Month: December 2014

Former Ukrainian MP Elena Bondarenko’s open letter to the world

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From Fort Russ, December 14, 2014
http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2014/12/former-ukrainian-pm-elena-bondarenkos.html

Elena Bondarenko

 

Elena Bondarenko, silenced in the Ukrainian Parliament, published an open letter to the public. It’s a voice nowhere to be heard in the Western press. Although it has been written a few months ago, it is still important today and will remain on the pages of history as a testimony to the situation of lawlessness perpetrated by those in the highest ranks of power in Ukraine:

My friends, here is my declaration. I ask that you share it to the extent possible. If you can translate it into other languages, please do!

I, Elena Bondarenko, People’s Deputy from the Party of Regions, finding myself in opposition to the current power in Ukraine, wish to declare that this administration has resorted to direct threats of physical elimination of the opposition in Ukraine; has resorted to suspending the right of freedom of speech, in parliament and out, and is implicated in complicity in crimes not just against politicians, but even against their children. The everyday life of an opposition deputy is this: constant threats, unofficial ban from the airwaves, targeted persecution. Everyone who calls for peace is immediately branded as an enemy of the people, just as in 1930’s Germany, or in McCarthyite US.

A few days ago, Arseniy Avakov, the Minister of the Interior, an ardent adherent of the so-called Party of War of the Ukraine, said the following: “When Elena Bondarenko comes to the podium to speak, my hand automatically reaches for my gun.” This, I emphasize, are the words of a man entrusted with the supreme police power of the country. Further: exactly one week ago, Alexander Turchinov the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, deprived me of the right to speak from the podium as a member of the opposition Party of Regions, only for this: I declared “Any power that commissions its army to bomb its peaceful cities, is criminal.” After which, he magnanimously gave the radical parliamentarians the option to call for shooting the opposition. Considering that my car was shot at last year, when the extremists were already arming with weapons, [a fact on record with the police, on my complaint] such threats aimed at me must be taken seriously.

Further, I will inform everyone, who does not already know it, that the current leadership is covering up those who dared to raise a hand against the son of another opposition politician, Vladimir Oleinik. Ruslan Oleinik, performing his duties as regional prosecutor, was beaten up at his office, endangering his health, and even his life. Di they investigate the beating of a prosecutor performing his duty? No. Did they investigate the monstrous pressure on the leader of the opposition? No. Instead, this administration fired the prosecutor! Every day, from his colleagues I learn of beatings of their aides, of attacks on their companies, of threats, yes, even attacks, on their lives, their health, their property.

The Ukrainian media is completely sanitized from this information, and the typical Ukrainian has no idea that a criminal struggle is taking place against the opposition, and that the constitutional right of free speech is suppressed in every way. The journalists who overcome their fear and work honestly are subject to attack by nationalist mobs, but the organizers and participants of these pogroms are not punished, even when they are recorded on videos and photographs.

I call upon those international organizations that proclaim their support of democratic principles not just to notice this declaration, but to involved in this struggle for the preservation and respect for the democratic rights and freedoms of the citizens of Ukraine.

The methods of the junta in their struggle for power, or rather, for the establishment of a Ukrainian dictatorship, have nothing to do with any concept of “democracy.” If the international community does nothing in the face of these egregious acts, it will look like complicity and silent approbation of all these crimes which are being committed in Ukraine. The free world will lose an outpost, Ukraine. All who fight for democracy, rule of law, and the rights of man, together, can achieve a lot. But only together can we stop the junta and the fratricidal war in Ukraine.

With my respect,

People’s Deputy of Ukraine, Elena Bondarenko

Translated by Thomas Winter

Indications that the U.S. is planning a nuclear attack against Russia

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Posted on Washington’s Blog, June 13, 2014
By Eric Zuesse
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/indications-u-s-planning-nuclear-attack-russia.html

Preface by Washington’s Blog:  Daniel Estulin is saying the same thing.

On Wednesday, June 11th, CNN headlined “U.S. Sends B-2 Stealth Bombers to Europe,” and reported that “they arrived in Europe this week for training.” Wikipedia notes that B-2s were “originally designed primarily as a nuclear bomber,” and that “The B-2 is the only aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.”

In other words, the primary advantage of the newer, “Stealth,” version of B-2, is its first-strike (or surprise-attack) nuclear capability. That’s the upgrade: the weapon’s ability to sneak upon the target-country and destroy it before it has a chance to fire off any of its own nuclear weapons in response to that “first-strike” attack. The advantage of Stealth is creating and stationing a nuclear arsenal for the purpose of winning a nuclear war, instead of for the goal of having continued peace via “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD.

Some historical background is necessary here, so that a reader can understand why this is happening — the switch to an objective of actually winning a nuclear war (as opposed to deterring one). One cannot understand what’s happening now in Ukraine without knowing this bigger picture.

