leadership’, Washington is engaged in ‘empire-building”.

But the notion that the US is building an empire, by engaging in wars to exploit and plunder countries’ markets, resources and labor, defies the realities of the past two decades. US wars, including invasions, bombings, occupations, sanctions, coups and clandestine operations have not resulted in the expansion of markets, greater control and exploitation of resources or the ability to exploit cheap labor. Instead US wars have destroyed enterprises, reduced access to raw materials, killed, wounded or displaced productive workers around the world, and limited access to lucrative investment sites and markets via sanctions.

In other words, US global military interventions and wars have done the exact opposite of what all previous empires have pursued: Washington has exploited (and depleted) the domestic economy to expand militarily abroad instead of enriching it.

Why and how the US global wars differ from those of previous empires requires us to examine (1) the forces driving overseas expansion; (2) the political conceptions accompanying the conquest, the displacement of incumbent rulers and the seizure of power and; (3) the reorganization of the conquered states and the accompanying economic and social structures to sustain long-term neo-colonial relations.

Empire Building: The Past

Europe built durable, profitable and extensive empires, which enriched the ‘mother country’, stimulated local industry, reduced unemployment and ‘trickled down’ wealth in the form of better wages to privileged sectors of the working class. Imperial military expeditions were preceded by the entry of major trade enterprises (British East India Company) and followed by large-scale manufacturing, banking and commercial firms. Military invasions and political takeovers were driven by competition with economic rivals in Europe, and later, by the US and Japan.

The goal of military interventions was to monopolize control over the most lucrative economic resources and markets in the colonized regions. Imperial repression was directed at creating a docile low wage labor force and buttressing subordinate local collaborators or client-rulers who facilitated the flow of profits, debt payments, taxes and export revenues back to the empire.

Imperial wars were the beginning, not the end, of ‘empire building’. What followed these wars of conquest was the incorporation of pre-existing elites into subordinate positions in the administration of the empire. The ‘sharing of revenues’, between the imperial economic enterprises and pre-existing elites, was a crucial part of ‘empire building’. The imperial powers sought to ‘instrumentalize’ existing religious, political, and economic elites’ and harness them to the new imperial-centered division of labor. Pre-existing economic activity, including local manufacturers and agricultural producers, which competed with imperial industrial exporters, were destroyed and replaced by malleable local traders and importers (compradors). In summary, the military dimensions of empire building were informed by economic interests in the mother country. The occupation was pre-eminently concerned with preserving local collaborative powers and, above all, restoring and expanding the intensive and extensive exploitation of local resources and labor, as well as the capture and saturation of local markets with goods from the imperial center.

“Empire-building” Today

The results of contemporary US military interventions and invasions stand in stark contrast with those of past imperial powers. The targets of military aggression are selected on the basis of ideological and political criteria. Military action does not follow the lead of ‘pioneer’ economic entrepreneurs – like the British East India Company. Military action is not accompanied by large-scale, long-term capitalist enterprises. Multi-national construction companies of the empire, which build great military bases are a drain on the imperial treasury.

Contemporary US intervention does not seek to secure and take over the existing military and civilian state apparatus; instead the invaders fragment the conquered state, decimate its cadres, professionals and experts at all levels, thus providing an entry for the most retrograde ethno-religious, regional, tribal and clan leaders to engage in intra-ethnic, sectarian wars against each other, in other words – chaos. Even the Nazis, in their expansion phase, chose to rule through local collaborator elites and maintained established administrative structures at all levels.

With US invasions, entire existing socio-economic structures are undermined, not ‘taken over’: all productive activity is subject to the military priorities of leaders bent on permanently crippling the conquered state and its advanced economic, administrative, educational, cultural and social sectors. While this is militarily successful in the short-run, the medium and long-term results are non-functioning states, not a sustained inflow of plunder and expanding market for an empire. Instead what we have is a chain of US military bases surrounded by a sea of hostile, largely unemployed populations and warring ethno-religious groups in decimated economies.

The US claims to ‘world leadership’ is based exclusively on failed-state empire building. Nevertheless, the dynamic for continuing to expand into new regions, to militarily and politically intervene and establish new client entities continues. And, most importantly, this expansionist dynamic further undermines domestic economic interests, which, theoretically and historically, form the basis for empire. We, therefore, have imperialism without empire, a vampire state preying on the vulnerable and devouring its own in the process.

Empire or Vampire: The Results of US Global Warfare

Empires, throughout history, have violently seized political power and exploited the riches and resources (both material and human) of the targeted regions. Over time, they would consolidate a ‘working relation’, insuring the ever-increasing flow of wealth into the mother country and the expanding presence of imperial enterprises in the colony. Contemporary US military interventions have had the opposite effect after every recent major military conquest and occupation.

Iraq: Vampires Pillage

Under Saddam Hussein, the Republic of Iraq was a major oil producer and profitable partner for major US oil companies, as well as a lucrative market for US exports. It was a stable, unified secular state. The first Gulf War in the 1990s led to the first phase of its fragmentation with the de facto establishment of a Kurdish mini-state in the north under US protection. The US withdrew its military forces but imposed brutal economic sanctions limiting economic reconstruction from the devastation of the first Gulf War. The second US-led invasion and full-scale occupation in 2003 devastated the economy and dismantled the state dismissing tens of thousands of experienced civil servants, teachers and police. This led to utter social collapse and fomented ethno-religious warfare leading to the killing, wounding or displacement of millions of Iraqis. The result of GW Bush’s conquest of Baghdad was a ‘failed state’. US oil and energy companies lost billions of dollars in trade and investment and the US economy was pushed into recession.

Afghanistan: Endless Wars, Endless Losses

The US war against Afghanistan began with the arming, financing and political support of Islamist jihadi-fundamentalists in 1979. They succeeded in destroying and dismantling a secular, national government. With the decision to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 the US became an occupier in Southwest Asia. For the next thirteen years, the US-puppet regime of Hamad Karzai and the ‘NATO coalition’ occupation forces proved incapable of defeating the Taliban guerrilla army. Billions of dollars were spent devastating the economy and impoverishing the vast majority of Afghans. Only the opium trade flourished. The effort to create an army loyal to the puppet regime failed. The forced retreat of US armed forces beginning in 2014 signals the bitter demise of US ‘empire building’ in Southwest Asia.

Libya: From Lucrative Trading Partner to Failed State

Libya, under President Gadhafi, was evolving into a major US and European trading partner and influential power in Africa. The regime signed large-scale, long-term contracts with major international oil companies that were backed by a stable secular government. The relationship with the US and EU was profitable. The US opted to impose a ‘regime change’ through massive US-EU missile and bombing strikes and the arming of a motley collection of Islamist terrorists, ex-pat neo-liberals and tribal militias. While these attacks succeeded in killing President Gadhafi and most of his family (including many of his grandchildren) and dismantling the secular Libyan government and administrative infrastructure, the country was ripped apart by tribal war-lord conflicts, political disintegration and the utter destruction of the economy. Oil investors fled. Over one million Libyans and immigrant workers were displaced. The US and EU ‘partners-in-regime-change’ have even fled their own embassies in Tripoli – while the Libyan ‘parliament’ operates off-shore from a casino boat. None of this devastation would have been possible under President Gadhafi. The US vampire bled its new prize, Libya, but certainly could not incorporate it into a profitable ‘empire’. Not only were its oil resources denied to the empire, but even oil exports disappeared. Not even an imperial military base has been secured in North Africa!

Syria: Wars on Behalf of Terrorists not Empire

Washington and its EU allies backed an armed uprising in Syria hoping to install a puppet regime and bring Damascus into their “empire”. The mercenary assaults have caused the deaths of nearly 200,000 Syrians, the displacement of over 30% of the population and the seizure of the Syrian oil fields by the Sunni extremist army, ISIS. ISIS has decimated the pro-US mercenary army, recruiting and arming thousands of terrorists from around the world It invaded neighboring Iraq conquering the northern third of that country. This was the ultimate result of the deliberate US dismantling of the Iraqi state in 2003.

The US strategy, once again, is to arm Islamist extremists to overthrow the secular Bashar Assad regime in Damascus and then to discard them for a more pliable client. The strategy ‘boomeranged’ on Washington. ISIS devastated the ineffective Iraqi armed forces of the Maliki regime in Baghdad and America’s much over-rated Peshmerga proxy ‘fighters’ in Iraqi ‘Kurdistan’. Washington’s mercenary war in Syria didn’t expand the ‘empire’; indeed it undermined existing imperial outposts.