(This account is written under the assumption that the reader already knows some of the allegations it contains, but not all of them, and that the reader will click on the link wherever a given allegation requires documentation and support.)

I have previously reported about “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War),” and, “Do We Really Need to Re-Start the Cold War?” I pointed out there that we don’t really need to re-start the Cold War, at all, since communism (against which the Cold War was, at least allegedly, fought) clearly lost to capitalism (we actually won the Cold War, and peacefully) but that America’s aristocracy very much does need to re-start a war with Russia — and why it does. (It has to do with maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, something that benefits America’s aristocrats enormously.)

Consequently, for example, a recent CNN Poll has found that Americans’ fear of Russia has soared within just the past two years. Our news media present a type of news “reporting” that places Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, into a very bad light, even when it’s unjustified by the facts.

The situation now is thus rather similar to that right before World War I, when the aristocracy in America decided that a pretext had to be created for our going to war against Germany. That War had already started in Europe on 28 July 1914, and President Wilson wanted to keep the U.S. out of it, but we ultimately joined it on the side of J.P. Morgan and Company. This was documented in detail in an important 1985 book, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914-1918, which was well summarized in Business History Review, by noting that: “J.P. Morgan & Co. served as Britain’s financial and purchasing agent, and the author makes especially good use of the Morgan Grenfell & Co. papers in London to probe that relationship. Expanding British demand for U.S. dollars to pay for North American imports made the politics of foreign exchange absolutely central to Anglo-American relations. How to manage those politics became the chief preoccupation of Her Majesty’s representatives in the United States,” and most especially of Britain’s financial and purchasing agent in the U.S.

In 1917, after almost two years of heavy anti-German propaganda in the U.S. press that built an overwhelming public support for our joining that war against Germany, Congress found that, in March 1915, “J.P. Morgan interests had bought 25 of America’s leading newspapers, and inserted their own editors, in order to control the media” so that we’d join the war on England’s side. Whereas back then, it was Germany’s leader who was being goaded into providing a pretext for us to declare war against his country, this time it’s Russia’s leader (Putin) who is being demonized and goaded into providing such a pretext, though Putin (unlike Germany’s Kaiser) has thus far refrained from providing the pretext that Obama constantly warns us that he will (a Russian invasion of Ukraine). Consequently, Obama’s people are stepping up the pressure upon Putin by bombing the areas of neighboring Ukraine where Russian speakers live, who have family across the border inside Russia itself. Just a few more weeks of this, and Putin’s public support inside Russia could palpably erode if Putin simply lets the slaughter proceed without his sending troops in to defend them and to fight back against Kiev’s (Washington’s surrogate’s) bombing-campaign. This would provide the pretext that Obama has been warning about.

I also have reported on “Why Ukraine’s Civil War Is of Global Historical Importance.” The article argued that “This civil war is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War, this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an ideological battle between ‘capitalism’ versus ‘communism,’ but instead more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging aristocracies of Russia and of China.” The conflict’s origin, as recounted there, was told in its highest detail in an article in the scholarly journal Diplomatic History, about how U.S. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 fooled the Soviet Union’s leader Mikhail Gorbachev into Gorbachev’s allowing the Cold War to be ended without any assurance being given to the remaining rump country, his own Russia, that NATO and its missiles and bombers won’t expand right up to Russia’s doorstep and surround Russia with a first-strike ability to destroy Russia before Russia will even have a chance to get its own nuclear weapons into the air in order to destroy the U.S. right back in retaliation.

That old system — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD, but actually very rational from the public’s perspective on both sides — is gone. The U.S. increasingly is getting nuclear primacy. Russia, surrounded by NATO nations and U.S. nuclear weapons, would be able to be wiped out before its rusty and comparatively puny military force could be mustered to respond. Whereas we are not surrounded by their weapons, they are surrounded by ours. Whereas they don’t have the ability to wipe us out before we can respond, we have the ability to wipe them out before they’ll be able to respond. This is the reason why America’s aristocracy argue that MAD is dead. An article, “Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War” was published in the December 2008 Physics Today, and it concluded that, “the indirect effects [‘nuclear winter’] would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.” (It would be even worse, and far faster, than the expected harms from global warming.) However, aristocrats separate themselves from the public, and so their perspective is not necessarily the same as the public’s. The perspective that J.P. Morgan and Co. had in 1915 wasn’t the perspective that the U.S. public had back then, and it also wasn’t the perspective that our President, Woodrow Wilson, did back then, when we were a democracy. But it’s even less clear today that we are a democracy than it was in 1915. In that regard, things have only gotten worse in America.

So, President Obama is now trying to persuade EU leaders to join with him to complete this plan to replace MAD with a first-strike nuclear capability that will eliminate Russia altogether from the world stage.