The Ukrainian Power Grab, Russian Sanctions and Empire Building

In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the US and EU incorporated the Baltic, Eastern European and Balkan ex-communist countries into their orbit. This clearly violated major agreements with Russia, by incorporating most of the neo-liberal regimes into NATO and bringing NATO forces to the very border of Russia. During the corrupt regime of Boris Yeltsin, the ‘West’ absolutely looted the Russian economy in co-operation with local gangster – oligarchs, who took up EU or Israeli citizenship to recycle their pillaged wealth. The demise of the vassal Yeltsin regime and the ascent and recovery of Russia under Vladimir Putin led the US and EU to formulate a strategy to deepen and extend its ‘empire’ by seizing power in the Caucuses and the Ukraine. A power and land grab by the puppet regime in Georgia attacking Russian forces in Ossetia in 2012 was decisively beaten back. This was a mere dress rehearsal for the coup in Kiev. In late 2013-early 2014, the US financed a violent rightwing putsch ousting the elected government and imposing a hand-picked pro-NATO client to assume power in Kiev.

The new pro-US regime moved quickly to purge all independent, democratic, federalist, bilingual and anti-NATO voices especially among the bi-lingual citizens concentrated in the South-Eastern Ukraine. The coup and the subsequent purge provoked a major armed uprising in the southeast, which successfully resisted the invading NATO-backed neo-fascist armed forces and private armies of the oligarchs. The failure of the Kiev regime to subdue the resistance fighters of the Donbass region resulted in a multi-pronged US-EU intervention designed to isolate, weaken and undermine the resistance. First and foremost they attempted to pressure Russia to close its borders on the eastern front where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians eventually fled the bombardment. Secondly, the US and EU applied economic sanctions on Russia to abandon its political support for the southeast region’s democratic and federalist demands. Thirdly, it sought to use the Ukraine conflict as a pretext for a major military build-up on Russia’s borders, expanding NATO missile sites and organizing an elite rapid interventionist military force capable of bolstering a faltering puppet regime or backing a future NATO sponsored putsch against any adversary.

The Kiev regime is economically bankrupt. Its war against its own civilians in the southeast has devastated Ukraine’s economy. Hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals, workers and their families have fled to Russia. Kiev’s embrace of the EU has resulted in the breakdown of vital gas and oil agreements with Russia, undermining the Ukraine’s principle source of energy and heating with winter only months away. Kiev cannot pay its debts and faces default. The rivalries between neo-fascists and neo-liberals in Kiev will further erode the regime. In sum, the US-EU power grab in the Ukraine has not led to the effective ‘expansion of empire’; rather it has ushered in the total destruction of an emerging economy and precipitated a sharp reversal of financial, trade and investment relations with Russia and Ukraine. The economic sanctions against Russia exacerbate the EU current economic crisis. The belligerent posture of military confrontation toward Russia will result in an increase in military spending among the EU states and further divert scarce economic resources form job creation and social programs. The loss by significant sectors of the EU of agricultural export markets, as well as the loss of several billion-dollar military-industrial contracts with Russia, certainly weakens, rather than expands, the ‘empire’ as an economic force

Iran: 100 Billion Dollar Punitive Sanctions Don’t Build Empires

The US-EU sanctions on Iran carry a very high political, economic and political price tag. They do not strengthen empire, if we understand ‘empire’ to mean the expansion of multi-national corporations, and increasing access to oil and gas resources to ensure stable, cheap energy for strategic economic sectors within the imperial center.

The economic war on Iran has been at the behest of US allies, including the Gulf Monarchies and especially Israel. These are dubious ‘allies’ for US ‘empire’ . . . widely reviled potentates and a racist regime which manage to exact tribute from the imperial center!

In Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, Iran has demonstrated its willingness to co-operate in power sharing agreements with US global interest. However, Iran is a regional power, which will not submit to becoming a vassal state of the US. The sanctions policy has not provoked an uprising among the Iranian masses nor has it led to regime change. Sanctions have not weakened Iran to the extent of making it an easy military target. While sanctions have weakened Iran’s economy, they has also worked against any kind of long-range empire building strategy, because Iran has strengthened its economic and diplomatic ties with the US’ rivals, Russia and China.

Conclusion

As this brief survey indicates, US-EU wars have not been instruments of empire-building in the conventional or historical sense. At most they have destroyed some adversaries of empire. But these have been pyrrhic victories. Along with the overthrow of a target regime, the systematic break-up of the state has unleashed powerful chaotic forces, which have doomed any possibility of creating stable neo-colonial regimes capable of controlling their societies and securing opportunities for imperialist enrichment via economic exploitation.

At most the US overseas wars have secured military outposts, foreign islands in seas of desperate and hostile populations. Imperial wars have provoked continuous underground resistance movements, ethnic civil wars and violent terrorist organizations that threaten ‘blowback’ on the imperial center.

The US and EU’s easy annexations of the ex-communist countries, usually via the stage-managed ballot-box or ‘color revolutions’, led to the take-over of great national wealth and skilled labor. However, Euro-American empires bloody campaigns to invade and conquer the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa and the Caucuses have created nightmarish ‘failed states’ – continuously draining imperial coffers and leading to a state of permanent occupation and warfare.

The bloodless takeover of the Eastern European satellites with their accommodating, corrupt elites has ended. The 21^st century reliance on militarist strategies contrasts sharply with the successful multi-pronged colonial expansions of the 19th–20th century, where economic penetration and large scale economic development accompanied military intervention and political change. Today’s imperial wars cause economic decay and misery within the domestic economy, as well as perpetual wars abroad, an unsustainable drain.

The current US/EU military expansion into Ukraine, the encirclement of Russia, NATO missiles aimed at the very heart of a major nuclear power and the economic sanctions may lead to a global nuclear war, which may indeed put an end to militarist empire-building… and the rest of humanity.

US to rapidly expand war in Iraq and Syria

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Symonds

Source: World Socialist Web Site

In the wake of President Obama’s speech Wednesday night, the US is preparing to rapidly ramp up its military operations in Syria and Iraq. Over the past month, the American military has carried out about 150 air strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militias inside Iraq. Now, Obama declared, the US will “go on offense,” extending the war in Iraq and into Syria.

While ISIS “terrorists” are the nominal target, the new US-led war in the Middle East is above all a revival of plans shelved a year ago for the toppling of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Immediately after Obama’s address, a senior American defence official briefed the media on the Pentagon’s plans, declaring that it “is ready to conduct direct action against ISIL [ISIS] targets in Syria.” Of the nearly 500 additional US troops due to arrive in Iraq next week, more than half will be allocated to boosting joint operational command centres in Baghdad and the northern Kurdish city of Erbil, closer to the Syrian border. Another 125 military personnel are to go to Erbil to boost the number of drone strikes inside Iraq and Syria.

US Special Forces are already operating in Iraq and undoubtedly will be deployed inside Syria. A senior Air Force commander told USA Today that, while spy planes could identify targets in Iraq and Syria, it was “absolutely crucial that pilots are talking to an American on the ground.” He drew a parallel with the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 when US Special Forces and CIA operatives infiltrated into the country to guide US air strikes on Taliban targets and lay the ground work for the military occupation.

The Obama administration is pressing for Congress to authorise $500 million to train and equip anti-Assad militias, which is likely to proceed quickly with bipartisan support. At the same time, US Secretary of State John Kerry is touring the Middle East to enlist political and military support for anti-Assad forces inside Syria.

Twelve months ago, Obama called off a US air war against the Assad regime at the last minute amid widespread popular hostility, divisions in US ruling circles, lack of support from key allies such as Britain and opposition, particularly from Russia. Now the White House has seized on the spectre of ISIS—which the US and its allies in the Gulf States helped foster and fund—as the pretext for dusting off its plans for regime-change in Syria.

Saudi Arabia, which was bitter about the US decision to cancel the air strikes last year, is enthusiastically supporting the new war against ISIS, even though significant sections of the Saudi elite have been backing ISIS. The Saudi monarchy is well aware that the US has Assad firmly in its sights. Assad’s overthrow would greatly weaken the Saudi regime’s arch rival, Iran, by removing Iran’s ally in the Middle East.

The Saudi regime has offered facilities on its soil for the US to train and arm “moderate” anti-Assad militias and yesterday hosted a meeting between Kerry and Middle Eastern foreign ministers, including from the Gulf States, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq. A joint communiqué between the US and 10 Arab states endorsed efforts to cut off funding to ISIS and block the flow of volunteers to ISIS.

The statement called for a coordinated military campaign, to which each country would contribute “as appropriate.” No specifics were spelled out, but a US State Department official traveling with Kerry told the media that “there’s going to be a meeting soon of defence ministers to work out the details,” including “enhanced basing and overflights” for US military forces.

Speaking after the meeting, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal enthused: “There is no limit to what the kingdom can provide.” Asked about previous criticism of Obama’s decision last year to call off air strikes on Syria, he played down past differences, declaring: “I don’t see disagreement. I see agreement about the present situation.” Any Saudi involvement in military operations inside Syria would dramatically heighten tensions with Iran and throughout the region.