As I also documented, the IMF is thoroughly supportive of this plan to remove Russia, and announced on May 1st, just a day prior to our massacre of independence-supporters in the south Ukrainian city of Odessa on May 2nd, that unless all of the independence supporters in south and eastern Ukraine can be defeated and/or killed, the IMF will pull the plug on Ukraine and force it into receivership.

Obama clearly means business here, and so the government that we have installed in Kiev is bombing throughout southeastern Ukraine, in order to convince the residents there that resistance will be futile. Part of the short-term goal here is to get Russia to absorb the losses of all of Ukraine’s unpaid debts to Russia, so that far less of Ukraine’s unpaid debts to the IMF, U.S. and E.U., will remain unpaid. It’s basically an international bankruptcy proceeding, but without an international bankruptcy court, using instead military means. It’s like creditors going to a bankrupt for repayment, and the one with the most gunmen gets paid, while the others do not. This is the reason why the IMF ordered the leaders in Kiev to put down the rebellion in Ukraine’s southeast. What’s important to the IMF is not land, it’s the Kiev government’s continued control over the assets in the rebelling part of Ukraine — assets that will be worth something in a privatization or sell-off to repay that debt. However, for Obama, what is even more important than repaid debts is the continued dominance of the U.S. dollar. Wall Street needs that.

Among other indications that the U.S. is now preparing a nuclear attack against Russia is an article on May 23rd, “U.S. Tests Advanced Missile For NATO Interceptor System,” and also a June 10th report from a website with good sources in Russian intelligence, which alleges that Ukrainian President Petro “Poroshenko secretly met with … [an] American delegation headed by the Director of … the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Frank Archibald, which also included former CIA chief in Ukraine Jeffrey Egan, the current – Raymond Mark Davidson, Mark Buggy (CIA, Istanbul), Andrzej Derlatka, a CIA agent in the Polish intelligence Agency, and member of CIA Kevin Duffin who is working as senior Vice President of the insurance company Brower. Poroshenko and Archibald signed a paper entitled an ‘Agreement on Military Cooperation between the U.S. and Ukraine’”

Furthermore, barely a month before the CIA and State Department overthrew the previous, the pro-Russian, President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, the government of Netherlands decided, after 18 years of “dithering,” to allow the U.S. to arm our F-35 bombers there with nuclear weapons. And this was already after Holland’s “Parliament in November signed off on a government plan to purchase 37 F-35As to replace the Dutch air force’s aging fleet of nuclear-capable F-16s. The Netherlands is widely understood to host about two dozen U.S. B-61 gravity bombs at the Volkel air base, as part of NATO’s policy of nuclear burden-sharing.”

Moreover, Obama isn’t only beefing up our first-strike nuclear capability, but is also building something new, called “Prompt Global Strike,” to supplement that nuclear force, by means of “a precision conventional weapon strike” that, if launched against Russia from next-door Ukraine, could wipe out Russia’s nuclear weapons within just a minute or so. That might be a fallback position, for Obama, in case the EU’s leaders (other than Netherlands and perhaps one or two others) might happen to decide that they won’t participate in our planned nuclear invasion of Russia.

As if it’s not already enough, that the U.S. has troops in many countries, which include the following nations where our soldiers are stationed (and this includes ones with missile bases located near Russia): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

We also have some soldiers in other former parts of the U.S.S.R.: Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

We also have nearly 35,000 troops stationed in Japan, a nation near Russia and that claims ownership of four small Sakhalin Islands and two small Kuril Islands, from Russia.

Not to mention, of course, installations in places like Romania, Singapore, Turkey, Peru, Kenya, and Oman, totaling 185 countries throughout the world.

The United States is, of course, not surrounded by any Russian soldiers at all — not in Mexico, nor in Canada, nor anywhere near this country, except Russia itself near Alaska.

Certainly, Obama means business here, but the big question is whether he’ll be able to get the leaders of other “democratic” nations to go along with his first-strike plan.

The two likeliest things that can stop him, at this stage, would be either NATO’s breaking up, or else Putin’s deciding to take a political beating among his own public for simply not responding to our increasing provocations. Perhaps Putin will decide that a temporary embarrassment for him at home (for being “wimpy”) will be better, even for just himself, than the annihilation of his entire country would be. And maybe, if Obama pushes his indubitable Superpower card too hard, he’ll be even more embarrassed by this conflict than Putin will be. After all, things like this and this aren’t going to burnish Obama’s reputation in the history books, if he cares about that. But maybe he’s satisfied to be considered to have been George W. Bush II, just a far better-spoken version: a more charming liar than the original. However, if things come to a nuclear invasion, even a U.S. “victory” won’t do much more for Obama’s reputation than Bush’s “victory” in Iraq did for his. In fact, perhaps Americans will then come to feel that George W. Bush wasn’t America’s worst President, after all. Maybe the second half of the Bush-Obama Presidency will be even worse than the first.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

 

Are Ukraine and U.S. NATO preparing for a nuclear false flag to frame Russia?