The presence of the new Iraqi foreign minister is significant because Saudi Arabia branded the previous Baghdad government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as an Iranian puppet and cut diplomatic relations. Washington’s determination to oust Maliki to make way for “a more inclusive government,” formed this week, was aimed at drawing Iraq toward Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, and isolating Iran.

Kerry, who met with new government ministers in Baghdad on Wednesday, underlined how critical Maliki’s removal was to Washington’s war plans. “Now that the Iraqi parliament has approved a new cabinet with new leaders and representative from all Iraqi communities, it’s full speed ahead. A new, inclusive Iraqi government has to be the engine of our global strategy against ISIL.”

While repeating the line that the US would not deploy combat troops, Kerry left the door wide open by adding the rider, “unless, obviously, something very, very dramatic changes.” Dramatic changes are virtually inevitable as the US plunges recklessly into a military conflict in Iraq and Syria. If a sufficiently dramatic event does not emerge, it can always be provoked or manufactured.

The governments in Syria, Iran and Russia understand that they are the targets of this phony new “war on terror.” Syrian National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar declared yesterday that “any action of any type without the approval of the Syrian government is an attack against Syria.” Haidar insisted “there must be cooperation with Syria,” but Obama has emphatically ruled that out.

Russia’s foreign ministry warned that any US action, “in the absence of a UN Security Council decision, would be an act of aggression, a gross violation of international law.” Obama has indicated that, while he will seek a UN resolution, the US is prepared to act without it. Already confronted by the intervention of the US and its European partners in Ukraine, Russia now faces the prospect of losing its only ally in the Middle East and access to a Mediterranean port for its naval vessels.

Just as the 2003 invasion of Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction, so the latest US military intervention in the Middle East has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but is aimed at securing American domination throughout the region. A decade on, under conditions of greatly heightened geo-political tensions, this new expanded war of aggression threatens to embroil the entire region and trigger a far broader conflagration.

The Downing of Malaysia Flight 17: Sinister Pretext for War with Russia

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Mike Whitney

Source: Counterpunch

“There is no innocent explanation for the sudden disappearance of MH17 from the media and political spotlight. The plane’s black box has been held in Britain for examination for weeks, and US and Russian spy satellites and military radar were intensively scanning east Ukraine at the time of the crash. The claim that Washington does not have detailed knowledge of the circumstances of the crash and the various forces involved is not credible.”

– Niles Williamson, “Why have the media and Obama administration gone silent on MH17?”, World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/18/ukmh-a18.html

See: 11 minute you tube “MH17 – We know with 99% certainty who shot down MH17“

The Obama administration has failed to produce any hard evidence that pro-Russia separatists were responsible for the downing of Malaysia Flight 17. The administration’s theory– that the jetliner was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from rebel territory in east Ukraine– is not supported by radar data, satellite imagery, eyewitness testimony or forensic evidence. In fact, there is no factual basis for the hypothesis at all. It’s merely politically-motivated speculation that’s been repeated endlessly in the media to shape public opinion. The preponderance of evidence suggests a different scenario altogether, that is, that MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian fighters in an effort to frame the pro-Russia separatists and demonize Russia by implication. This is precisely why the MH17 story has vanished from all the major media for the last three weeks. It’s because the bloody fingerprints point to Obama’s puppet-government in Kiev.

So what are the facts?

Fact Number 1: There were eyewitnesses.

According to the Oxford dictionary, an eyewitness is “A person who has personally seen something happen and can give a first-hand description of it.” This is why eyewitness testimony is so important in criminal investigations, because what people actually see matters. In a capital case, eyewitness testimony can be just as damning as the bloody fingerprints on a murder weapon. In contrast, theories are of little or no importance at all. The administration’s missile theory is just obfuscating blabber intended to pacify the public with a soothing explanation that is entirely divorced from the facts. Eyewitness accounts help to cut through government bullsh** and uncover what really happened.

So, what did happen to MH17? Check out this blurb from a report by the BBC:

”The inhabitants of the nearby villages are certain they saw military aircraft in the sky shortly before the catastrophe. According to them, it was actually the jet fighters that brought down the Boeing.

Eyewitness number one: “There were two explosions in the air. And this is how it broke apart, (Waves her hands to show the plane exploding) And there was another aircraft, a military one, beside it. Everyone saw it….

Yes, yes, It was flying under it, because it could be seen. It was flying underneath…below the civilian plane.”

Many people saw what happened. Many people saw the Ukrainian fighter rise in a shark-on-seal type motion. Many people saw the explosion. Are these credible witnesses? Are they lying? Do they have a political agenda?

We don’t know, but we do know what they said. They said they saw a fighter (probably a Ukrainian SU 25) stalking MH17 just before it blew up. That’s significant and it should have a bearing on the investigation.

Fact Number 2: Russia picked up the Ukrainian fighters on their radar.

According to Russian military analysts:

“Russian monitoring systems registered Ukrainian airforce jet, probably an SU 25 fighter, climbing and approaching the Malaysia aircraft. The SU 25 was between 3 to 5 kilometers away from the Malaysian plane. The fighter is capable of reaching an altitude of 10,000 meters for short periods of time. It’s standard armaments include R-60 air-to-air missiles which are capable of locking and destroying targets within a range of 12 kilometers and which are guaranteed to hit their target from a distance of 5 kilometers.

What was a military aircraft doing on a route intended for civilian planes flying at the same time and same altitude of a passenger plane? We would like an answer to this question? …

To corroborate this evidence we have a picture taken at the regional air traffic control center at Rostov….Ukrainian military officials claimed there were no Ukrainian military aircraft in that area of the crash that day. As you can see, that is not true” (“MH17 Fully Exposed”, The Corbett report; Check minute 34:17 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWlAARb0fN4video

Repeat: “Ukrainian military officials claimed there were no Ukrainian military aircraft in that area of the crash that day. As you can see, that is not true.”

Kiev lied. Not only was one of their fighters in the vicinity, but the warplane also had the capacity to take down a jetliner.

Let’s be clear about how important this information is: We now have hard evidence (Russian radar data and eyewitness testimony) that a Ukrainian fighter was in the vicinity of Malaysia Flight 17 when it was shot down. Thus, the Ukrainian fighter very well may have played a role in the downing of MH17. This is a possibility that cannot be excluded if one is basing their judgments on the facts alone.

Then there the story of Carlos who worked at Kiev’s Air Traffic Control at Borispol but who mysteriously vanished immediately after the crash. Carlos’s twitter feeds on the day of the incident have become something of a legend on the internet, so we would like to narrow our focus to just a few of his communiques.

Carlos tweets on day of MH17 crash:

“Kiev Authorities, trying to make looks like an attack by pro-Russian”…

“warning! It can be a downing, Malaysia Airlines B777 in ukraine, 280 passengers”…

(Military?) “has taken control of ATC in Kiev”….

“The Malaysia Airlines B777 plane disappeared from the radar, there was no communication of any anomaly, confirmed”….

“Plane shot down, shot down, shot down, no accident”….

“Before They remove my phone or they break my head, shot down by Kiev”…

“The B777 plane flew escorted by Ukraine jet fighter until 2 minutes before disappearing from the radar”…

“If Kiev authorities want to tell the truth, It´s gathered, 2 jet fighters flew very close minutes before, wasn’t downed by a fighter”….

“Malaysia Airlines B777 plane just disappeared and Kiev military authority informed us of the downing, How they knew?”…

“all this is gathered in radars, to the unbelieving, shot down by kiev, here we know it and military air traffic control also”…

“military control now officially [say] the plane was shot down by missile”….(“FINAL – Spanish Air Controller @ Kiev Borispol Airport: Ukraine Military Shot Down Boeing #MH17“, Rebel’s Blog)

Shortly after posting the news on Twitter, the Military took over the tower, the SBU seized the Air traffic Control recordings, and Carlos disappeared never to be seen again. At the very least, Carlos’s postings lend support to our thesis that one or two SU 25 fighters were in the vicinity of the Boeing 777 at the time of the incident, which is to say they were in a position to shoot it down.

So why have Obama, Kerry and the entire western media excluded the SU 25s from their analysis? And why are they withholding the satellite and radar data (that everyone knows they have) of the area at the time of the crash? According to the World Socialist Web Site: “The US Air Force’s Defense Support Program utilizes satellites with infrared sensors to detect missile launches anywhere on the planet, and US radar posts in Europe would have tracked the missile as it shot through the sky.”

Indeed, the US does have the capability to track missiles launches anywhere on the planet, so where is the data to support their theory that a missile took down MH17? Where is the satellite imagery? Where is the radar data? What is it Obama doesn’t want the American people to know?