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From Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-ukraine-preparing-for-nuclear-false.html

Russia’s State Advisor, Director of The Institute of Problems of Globalization, Doctor of Economics, author Mikhail Delyagin tells Anton Chelyshev on Komsomolskaya Pravda radio that Ukraine is preparing a new large-scale anti-Russian provocation. Below is the excerpt from a 40-minute interview, published on December 11, 2014/

The rest of the Russian text of the interview can be found on Delyagin’s personal website Delyagin.ru.
http://delyagin.ru/articles/83509-zadacha-amerikantcev-otorvat-rossiyu-ot-evropy.html#.VIc493VQ2Jg.facebook
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Chelyshev:

– Hello, Mikhail Gennadievich. Are we going to discuss President Putin’s adress?

Delyagin:

– The address of President Vladimir Putin to the Federal Assembly is extremely important. And, of course, it would be necessary to discuss it in the first place. Moreover, it gives us some quite certain distinct new perspectives. After Crimea I have great respect for the President. I had different stages of my assessment of the President, but after Crimea I have no doubts. But, unfortunately, as American Secretary of Defense once said -“there are more important things in the world”. Today, I hope you listened to this address and you can always read, listen to the experts. I want to talk about things and information of a unique character, unfortunately. It is of a pretty nasty character and threatens us all very much.

Chelyshev:

– What kind of information?

Delyagin:

– It is connected with geopolitics. Why did Ukrainian crisis happen, what is the fundamental reason? Why did Americans get into it so deep? The Europeans got there because of the assets, as the Germans in 1941 – to take more land, factories, power lines and other existing businesses – ports, mines. The Americans got in because in the world objectively, there are three global players: the US, China and the EU. But the European Union is independent and a player equal to America and China only in case of cooperation with Russia. Not integration, of course, but at least close and tight relationship. The destruction of EU cooperation with Russia eliminates it as an independent participant in global competition, which is what we see now. The Americans did not get into this to get Russia. With all my patriotism, 2.5 percent of global GDP at market prices, up to 3 %, almost 4 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity, it is not something that plays a global role. The global role is affected when instead of three actors in the global competition, if you tear the European Union and Russia, only two will remain. The EU will be no more. And this was the strategic objective of the Americans, which, unfortunately, neither we nor the Europeans realized. We possibly realized, but we were focused on a local task – how to appease Yanukovych. How could we explain to him that he should take money from us, than give it to the Europeans.

As a result, Americans have achieved outstanding success. We are in a real cold war. Ukraine is in a hot civil war. The talk about some sort of a ceasefire… let’s not bring out the horrible details, but peaceful civilians are killed every day. But the problem isn’t solved. Because despite the fact that the Russian Federation did not invade Ukraine, did not get involved in the war, despite the fact that we turned ourselves into a trash can for spitting, despite the aggressiveness of the European Union, the European Union has very strong sentiments in favor of not quarreling with the Russians. The mood is the following: the Russians may be right or wrong, but they are big, and we need to trade with someone. It is cool to trade with them. If they are wrong, well, we will believe our political bosses, let us trade with them from a distance. Why break up the relationship. But Europe suffers from many ailments. It suffers from our poverty too. Because if only 40% of our tourists now travel to Europe from a year ago, this is a very severe blow to many tourist economies of Europe. And they think it’s a result of their sanctions, and not a result of our stupidity. And there is a very strong mood to restore relations with Russia, whether we’re right or wrong.

Here is what happened in Milan recently. Our delegation of businessmen in suits and ties, after difficult negotiations, not very successful, were looking for an authentic restaurant. Where local Italians eat. Found this restaurant, went inside. There is a sudden moment of silence, because the guys are in suits. Who are they? This is a local neighborhood restaurant. The guys decided to relax, asked if there is any Russian vodka by chance? They were asked: you are probably Russians? Well, Yes, we are Russians. Whispers. Vodka comes out on the house. But that’s not the point. After the whispers subsided in about five minutes the locals stood up and applauded. And chanted: “Putin! Russia!” This lasted for about five minutes. Then everyone went about their business, not to bother the Russians. But this would be unimaginable even a year ago. Or two years ago. People in Europe feel that their rulers have sold them to the Americans. What has never happened before. Well, almost never. In the 1950’s, maybe it did.