German pilot and airlines expert, Peter Haisenko, thinks that Malaysia Flight 17 was not blown up by a missile, but shot down by the type of double-barreled 30-mm guns used on Ukrainian SU-25 fighter planes. Haisenko presented his theory in an article which appeared on the Global Research website titled “Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the “Shooting Down” of Malaysian MH17. “Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile”. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“The facts speak clear and loud and are beyond the realm of speculation: The cockpit shows traces of shelling! You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likely that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile….” (“Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the “Shooting Down” of Malaysian MH17. “Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile””, Global Research)

Haisenko notes that the munitions used on Ukrainian fighters–anti-tank incendiary and splinter-explosive shells–are capable of taking down a jetliner and that the dense pattern of metal penetrated by multiple projectiles is consistent with the firing pattern of a 30-mm gun.

Also, Michael Bociurkiw, who was one of the first international inspectors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to reach the crash site and who spent more than a week examining the ruins– appears to be convinced that MH17 was downed by machinegun fire consistent with the myriad bullet-holes visible on the fuselage. Here’s what he told on CBC World News:

“There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pock-marked. It almost looks like machine gun fire; very, very strong machine gun fire that has left these unique marks that we haven’t seen anywhere else.

We’ve also been asked if we’ve seen any signs of a missile?

Well, no we haven’t. That’s the answer.”

(“Malaysia Airlines MH17: Michael Bociurkiw talks about being first at the crash site,” CBC News. Note: The above quote is from the video)

Now, admittedly, the observations of Haisenko and Bociurkiw could mean nothing, after all, they are just opinions. But for the sake of argument, let’s compare what they have to say to the comments made by Obama and Kerry.

Here’s Obama on the day after the crash:

“Here is what we know so far. Evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile that was launched from an area that is controlled by Russian-backed separatists inside of Ukraine.

We also know that this is not the first time a plane has been shot down in eastern Ukraine. Over the last several weeks Russian- backed separatists have shot down a Ukrainian transport plane and a Ukrainian helicopter, and they claimed responsibility for shooting down a Ukrainian fighter jet.

Moreover, we know that these separatists have received a steady flow of support from Russia.

This includes arms and training. It includes heavy weapons. And it includes anti-aircraft weapons.

Now, here’s what’s happened now. This was a global tragedy. An Asian airliner was destroyed in European skies, filled with citizens from many countries. So there has to be a credible international investigation into what happened. The U.N. Security Council has endorsed this investigation, and we will hold all its members, including Russia, to their word…

Now, the United States stands ready to provide any assistance that is necessary…..

Let’s summarize Obama’s allegations:

1–MH17 was shot down in east Ukraine.

2–The separatists have shot down planes in east Ukraine before.

3–Therefore the separatists shot down MH17

Do you find that argument persuasive, dear reader? Keep in mind, Obama has never veered from his original position on the issue nor has he ever addressed the eyewitness reports or the technical data provided by Moscow. When all the media repeat the government’s version of events word-for-word, the facts don’t matter. In other words, Obama hasn’t changed his story, because he doesn’t have to. He knows the dissembling media will assist him in the cover up. Which it has.

Now let’s take a look at what Kerry had to say two days after the crash when he visited all five Sunday talk shows to blast Putin and blame the rebels for downing MH17. According to the Guardian:

”Kerry said all the evidence surrounding the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 points towards pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine…..

“We have enormous input about this that points fingers,” Kerry told CNN’s State of the Union. “It is pretty clear that this was a system from Russia, transferred to separatists. We know with confidence that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point of time.”…

Kerry said social media reports and US surveillance put the missile system in question in the vicinity of the crash before the tragedy.

“We know because we observed it by imagery that at the moment of the shootdown we detected a launch from that area,” he said. “Our trajectory shows that it went to the aircraft.” (“MH17 crash: Kerry lays out evidence of pro-Russia separatists’ responsibility“, Guardian)

Needless to say, Kerry has never provided any proof of the satellite “imagery” he referred to on the day of the interview. The administration’s case still depends on the discredited information it picked up on social media and on its own politically-motivated theory. It’s worth noting, that the administration used its shaky claims to great effect by convincing leaders of the European Union to impose more economic sanctions on Russia before any of the facts were known and without any legal process in place for Russia to defend itself. The sanctions, of course, are still in effect today even though the administrations hysterical accusations have come under increasing scrutiny.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly called for a transparent and thorough international investigation, but Washington seems more eager to sweep the whole matter under the rug. Moscow is particularly interested in recovering the Air Traffic Control tapes which were seized by Kiev’s security services immediately following the crash. It’s imperative that these tapes be handed over to international inspectors to analyze communications between the cockpit and the tower. There’s no doubt that Kiev would hand over the recordings if Washington simply demanded that they do so. But Obama has issued no such order. Why is that?

Keep in mind, that the ATC recordings could be much more valuable than the black boxes because they record both sides of every communication on every frequency used by that facility (including frequencies used for communication with other ground facilities and/or agencies), and also on every land line in use at that facility.”

What does that mean? It means that ATC recorders also include communications between ATC operators and, lets say, government or military authorities. They would also have recorded the communications between ATC and any fighters that may have been in the vicinity of Flight 17. In other words, if MH17 was in fact shot down by a SU 25, there’s a good chance the communications would show up in the ATC tapes.

Is this why Obama hasn’t demanded that Kiev surrender the recordings, because he doesn’t really want the truth to come out? Now take a look at this out from the World Socialist Web Site:

“After a month during which Washington has failed to release evidence to support its charges against Putin, it is clear that the political offensive of the NATO governments and the media frenzy against Putin were based on lies.

If pro-Russian separatists had fired a ground-to-air missile, as the US government claims, the Air Force would have imagery in their possession confirming it beyond a shadow of a doubt…..

On August 9, the Malaysian New Straits Times published an article charging the Kiev regime with shooting down MH17. It stated that evidence from the crash site indicated that the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter with a missile followed by heavy machine gun fire.

While it is too early to say conclusively how MH17 was shot down, the preponderance of the evidence points directly at the Ukrainian regime and, behind them, the American government and the European powers. They created the conditions for the destruction of MH17, backing the fascist-led coup in Kiev this February that brought the current pro-Western regime to power.”

(“Why have the media and Obama administration gone silent on MH17?“, Niles Williamson, World Socialist Web Site)

The media has played a pivotal role in this tragedy, deliberately misleading the American people on critical details related to the case in order to shape their coverage in a way that best serves the interests of the government. The MSM doesn’t care about identifying the criminals who killed 298 passengers. Their job is to demonize Putin and create a pretext for waging war on Russia. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Even More Certain Now: Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did Intentionally Down that Malaysian Airliner

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: RINF

Information continues to pour in confirming the retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of how that Malaysian airliner (MH-17) came to be downed over the war-zone in Ukraine, the place to which Obama’s Ukrainian stooges had guided it and then shot it down in order to blame Russia for the tragedy so that Obama’s international sanctions against Russia could be increased. The present article is an updated version of the prior ones I’ve done attempting to present this case as clearly and as fully and honestly as I can. The “PS: at the end here is the main addition to the version I posted yesterday.

We’ll go considerably farther than has yet been revealed by the professional intelligence community, to provide the actual evidence that conclusively shows that (and how) the Ukrainian Government shot down the Malaysian airliner, MH-17, on July 17th.

The latest report from the intelligence community was headlined on August 3rd by Robert Parry, “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts,” and he revealed there that, “Contrary to the Obama administration’s public claims blaming eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, some U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings. This judgment — at odds with what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have expressed publicly — is based largely on the absence of U.S. government evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”

It’s actually based on lots more than that; it’s based not on an absence of evidence, but on positive proof that the Ukrainian Government shot the plane down, and even proving how it was done. You will see this proof, right here, laid out in detail, for the first time anywhere, as of the present date.

The reader-comments to my July 31st article, “First Examination of Malaysian MH-17 Cockpit Photo Shows Ukraine Government Shot that Plane Down,” provided links and leads to independent additional confirmatory evidence backing up that account, of retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of this event, to such an extent that, after exploring the matter further, I now feel confident enough to say that the evidence on this matter is, indeed, “conclusive,” that Haisenko is right. Here is all of that evidence, which collectively convinces me that Haisenko’s conclusion there, is, indeed, the only one that can even possibly explain this wreckage:

“There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pockmarked with what almost looks like machine-gun fire, very very strong machine-gun fire.” This remarkable statement comes not from Haisenko, but from one of the first OSCE investigators who arrived at the scene of the disaster. Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ze9BNGDyk4 and you will see it.