Because democracy, albeit perverted, is still preserved, this pressure seeps upward. And the task of the Americans – to finally rip Russia from Europe – is not solved. Europe does not want to switch to the American shale gas – it is more expensive and it is unstable. Europe likes Russian pipeline gas. Europe does not want to abandon Russia as a market for selling cars and wine. It doesn’t want to destroy the relationship. The brilliant affair with the Malaysian Boeing failed. Nothing came of it. Now the British can demonstrate after some time the replaced fragments of the Boeing with fragments of Buk with a factory number stuck in them. But no one will believe this anymore. Because everyone remembers how the anti-Russian hysteria had stopped, as soon as the Russian General staff began to ask questions. It just halted all of a sudden. And this was the answer to who shot down the Boeing in reality.

The sequel is coming. there will be another provocation. And what will the next provocation be? We got some information. Moreover, first the information came from former Novorossia, from Kharkov. And this information I was not very inclined to trust, because Ukraine is embraced in a mass psychosis, and it’s saturated with rumors. But then came an indirect confirmation of this information from the West. I really hope that it’s a fake. I really hope that this is hostile propaganda. But you know, better be safe than sorry. The point is: Ukrainian army goes on the offensive. Yes, it doesn’t have the strength for the offensive and the level of demoralization is monstrous. Therefore it pretends to attack. Valiant soldiers carry out a massive artillery preparation. And all the Western media, not to mention Ukrainian, shout in unison about the liberation of another 300 square meters of Donetsk airport, for example. After that a tactical nuclear warhead explodes in the zone of the offensive of the Ukrainian army. Then everyone shouts that the monstrous Russia used nuclear weapons. Conversations about changing our military doctrine are moving in that direction. The liberal intelligentsia is already hysterically screaming about it. This is that which will be extremely difficult to clean up from. That which our military is not capable of, in principle, even theoretically. And that which is quite normal for the Americans, because both times of the use of nuclear weapons in the history of mankind it was them. To use it the third time is not so difficult.

Moreover, there were reports about wonderful Estonian port Paldiski – former Baltic, there is now a large warehouse of radioactive waste from all over Estonia, may be even from across the Baltic States. Spent x-ray medical devices and so on. And there NATO, U.S. military reportedly delivered some cargo, which also radiates, but in no case is it a waste to be disposed of. Just that the stock of radioactive waste is used as a disguise for the background. Similarly, there are a few other strange stories. For example, there have been some experts from the private military companies in the beginning of the conflict. And the man (his name and last name are known) was placed in the deepest quarantine due to radiation sickness. Apparently, he died there. Former father of chemical weapons is a bit of a different story, but under Saddam Hussein, the man who created chemical weapons, went to negotiations with representatives of the European Union in the center of Kiev, and there in the center of Kiev he was assassinated. Democracy, who would pay attention? But such episodes are very disturbing. Now the scheme is as follows. Unable to explain to anyone that Malaysian Boeing was hit by damned Russian animals, damned Russian barbarians. So we will explain to everyone that the damned Russian barbarians had used nuclear weapons against defenseless Ukrainian army.

Chelyshev:

– If possible, do you have information about how this warhead would be delivered to the zone of the Ukrainian army?

Delyagin:

– No. Understand, I am not the competent authority. I just don’t know. In principle, it could be a cruise missile that will fly somewhere from afar, just on a low flight, below all of the locators. This could be a fixed delivery.

Chelyshev:

– Is the follow up script known?

Delyagin:

– It’s very simple. They all begin to shout, as we have just seen with the story of Malaysian Boeing that Putin is personally to blame. Actually no officer in the Russian Federation, no general of the Russian Federation, no last idiot in the Russian Federation can deploy a tactical nuclear weapon without the direct order from the Supreme Commander. After that all the liberal intelligentsia of the Russian Federation in unison begins to apologize to the West for the despicable criminal regime. We just went through this with the Malaysian Boeing. With all these Makareviches and others. Next – the regime is declared criminal, all relations are broken, including banking transactions. And here no European politician, at least from Germany, from France, and others, will be able to say: no, guys, they certainly did something not very good, but we will still continue to buy their gas, because it is advantageous. Because they will be shown Ukrainian children burnt with radiation disease and all that is necessary to present in such cases. And this is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because then the Americans were the winners. Now we will be the losers. That’s the difference. Global media is tightly controlled by the Americans. I think that Russia Today will be banned in all Western countries and in Japan, and all countries that want to trade with the West and Japan, just on demand. It is quite possible, which seems theoretically impossible. Given the infinite cynicism of our American, as many say – “colleagues”.