That youtube snippet in an interview with Michael Bociurkiw, comes from a man who is “a Ukrainian-Canadian monitor with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), [who] has seen up close … the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Bociurkiw and one other colleague were the first international monitors to reach the wreckage after the jet was shot down over a rebel-held region of eastern Ukraine July 17.” That description of him is from the lead-in to the full interview with him, at the 29 July 2014 CBC news article, “Malaysia Airlines MH17: Michael Bociurkiw talks about being first at the crash site.” The far briefer youtube clip shows only what’s presented on 6:10-6:24 of this CBC interview with Bociurkiw. The CBC reporter in the video precedes the interview by announcing, “The wreckage was still smoldering when a small team from the OSCE got there.” So: he had to have been there really fast. “No other officials arrived for days,” she said.

So: one of the two first international monitors on-site saw conclusive evidence that the Malaysian plane had been hit by “very very strong machine-gun fire,” not by ground-based missile-fire. Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the downing of that airliner, was here being essentially confirmed on-site by one of the two first OSCE international monitors to arrive on-site, while the wreckage was still smoldering. That’s as close to virgin, untouched evidence and testimony as we’ll ever get. Unlike a black-box interpretation-analysis long afterward by the Russian Government, or by the British Government, or by the Ukrainian Government, each of which governments has a horse in this race, this testimony from Bociurkiw is raw, independent, and comes from one of the two earliest witnesses to the physical evidence. That’s powerfully authoritative testimony, and it happens to confirm pilot Peter Haisenko’s theory of what happened. Bociurkiw arrived there fast because he negotiated with the locals for the rest of the OSCE team, who were organizing to come later: Bociurkiw speaks the local languages there — Ukrainian and Russian.

Furthermore, this is hardly testimony from someone who is supportive of the anti-Government rebels. Earlier, there had been this, http://pressimus.com/Interpreter_Mag/press/3492, which transcribes the BBC’s interview with Bociurkiw on July 22nd. He said then: “We’re observing that major pieces, and I’m looking at the tail fin as I said, and then there’s also the rear cone section of the aircraft, they do look different than when we first saw them, … two days ago.” So, he had arrived on-scene July 20th at the latest. (Neither the BBC nor the CBC, both of which interviewed him, were sufficiently professional to have reported the specific date at which Bociurkiw had actually arrived on-scene, but, from this, it couldn’t have been after July 20th. The downing had occurred July 17th. If some of the debris was still “smoldering” as the CBC journalist said, then maybe he had arrived there even earlier.)

The youtube snippet of Bociurkiw came to me via a reader-comment to my article, from Bill Johnson, after which I web-searched the youtube clip for its source and arrived then at the 29 July 2014 CBC news article and its accompanying video.

Further, there’s this crucial 21 July photo-reconstruction of that cockpit-fragment positioned into place on the aircraft as it had originally been in that intact-airliner: https://twitter.com/EzraBraam. (Sometimes that doesn’t work, so here’s another screen of it from someone who copied it.) Looking at that photo-reconstruction, one can easily tell that the SU-25 or other fighter-jet that was firing into the cockpit from the pilot’s left side didn’t just riddle the area surrounding the pilot with bullets, but that it then targeted-in specifically onto the pilot himself, producing at his location a huge gaping hole in the side of the plane precisely at the place where the pilot was seated. Furthermore, this gaping hole was produced by shooting into the plane, precisely at the pilot, from below and to the pilot’s left, which is where that fighter-jet was located — not from above the airliner, and not from beside it, and also not from below it.

In other words: this was precise and closely-targeted firing against the pilot himself, not a blast directed broadly against, and aiming to hit, the plane anywhere, to bring it down.

Haisenko explained how this penetration of the plane, though it was targeted specifically at the pilot, caused immediately a breaking-apart of the entire aircraft.

Other readers have responded to my news-report about Haisenko’s article, by saying that shrapnel from a Buk missile could similarly have caused those holes into the side of the cockpit. However, that objection ignores another key feature of Haisenko’s analysis. Haisenko said there: “You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likeley that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile. The edge of the other, the larger and slightly frayed exit holes showing shreds of metal pointing produced by the same caliber projectiles. Moreover, it is evident that … these exit holes of the outer layer of the double aluminum reinforced structure are shredded or bent — outwardly!”

What this means is that in order to have some of those holes frayed inwardly and the other holes frayed outwardly, there had to have been a second fighter-jet firing into the cockpit from the airliner’s right-hand side. That’s critically important, because no ground-based missile (or shrapnel therefrom) hitting the airliner could possibly have produced firing into the cockpit from both sides of the plane. It had to have been a hail of bullets from both sides, that brought the plane down, in that circumstance. This is Haisenko’s main discovery, by his pointing that out. You can’t have projectiles going in both directions — into the left-hand-side fuselage panel from both its left and right sides — unless they are coming at the panel from different directions. Nobody before Haisenko had noticed that the projectiles had ripped through that panel from both its left side and its right side. This is what rules out any ground-fired missile.

Peter Haisenko posted an extremely high-resolution image from that photo which he used, and it shows unequivocally that some of the bullet-holes were inbound while others of them were outbound: Here it is, viewed very close-up.

Although the fighter jets that were said to have been escorting the Malaysian plane into the war-zone were alleged to be SU-25 planes, a different type might have been used. SU-25s are designed to be flown up to 23,000 feet without an oxygen-mask, but can go much higher if the pilot does wear that mask, which was probably the case here. Of course, an airliner itself is fully pressurized. That pressurization inside the airliner is, moreover, a key part of Haisenko’s reconstruction of this airliner’s downing. Basically, Haisenko reconstructs the airliner’s breaking apart as soon as that hail of bullets opened and released the plane’s pressurization.

The specific photo of that cockpit-fragment, which Haisenko had downloaded immediately after the disaster, was removed from the Internet, but other photos of this fragment were posted elsewhere, such as at the British publication (which, like the rest of the Western “news” media is slanted pro-Obama, anti-Putin), on July 21st, headlining their anti-Putin missile-theory bias, “MH17 crash: FT photo shows signs of damage from missile strike.” Their “reporters” opened with their blatant anti-Russian prejudice: “The first apparent hard evidence that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile is emerging from the crash site in eastern Ukraine, after experts confirmed on Monday there were signs of shrapnel damage to the aircraft.” Although they didn’t say in their opener that the “surface-to-air missile” was from the rebels, they made clear their pro-Ukrainian-Government anti-Russian bias by saying, “Over the weekend, western intelligence agencies pointed to mounting evidence that backs Ukraine’s claim that the aircraft with 298 people on board was shot down by mistake by pro-Russian separatists and Russian military personnel with an SA-11 missile launched from a Buk-M1 SAM battery.” Their stenographers (or as they would say “reporters”) stenographed (“reported”) that, “Douglas Barrie of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the photographic evidence ‘was consistent with the kind of damage you would expect to see from the detonation of a high explosive fragmentation warhead of the type commonly used in a SAM system’.” No analyst from the pro-Putin camp was interviewed by their “reporters.” For example, Russia’s Interfax News Service headlined on July 29th, the same day as the FT’s article, “Boeing’s downing by Buk missile system unlikely — military expert,” and they stenographed their “expert,” as follows:

Chief of the Russian Land Forces’ tactical air defense troops Maj. Gen. Mikhail Krush said he doubts that the Malaysian passenger liner was brought down by a Buk surface-to-air missile system. “No one observed a Buk engaging targets in that region on that day, which provides 95 percent proof that Buk systems were not used in this concrete case,” the general said in an interview with the Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kuryer military weekly to be published on Wednesday [July 30th]. “This is no more than a theory for now. However, a guided missile launched by a Buk missile system leaves behind a specific smoke trail as it flies, like a comet. In daylight this trail can be clearly seen within a radius of 20-25 kilometers from the missile system. It cannot remain unnoticed. There are no eyewitnesses to confirm there was any. No one reported a launch. This is one thing,” he said. “Second. The holes left by the strike elements on the Boeing’s outer skin indicate that the warhead blew up from below and sideways. A Buk missile strikes the target from above,” he said. “The damage done to the plane suggests that a different missile was used. Our guidance method is a zoom, when the missile strikes the target from above covering it with a thick cloud of fragments” the general said. “I cannot state categorically, guided by this data, but I can suggest, using my experience, that it was not a Buk missile that hit the Boeing,” the expert said.

General Krush’s statement can fit with Haisenko’s and with Bociurkiw’s, but not with FT’s or the rest of the “reporters” (just consider them as rank propagandists) in the West.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been saying all along that Russia – against which he is actually systematically building toward war – and not Ukraine (which he’s using as his chief vehicle to do that), is to blame for this airliner-downing. Previously, he had said that the snipers who in February had killed many people at the Maidan demonstrations against the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych came from Yanukovych’s State Security Service and not from the far-right political parties that were trying to bring Yanukovych down and that Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland selected to run the new Ukrainian government. But that too was an Obama lie. He lies a lot, and it’s just about the only type of statement he ever makes about Russia, and about Ukraine: lies.

If someone wants to verify how rabidly the U.S. Government lies, and has lied since at least the time of George W. Bush’s Presidency, just look at this video, by starting at 16:00 on it and going to 42:00 on it, and you will be shocked. (It pertains to lies by Bush that are still being covered up by Obama.) And when you further consider the many obvious questions it points out, which U.S. “news” media refused to ask and still refuse to ask about the matter, you’ll recognize that we are being lied to systematically and with utter contempt of the public, and with no respect for the public’s right to know the truth, even regarding massive history like that. It’s really brutal.

Ignorant “reporters” sometimes slip-up and include, in their stenography, facts that actually support the opposite side’s narrative of events and that discredit their own story-line. Such has been the case, for example, in the Financial Times piece, which included the statement that, “Anti-aircraft missiles are not designed to score a direct hit as they are targeted to destroy fast, agile fighter jets. Instead, they are designed to explode within about 20m of their target, sending out a cloud of red hot metal to increase the chances of inflicting as much damage as possible.”

But rather than merely “a cloud of red hot metal,” what actually brought down this plane was what Haisenko has said brought it down: magazines-full of carefully targeted rapid-fire machine-gun bullets pouring forth from below the plane, at both its left and right.

This was a Ukrainian Government job. It was close-in. (No missile fired from the distance more than 30,000 feet down to the ground could have been that precise to target the pilot rather than the far larger target of the plane’s entire body.) It came from the Government that Obama installed there in February and that’s now carrying out an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the residents in Ukraine’s southeast, the places where Yanukovych’s voters live (to the extent that they still can and do live).

Compare that picture with the following one, which I take from a propaganda-site for the U.S. regime, and so which is intended instead to support the Administration’s line on this, certainly not Haisenko’s explanation of how the airliner was downed, though it actually supports Haisenko’s case:

As you can see there, a plane that’s hit by a ground-fired missile, instead of by bullets fired from an attack-plane only a few yards away, has the damage spread rather widely over its body, not concentrated into a tiny area, such as to where the plane’s pilot is seated. Certainly, the contrast between that photo and this one is enormous.

Furthermore, note also that the shrapnel damage to that plane comes from above it, which is where missiles usually hit a plane from, releasing their shrapnel from above, down onto the plane. By contrast, the hail of bullets to the Malaysian plane’s pilot came from below the plane, aiming upward at the cockpit, from both sides of the cockpit.

Furthermore, note also that all of the holes appear to be inbound into the plane, none outbound.

As regards whether there were actually two fighter jets firing into the Malaysian airliner or only one, a proponent of the single-jet hypothesis, Bill Johnson, posted as a reader-comment to my article on August 4th, a series of extreme close-ups of the side-panel, in which he inferred that the explanation of the apparent left-side (pilot-side) bullets was probably the shape of the bullets. I then asked him why he declined to accept the possible existence of two jets. He said, “from what I could find Russian military radar detected only one Ukrainian fighter jet, not two. I have looked and looked for any type of radar confirmation of a second fighter jet and can not find it.” However, the most virginal, very earliest, online evidence concerning the matter was on July 17th, within moments of the downing, headlining in the subsequent English translation, “Spanish Air Controller @ Kiev Borispol Airport: Ukraine Military Shot Down Boeing #MH17,” and it included, “@spainbuca’s TWITTER FEED,” which included his observation, only minutes after the downing, “2 jet fighters flew very close” to the plane. Furthermore, immediately before that, he had tweeted, “The B777 plane flew escorted by Ukraine jet fighter until 2 minutes before disappearing from the radar.” So, perhaps the second jet appeared distinct to him only immediately prior to the downing. An extensive file of tweets from @spainbuca was posted below the headline story and it included also the note: “LAST MINUTE Air Traffic Controller: The Boeing 777 ‘flew fighters escorted by two Ukrainians’ before disappearing.” (The original Spanish there was: “‘voló escoltado por 2 cazas ucranianos’ antes de desaparecer.”)

Additionally, a news story from the Spanish language edition of Russian Television on 8 May 2014, soon after the Odessa massacre, had been headlined in google trans English as “Death threats to a Spanish review in Ukraine crisis” and it said: “Spanish air traffic controller who was threatened by supporters of the Maidan, Carlos, who spoke with RT on the condition of anonymity, has received threats despite not defending any interest. ‘I have my opinion and my view of a normal person, with a separate work [unrelated] or media, or any political party, nor to any association.’” These “supporters of Maidan … threatened to kill him, to send him to ‘do not know what battalion’ and out of the country.” Then on July 17th there was, yet again in google trans from Spanish, “Block a Twitter account accusing Kiev of the demolition of the MH17,” which reported that a controller at “Ukraine’s largest airport said the plane from Malaysia, which crashed in the east with 298 people on board, was escorted by two Ukrainian fighters until minutes before disappearing from radar.”

Another news-report, also on July 17th, came from Global Travel Industry News datelined 17 July and it headlined “Ukraine air traffic controller suggests Kiev military shot down passenger plane.” It said: “This Kiev air traffic controller is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller along with other foreigners immediately after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine killing 295 passengers and crew on board. The air traffic controller suggested in a private evaluation and basing it on military sources in Kiev, that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. Radar records were immediately confiscated after it became clear a passenger jet was shot down.” If this is true, then the radar-records upon the basis of which those tweets had been sent out were “confiscated.” That news-story from Global Travel Industry News closed by saying that the report was “based on” “tweets received” and “the statements of one airline controller.”

That person, who called himself anonymously by the name “Carlos,” had produced a file characteristic of someone hostile toward, and personally afraid of, the new Kiev government, and nothing further was heard from him, if he even survived. The Ukrainian Government said that he never existed, though the 8 May 2014 news report of his frictions with the Kiev authorities could hardly have been concocted after July 17th simply out of nowhere; it had pre-existed the airliner-downing, and it fit with his tweets on July 17th.

The best evidence is consistent with the view that those bullet-holes came from two directions not from one. What is virtually certain, however, is that at least one jet fighter was close up and shot down the Malaysian plane targeting the pilot at close range. There is no way that a 33,000-foot-away ground-fired missile could have produced that cockpit side-panel.

And the European Union has been playing along with this hoax. (If you still have any further doubts that it’s a hoax, just click onto that link and look.) And the mass of suckers in the West believe that hoax: it’s succeeding to stir a fever for war, instead of a fever to get rid of our own leaders who are lying us into a war that will benefit only the West’s aristocrats, while it inflicts massive physical and economic harms against everyone else – as if it were the invasion of Iraq except multiplied in this case a thousand-fold, especially with nuclear weapons possibly at the end of it.

If we had a free press, the news media would be ceaselessly asking President Obama why he doesn’t demand accountability against the Ukrainian Government for their massacre perpetrated on May 2nd inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa, where that newly Obama-installed regime’s peaceful opponents were systematically trapped and then burned alive, which the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government has refused to investigate (much less to prosecute). Basically: Obama had sponsored the massacre. So, our “news” media ignore it, even though it started this civil war on Russia’s doorstep, and thereby re-started the Cold War, as Obama had intended that massacre (his massacre, and his subsequent ethnic cleansing) to do. (Similarly, the “news” media, though all of them receive my articles by email, virtually all refuse to publish them, because I won’t let them control what I find and report.)

And while Obama leads this Republican policy, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s top foreign-policy advisor Victoria Nuland actually runs it for Obama, congressional Democrats are just silent about it, and do not introduce impeachment of this fake “Democratic” hyper-George W. Bush neo-conservative President, who’s a “Democrat” in rhetoric only – and though Obama’s policy in this key matter threatens the entire world.