Given that Mr. Obama now, if not a lame rooster, anyway lame duck in the American classification. Because he has a hostile Parliament. His power is very limited. And he needs to do something, just to survive, not to be eaten slowly and piece by piece. He has to radically change the situation. Poroshenko is in a similar situation. He tried to radically change the situation on November 1st. There almost began a large-scale frontal attack. The militia, as far as I can tell, knew about it in advance. So a preventive artillery preparation took place, and in some cases there was no one left to attack. A mini-Kursk happened. It is unpopular to talk about it here, and in the West, and in Ukraine. Everywhere for different reasons. It’s like what happened to the Georgian special forces during the war in 2008? Also no one likes to remember that. But this provocation can have terrible consequences, not just for the history of Russia, not just for Europe but for the whole humanity. I coined the phrase, I loved it and was very proud of, I kept saying that they tried to ignite a third world war in Ukraine, but it didn’t work out, because the firewood was wet. Some people who are fighting and dying there were offended. But from the perspective of a third world war it is true – the firewood is wet. It’s not an Islamic state.

But suddenly there is a prospect that it will still be able to ignite. Because it is an absolute crime. And no evidence will be left. This is not Malaysian Boeing, from which there are three tons of cargo left. And everyone walked around and took pictures. There will be nothing to photograph. And to prove that it’s not us, will be impossible. Western representatives under the guise of Russian journalists are sitting in Donetsk and intensely searching for the Russian military. Were looking during the peak of hostilities. We know these people. Top professionals and with that professionally absolutely debilitated people. They don’t take care of themselves and don’t know what to look for. They sat there during all the hot months and saw nothing. But it is not a proof for anyone. And for themselves it is not a proof. They say: we do not see anything, but we know that they are there. No one cares about the reality. They invented the myth that Russia is to blame, and they work with this myth to the fullest. And impose sanctions on the next day after Russia forces to sign a peace agreement. Violate these peace agreements, shelling cities, carrying out genocide on the eve of the winter. And Russia is to blame. This is normal.

But when this position is supported by a tactical nuclear explosion, gentlemen, we will not clear ourselves. It will be impossible to defend. Given the proportion of liberal propaganda in Russia. Given the idiotism of the liberal propaganda in Russia. Given the influence of liberal institutions in the state authorities. Given the helplessness of people who would like to live in Russia, before the liberals who work here just on a rotational basis. Sorry, this will be a catastrophic situation. And it is unlikely to happen right now, in mid-December. Because for a shock value it must happen on a Holy day. So I think that the threat exists before Christmas. The strongest threat. I may be wrong on the details. Because this is an indirect data. I didn’t hold the candle, I have no blood writings and I don’t have agents, to bring you hard evidence. And moreover, I sometimes make mistakes with dates. I thought a coup by Ukrainian Nazis will happen on the first day of the Olympics, but it happened on the last day of the Olympics. Colleagues, I made a mistake, it happens.

 

Translated by Kristina Rus for FortRuss.blogspot.com

Who are the oligarchs? Kolomoisky, Tymoshenko, and others

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From Washington’s Blog, May 18, 2014
By Eric Zuesse
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/key-man-behind-may-2nd-odessa-ukraine-trade-unions-building-massacre-many-connections-white-house.html

The key person behind the May 2nd massacre inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building appears to have been Ihor Kolomoyskyi

who was appointed to be the regional governor in that area by Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian Presidential candidate that the Obama Administration has apparently been hoping will win the May 25th election to take over the Ukrainian Government, from the junta that the Obama Administration imposed in Ukraine on February 22nd. Just weeks before this coup, on February 4th, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Asia, Victoria Nuland, chose Tymoshenko’s ally Arseni Yatsenyuk to head the post-coup interim government, which appointed Kolomoyskyi.

Only a few months before this coup, Nuland had asserted that U.S. taxpayers had already invested more than $5 billion, in order to bring “democracy” to Ukraine, by which she was referring to the U.S. effort to oust the Russian-oriented, democratically elected, leader of Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, who had prosecuted and imprisoned Tymoshenko for embezzlement and abuse of governmental office. Tymoshenko was then on 11 October 2011 sentenced to seven years in prison, and was ordered to pay the government restitution of $188 million. She was released from prison less than three years later, two days after the coup, on 24 February 2014. The Ukrainian criminal code was immediately changed, in order to legalize the actions for which Tymoshenko had been imprisoned. This allowed Tymoshenko to run for the Ukrainian Presidency. She had been Prime Minister 2007-2010. Both she and her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, and his father, all three of whom were on the board of United Energy Systems of Ukraine (and thus Ms. Tymoshenko was called “the gas princess”), have been legally prosecuted as embezzling state funds; but so have most of Ukraine’s oligarchs and political leaders (and there’s a lot of crossover between those two categories).

Kolomoyskyi, who lives in Geneva Switzerland, is generally regarded as the second-richest man in Ukraine, with a fortune estimated at about $6 billion. Tymoshenko used to be called “the Eleven Billion Dollar Woman,” but, like all of Ukraine’s oligarchs (including Kolomoyskyi), nobody really knows precisely how wealthy she is, nor even whether she is more, or perhaps less, wealthy than Kolomoyskyi. Almost all of the oligarchs’ money is hidden offshore; so, is invisible.

Most of Ukraine’s oligarchs live in Geneva (like Kolomoyskyi), London (like the Tymoshenkos’ daughter, Yevhenia), NYC, Rome, and other Western cities, and they tend to stash their money in secret bank accounts in tax-haven countries, not only in order to avoid paying taxes, but also in order to make more difficult their being successfully sued by each other, for violating handshake business deals that had helped them to become so rich. After all, illegal contracts cannot be enforced by any legal government (since they’re illegal, and have secret illegal terms). Thus, other means than written contracts — handshake deals — are resorted to between these aristocrats.

For example, in one such case, a Ukrainian oligarch who lives in London, Victor Pinchuk (whose fortune is around $4 billion), is suing Kolomoyskyi by alleging him to have sold him a company, “KZhRK,” for $143 million, and then to have re-seized it from him by force of arms. As is usual (since virtually all of Ukraine’s oligarchs had become oligarchs from the privatizations, or sell-offs of government assets, which accompanied Ukraine’s abandonment of communism), this case hinges on verbal testimony, and the various parties to the case contradict each other. Kolomoyskyi is well known for taking over corporations through his team entering with guns drawn. Pinchuk claims that when Kolomoyskyi did that here, Pinchuk nonetheless, somehow, managed to get Kolomoyskyi to restore Pinchuk to control, but that Pinchuk later discovered “it appears that they may have sold approximately 50% of KZhRK to a third party in 2007″; so, Pinchuk filed suit against Kolomoyskyi, in London, on this murky case.

According to a summary by wikipedia of several news reports: “Kolomyski has used [his banking company] Privat’s ‘quasi-military forces’ to enforce hostile takeovers of companies, sending a team of ‘hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws’ to forcibly take over a Kremenchuk steel plant in 2006,[17] and has used ‘a mix of phony court orders (often involving corrupt judges and/or registrars) and strong-arm tactics’ to replace directors on the boards of companies he purchases stakes in.[18] Kolomyski was criticized by Mr Justice Mann in a court case in London involving an attempted hostile takeover of an oil company, with the judge stating that Kolomyski had ‘a reputation of having sought to take control of a company at gunpoint in Ukraine’.”

Consequently, the reports of Kolomoyskyi’s tactics against the Ukrainians who refuse to be ruled by the Obama-installed government in Kiev seem to be consistent with this oligarch’s violent norm. Oriental Review headlined on 14 May 2014, “Bloodbath in Odessa guided by interim rulers of Ukraine,” and reported that, “The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” The account there is a more detailed one than has ever before appeared, and it’s consistent with those others (such as this and this). It alleges that:

“Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov [a long-time political ally and business-partner of Tymoshenko; he had destroyed crucial documents in the government’s case against Tymoshenko], to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov [a gangster who was placed on Interpol’s ‘Wanted’ list on 21 March 2012], the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko [a long-time NATO agent], and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy [co-founder of Ukraine’s National Socialist, or Nazi, Party]. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation [he being well-experienced in violent operations].

“During that meeting Arsen Avakov … reportedly came up with the idea of using football [soccer] hooligans, known as ‘ultras,’ in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he [Avakov] has worked closely with the fans’ leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even from his new home in Italy.

“Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private ‘Dnieper-1′ Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for ‘each pro-Russian separatist’ killed during the special operation. [That would be over $500,000, lent by his bank to the Ukrainian Government, to pay for the estimated 116 corpses thus produced.]

“Mykola Volkov [Captain Mykola Volkov Nikolaevich, born 1981 Odessa] was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud. A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened [filmed] during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the ‘incident’ by phone to an official in Kiev.”

This video is one of several that show “Mykola” at various stages during the May 2nd massacre.

Basically, the Kiev regime bussed in far-right or “Pravy Sektor” people, in civilian clothes, to pretend to be separatists and shoot at crowds of people who were supporting a soccer team from the western part of Ukraine and now leaving a soccer match. Whatever members of the local police force hadn’t quit it in protest against the scheme were now employed to bring these enraged western Ukrainian, pro-Kiev, soccer fans to the encampment of the anti-Kiev demonstrators at the Trade Unions Building, to join in setting it ablaze. As indicated in some of the videos (such as this), part of the preparation in advance of the arrival of these enraged western soccer fans was the burning of the tents in front of the Trade Unions Building, where literature had been distributed against the Kiev regime. Regime agents pretended to support the protesters inside those tents, and warned those anti-Kiev people that attackers were coming, and that they’d better go into the building for their own safety. Then, the attackers came and set fire to the tents, and threw firebombs into the building. However, even before many of the anti-Kiev people were incinerated, the regime’s gunmen entered the building’s basement where many of those protesters were hiding, and shot as many of them as they could. Most of the corpses were dragged out and taken away in vans, but the victims on the upper floors were later counted by the police, who announced that 46 people were killed. The actual number is indeterminate, but generally estimated at over a hundred: the number most often cited is 116.