A reader-comment to an earlier version of this news report and analysis objected to my identifying Obama as a Republican-in-”Democratic”-sheep’s clothing, and said: “They may be rethug policies in origin but they are decidedly BI-PARTISAN to anyone who wants to admit FACTS. The democratic party you all think still exists is DEAD and only exists in your brain (the part that doesn’t accept reality).” However, U.S. Senate bill 2277, which invites Obama to provide direct U.S. military support to the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime, has 26 sponsors, and all of them are Republican U.S. Senators. Democratic Senators, by contrast, are just silent on Obama’s turn toward nazism (or racist — in this case anti-ethnic-Russian racist — fascism); the Senate’s Democrats aren’t seeking for it to be stepped up. This is a Republican policy, which congressional Democrats are simply afraid to oppose. Any realistic person knows that however far right Obama turns, the overt Republican Party will turn even farther to the right, because they have to be to his right in order for them to be able to win Republican primaries and retain their own Party’s nomination. Just because Obama’s game of moving the American political center as far to the right as he can move it is succeeding, doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party itself should end. It instead means that progressives need to take the Democratic Party over, just like conservatives took the Republican Party over with Reagan. There is no other hope. If a Democrat in the U.S. House will simply introduce an impeachment resolution against Barack Obama, then the right-wing takeover of the Democratic Party might finally end, and the world might yet be saved, because the Democratic Party itself could then reject Obama as being a fake “Democrat,” a Democrat-in-rhetoric-only. It could transform American politics — and American politics needs such a transformation, which would move the Democratic Party back to progressivism, more like the FDR Democratic Party was, so that Republican politicians would no longer need to be so fascist as they now have become (and as they now need to be in order to be able to win their own Party’s nomination). If Democrats fail to renounce the conservatism of Obama and of the Clintons, then the Party will end, and needs to be replaced, just like the Republican Party replaced the Whig Party immediately before the Civil War. Nazism has become today’s slavery-type issue – it’s beyond the pale, and Obama’s installation and endorsement of it in Ukraine is like James Buchanan’s endorsement of slavery was during the 1850s: either the Democratic Party will become the progressive party, or else the Democratic Party is over.

But that’s just my own theory of how Obama’s frauds might yet be able to be overcome and defeated, if they still can be; it’s not part of my presentation of the explanation of what brought down the Malaysian airliner, which has been an open case since July 17th, and which is now a closed case. This is past history, not future.

The present news story is being circulated free of charge or copyright to all “news” media in the English-speaking world, in the perhaps vain hope that the cover-ups of our leaders’ constant lies will cease soon enough to avoid a World War III, even though communism is long since gone from Russia and so the ideological excuse wouldn’t make any sense here. This insanity is actually all about aristocratic conquest, like World War I was. It’s not for the benefit of the public anywhere. Silence about it (by “Democrats,” and the “news” media) is a scandal, which needs to stop. The real Democratic Party (the Party of FDR, who loathed and despised nazis — and even mere fascists — yet today Obama installs nazis into power in Ukraine) must be restored, and a real news media needs to become established in America. Even Republicans need it, because the very idea of “victory” in a nuclear war is a vicious fantasy. It is a dangerous lie, though there are some people who find it a very profitable one. And time might be short — let’s hope not already too short.

After all, Obama’s hoax of having won from Europe the stepped-up economic sanctions against Russia after the government that Obama had installed in Ukraine downed the Malaysian plane and successfully blamed it on “Russian aggression,” is very encouraging to him. And European leaders know that Obama’s entire operation is a very bloody fraud (read the phone-transcript there — it’s a stunner). So, they certainly won’t save the world from it. It’s up to us.

—

PS (dated August 5th):

Some readers disagree with Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event on account of their not understanding his reconstruction of it (not understanding what I have been trying here to state as clearly as I can, bringing in other evidence). For example, see:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/evidence-now-conclusive-2-ukrainian-government-su-25-fighter-jets-shoot-malaysian-airliner-buk-missile-ground-shot-involved/

reader-comment:

“Benoit • [c. 8AM on 5 August 2014]

“I do not agree with Peter Haisenko’s conclusions : if external hull of the cockpit is bent outwards, it is not necessarily because some of the bullets came outwards. It may also be because it’s a double hull, and explosive bullet coming inwards may, when exploding, have torn outer aluminium hull outwards. A very careful analysis shows tha the inner hull (the green one) is bent inwards, and that may well in fact confirm the present analysis. Here’s this careful analysis (in french, use Goolgle translate):

—

“Benoit” links there to:

http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/international/article/mh17-preuve-de-canonnage-et-155019

“MH17: evidence gunnery and Western Bankruptcy”

by joelim , Wednesday, July 30, 2014, in which is buried its conclusion:

“Anyway, these five aligned and clearly visible impacts directly lead to the conclusion that fire gunnery (not gun, which stops 20 mm) was made precisely to where stood the driver (see here and here ). The damage (physical, human, decompression) left them no chance. This is the cause of the crash. The plane did not explode which also explains the appearance of debris found.”

—

Here is the French original on that:

“MH17 : preuve de canonnage et faillite occidentale”

“Quoiqu’il en soit, ces 5 impacts alignés et parfaitement visibles mènent directement à la conclusion qu’un tir de canonnage (et non de mitrailleuse, qui s’arrête à 20 mm) a été effectué précisément à l’endroit où se tenait le pilote (voir ici et ici). Les dégâts occasionnés (matériel, humain, décompression) ne leur laissaient aucune chance. C’est donc la cause du crash. L’avion n’a pas explosé ce qui explique aussi l’aspect des débris retrouvés.”

—

In other words: “Benoit” couldn’t understand what he was reading, and so he said “I do not agree with Peter Haisenko’s conclusions.” He cited against Haisenko’s theory of the case, an analysis that was published a day after Haisenko’s, which concluded the same as Haisenko did.

The author of that French article refused to even use the word “Haisenko” in his article, much less to credit Haisenko’s article in any way, but the source-photo that he linked to came from Haisenko’s high-definition pdf of the photo that Haisenko was using. He was trying to get credit for Haisenko’s theory of the case.

—

There is a lot of lying going on, a lot of misrepresentation. The only way to get to the truth is to base it on the best available evidence, which is what Haisenko did. He found it; he analyzed it; he solved the mystery (though he could have explained it better). To the extent that other “evidence” is reliable, it fits his explanation — an explanation that I shall keep expanding on to the extent that new relevant evidence comes forth, pro and/or con, on it. The important thing to keep in mind, however, is this. It’s even more important than how that plane was brought down.

Barack Obama lies to us. All Republican (or conservative) politicians do. The Democratic Party will die if it fails to state that this is so and to make the case for the charge so that they separate themselves from the Republican Party and be clearly the progressive alternative to conservatism in America. A Democratic impeachment against this Republican President is essential in order to salvage the Democratic Party, and even in order to salvage democracy in America, because no country can be an authentic democracy if the country’s main political parties are all conservative, if none of the main parties is progressive. That’s not a democracy: it is a dictatorship. That’s what we’ve got.

Check Mating Washington in its Own Backyard with BRICSIANSE

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The United States and its closest allies have attempted to isolate Russia and President Vladimir Putin from the world stage. As a result of Western support for the Ukrainian regime that came to power through violence in Kiev, actions taken by Western powers against Russia have included expelling Russia from the G-8 of capitalist powers, the freezing of the assets of Russian government officials and Russian banks, and imposing travel bands on Russian citizens.

However, Putin has check-mated U.S. President Barack Obama in the American president’s own backyard. Obama’s defenders fancy their president as a master of «11-dimensional chess». However, what is transpiring in Brazil at the summit of the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa has shown the world that it is Putin, not Obama, who is the master of 11-dimensional chess. In fact, Obama could never even make it to the chess board.

Putin is visiting Brazil where he is participating in the 2014 summit in the city of Fortaleza. The BRICS summit comes as members of the Obama administration, including neo-cons like Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, have instituted plans for increased sanctions against Russia, bringing them to the level as those directed against Iran, Syria, and Cuba.

Putin and his BRICS colleagues will sign an agreement in Fortaleza on establishing a BRICS development bank that will help bypass the neo-cons’ attempt to isolate Russia from international banking networks. Any strengthening of sanctions in the same manner that U.S. sanctions have been imposed by Washington on Iran, Syria, and Cuba runs the risk of punishing Brazilian, Indian, Chinese, and South African banks and other corporations, something that could land the Obama administration in hot water before the World Trade Organization court that rules against trade practices that violate WTO regulations.

The legacy of the Obama administration is that its Cold War-era policies directed against Latin America have permanently ended America’s long-standing political and economic domination of the Western Hemisphere. Obama put the final nail in the arcane Monroe Doctrine that stipulated the United States would bar non-Western Hemisphere nations, including the powers of Europe, from intervention in the Americas. The interventionist policies in countries like Venezuela and Honduras carried out by Nuland’s fellow neocon ideologue Roberta Jacobson, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, have resulted in a large contingent of Latin American leaders in joining Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the other BRICS leaders in Brazil for a summit where the United States will not have a seat at the table. In fact, the United States and its imperialistic policies will be a major subject in Brazil, a country that has seen its telecommunications, including the private calls and e-mail of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff routinely spied upon by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Putin is making the most of his six-day visit to Latin America. He forgave Cuba’s debt to Russia while visiting Havana and also stopped in Nicaragua and Rio de Janeiro. While in Cuba, Putin met with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul Castro, Cuba’s president, two leaders who continue to infuriate the neo-con and right-wing power centers of Washington. Putin also attended the final game of the World Cup in Rio. Russia is the host of 2018 World Cup. Putin also visited Argentina where he signed a deal on nuclear energy. The interest of Iran, Argentina, Nigeria, Syria, and Egypt in joining BRICS may soon see the group’s acronym become «BRICSIANSE». Such a development would triumph the nations of the world that refuse to take orders from Washington and the presence of Syria would spell ultimate defeat of the Obama doctrine of «R2P», or «Responsibility to Protect» pro-U.S. and Western intelligence agency-financed opposition leaders intent on replacing anti-American governments with pro-U.S. regimes. Syria joining BRICS as a full or associate member would drive a stake through the heart of R2P.

The Obama administration could not convince a single South American leader to avoid the BRICS summit in Brazil. In fact, two of the South American leaders sitting down with Putin, Xi, Rousseff, and the other leaders in Brazil, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and Suriname’s President Desi Bouterse, have been the subject of CIA- and State Department-linked destabilization efforts and sanctions threats. Also in attendance at BRICS are Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, Guyana’s President Donald Ramotar, Paraguay’s President Horacio Cartes, Peru’s President Ollanta Humala, and Uruguay’s President José Mujica. America’s sanctions against Russia and its saber-rattling against China on behalf of Japan and the Philippines have fallen on deaf ears in South America. The teenager-like antics of Nuland, Jacobson, along with those of U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, are sure to be discussed in sideline gossip by the leaders gathered in Fortaleza.

The presence of President Santos of Colombia is particularly noteworthy. Santos recently defeated a right-wing candidate supported by the same Obama administration’s interventionists who have helped disrupt the economy of Venezuela. The losing candidate, Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, had the full support of Santos’s right-wing and pro-Israeli/pro-U.S. predecessor Alvaro Uribe. Recent disclosures have shown that Uribe instituted an NSA-like national communications surveillance system aimed at his opponents. Zuluaga’s ties with the same elements who are trying to depose Maduro in Venezuela have not been lost on Santos. He continues to engage in peace negotiations in Havana with left-wing DARC guerrillas and improve ties with Venezuela much to the chagrin of the CIA operatives who live in splendor in the Miami area of Florida.

While in Rio, Putin managed to cast off U.S. efforts to isolate him internationally by meeting with Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne, in addition to Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban, Namibian President Hage Geingob, Gabon’s President Ali Bongo, and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel and Rousseff have much in common as both had their personal cell phone conversations monitored by NSA, a fact that Putin, who has provided asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was likely sure to have mentioned in passing.

The only attempt the United States could make to have any Latin American officials criticize contact between Western Hemisphere leaders and Putin was to arrange for Trinidad opposition leader Keith Rowley to condemn his country’s prime minister’s private trip to Brazil. Rowley criticized Persad-Bissessar and her grandson for meeting with Putin and other leaders in Rio because the trip was made during a labor dispute involving Trinidad’s immigration department. The power of Washington to influence events in the Western Hemisphere has truly plummeted to new depths.

The agenda of the BRICS nations is as diversified as that of any G-7 meeting, no longer called G8 after Russia was expelled. On the BRICS summit agenda are trade, development, macroeconomic policy, energy, finance, terrorism, climate change, regional security, drug smuggling and trans-border crime, industrialization of Africa, and, kin what should serve as a wake-up call to Wall Street, the World Bank, European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other tools of western capitalism, international financial institution (IFI) reform.

The security operations by BRICS in Afghanistan stand to replace those of the United State after the withdrawal of its troops from that country. Russia has led BRICS efforts on dealing with money laundering and cross-border crime and it has drawn the participation of Belarus, India, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in its efforts. Observers from Mongolia and Armenia also joined the talks. In the area of security, synergism is apparent between the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that brings Russia and China into a common security policy with central Asian states like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russia and China appear determined that Ukraine and Georgia will be the «line in the sand» for any further encroachments by George Soros- and CIA-led «R2P» revolutions in the Eurasian space. It is also clear that Putin outsmarted Obama in his own backyard.

The US Government Thinks it Can Fool Us into a War with Russia

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Nick Bernabe

Source: The Anti-Media

It seems like only a few months ago (because it was) when the government that rules America was condemning the brutal crackdown against protesters by the Ukrainian government. The then-Russian backed regime was fending off large crowds of protesters who were angry about the Ukrainian government’s close ties with Russia, resorting to violence and anti-riot tactics to disperse the crowds.

In a statement issued by the White House on January 19th, before the new Western backed ‘legitimate’ government of Ukraine took power, US officials condemned the violence against protesters:

“We are deeply concerned by the violence taking place today on the streets of Kyiv and urge all sides to immediately de-escalate the situation. The increasing tension in Ukraine is a direct consequence of the government failing to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of its people.

Instead, it has moved to weaken the foundations of Ukraine’s democracy by criminalizing peaceful protest and stripping civil society and political opponents of key democratic protections under the law. We urge the government of Ukraine to take steps that represent a better way forward for Ukraine, including repeal of the anti-democratic legislation signed into law in recent days, withdrawing the riot police from downtown Kyiv, and beginning a dialogue with the political opposition.

From its first days, the Maidan movement has been defined by a spirit of non-violence and we support today’s call by opposition political leaders to reestablish that principle. The U.S. will continue to consider additional steps — including sanctions — in response to the use of violence.”

In a noble yet ironic –selective at best– attempt to stand up for human rights, what the US government said in the above statement made sense. Kind of.

While fighting for freedom of speech is a good thing, it should be stood up for even when it’s inconvenient. Now, as the US and allies in the West deliver billions in loans, tech and intel to the new central-banker-run government in Ukraine, Kiev is fully engaging (and killing) pro-Russian protesters in the East of Ukraine and even in the Southwestern port city of Odessa. Ahh yes, the sweet smell of selective humanitarianism.

Then –lockstep with American political talking heads– US media outlets immediately began referring to these pro-Russian (former)protesters as insurgents, militants, militiamen, radicals, separatists and terrorists just before the killing started a few months ago. They knew it was coming. 40 pro-Russians were burned alive in a building on Friday and there was hardly a mention of it in the news. You see, now the protesters are called terrorists so it’s okay to kill them. When did the media stop calling them protesters and start calling them terrorists? When it became politically convenient. Iraq remembers.

The US government (and citizen by default through taxes) is actively supporting the crony, human rights abusing, unelected Ukrainian regime through billions in loans, military training and equipment of which we can only speculate about.

As an American citizen, I do not consent to this insane foreign policy. And, according to a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal, it seems that at least 47% of Americans agree with me:

Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines.

…The poll findings, combined with the results of prior Journal/NBC surveys this year, portray a public weary of foreign entanglements and disenchanted with a U.S. economic system that many believe is stacked against them. The 47% of respondents who called for a less-active role in world affairs marked a larger share than in similar polling in 2001, 1997 and 1995.

Good! So the propaganda isn’t working, but the government doesn’t really care about public opinion anymore. After all, how many Americans would actually support sending billions of US dollars to an oppressive Ukrainian puppet regime while our own schools and infrastructure dwindle into a bureaucratic wasteland and the country falls $16+ Trillion into debt? Not me.

Another small detail to remember as the US government escalates tensions in Ukraine under the banner of de-escalation (I know it’s Orwellian, but what isn’t nowadays) is that the American government likely helped overthrow the democratically elected, Russian-aligned former government of Ukraine. As this leaked tape of a conversation between diplomats proves, the US government hand picked central banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the new ‘legitimate’ leader of Ukraine long before the coup took place. Oh yeah, “Fuck the EU” while we’re at it!

Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, later haphazardly apologized for her remarks that were recorded and leaked anonymously when she appeared at a press conference, clearly shaken up and taken back by the leak:

So while the US government and their media cohorts continue to push for the West’s version of “stability, democracy and self-determination” in Ukraine, the truth is that they were and continue to be part of the driving force causing these very problems they seek to fix. But hey, what’s new?

In no way do I seek to condone Putin or Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Russia is also a large oppressor in the region and is an oligarchy which is structured and governed much like America, for the rich. The Russian-American proxy war in Ukraine will have one guaranteed loser, the innocent Ukrainian civilians who are caught in the crossfire of this banker resource conflict. Both American and Russian citizens must regain control over their governments or these injustices will continue. Please share this article if you think WWIII is a bad idea.

Video News Roundup

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Reid Mukai

5/7 RT interviews a survivor of the Odessa massacre who witnessed police complicity in the violence:

5/6 Mark Dice on the NSA and freedom of speech:

5/6 A NextNewsNetwork report on a test of the limits of religious freedom in Oklahoma:

5/5 Before Snowden there was NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, who has had suspiciously less corporate media coverage. Fortunately WeAreChange and other independent journalists are helping to get his message out:

5/5 GlobalResearchTV posted this PressTV report linking chaos in Ukraine to US policy:

5/5 Lee Camp on the military-industrial complex:

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