Here is a summary of many of the best videos that were taken of these events and uploaded to youtube. It shows the best-documented massacre in all of history.

Commissioning this massacre wasn’t out of character for Tymoshenko. For example, on 24 March 2014, she was caught, for the umpteenth time, urging the extermination of Ukrainian Russians, and even of all Russians. She said in a tapped phone call, “They must be killed with nuclear weapons.” She seems to have meant this for Russia itself, not just for Russians living in Ukraine: “I’ll use all my connections, I’ll raise the whole world — as soon as I’m able to — in order to make sure.. Bugger! … even scorched earth won’t remain where Russia stands.” So, she was as anti-Russian as a person can be. Perhaps she believes that Obama will unleash nuclear weapons against Russia.

Despite the U.S.’s apparent hopes for Tymoshenko to win in the upcoming May 25th Presidential election, current polls show her as only a weak third, perhaps because most Ukrainians don’t want a President who is as corrupt as virtually all previous leaders (including their former Prime Minister Tymoshenko) have been. The person currently leading in the polls is Petro Poroshenko, the owner of Roshen Confectionery Corporation, Ukraine’s giant choclatier, whose fortune is only around $1 billion. Most of the other oligarchs are in industries such as banking, oil, and heavy industries, such as coal and steel; Poroshenko is unusual in this regard — he didn’t get his fortune from privatizations.

The oligarchs also own all of the country’s airlines (most of which are owned by Kolomoyskyi), and the news media, as well as the banks. Poroshenko, if he is allowed to win on May 25th, might try to restrain the Obama-installed oligarchic forces, but it would require great courage for him even to try to do that, and it would almost certainly fail.

The richest person in Ukraine is generally thought to be Rinat Akhmetov, whose fortune is estimated at around at $12 billion to $24 billion; and he, too, has not committed himself as of yet, except to say that the Ukrainian federation must not break up (which would decimate his export businesses). No one knows how he “earned” his fortune, but it was in the privatizations. He is currently on the fence, because most of his exports and imports have been to and from Russia. But he also relies heavily upon the Ukrainian Government; he is certain to lose from what’s now happening.

Whomever is declared the winner on May 25th, will be taking over a government that’s overwhelmingly being run, at present, by conservative extremists. Now that Obama has placed those individuals so firmly in charge, any path back away from the far right, for Ukraine, will be extremely difficult, at best.

WHY THIS IS HAPPENING

The reason why the Kiev government is ousting Russian-speaking Ukrainians from government buildings in the east is to retain control of the east. CNBC had headlined on May 1st, just the day before these massacres, “IMF warns Ukraine on bailout if it loses east” and reported: “‘This is something of a leap of faith for the IMF and is politically driven by key IMF shareholders [the international aristocracy in the U.S and Europe] to support the (interim prime minister Arseniy) Yatseniuk ‘kamikaze’ administration in its reform efforts,’ according to Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank.”

That “kamikaze” term there was referring to the following: Euronews on February 27th had bannered “Ukraine’s New Premier Suggests Sacrifices Are Unavoidable.” When Nuland’s choice, the far-right economist “Yats,” became the appointed interim leader, he immediately said: “We need to form a responsible government — and it’s not about personalities, this is about responsibility. You know, to be in this government is to commit political suicide. And we need to be very frank and open. This is the political suiciders.” He was looking to impress the lenders by imposing “austerity” on his country, so that when he’d retire from government, he’d be able to cash in for his having served not Ukrainians, but the corrupt Western lenders to the corrupt former Ukrainian political leaders, who had bought the votes of Ukrainians by this borrowed money, in order to get themselves into positions to skim money from this government that they ran.

Inasmuch as Ukraine’s oligarchs have their billions stashed away in places like Switzerland, it’s clear who will probably end up paying for these billions that they had skimmed off from lenders in Europe and the United States. The masses of Ukrainians obviously will take the losses, if the plan of the IMF and U.S. succeeds. That’s what the Ukrainian civil war is actually all about: getting the Ukrainian public to pay the losses that prior Ukrainian governments had engendered from Ukraine’s monumental corruption, a money-funnelling operation, from the masses to the classes.

How gigantic is Ukraine’s corruption? According to the World Economic Forum, in their “Global Competitiveness Report, 2013-2014,” Ukraine ranks #122 out of the 148 rated nations for “Diversion of public funds,” #143 for “Property rights,” #139 for “Judicial independence,” #130 for “Irregular payments and bribes,” #133 for “Favoritism in decisions of government officials” (otherwise known as cronyism), #143 for “Wastefulness of government spending,” #144 for “Efficiency of legal framework in settling disputes,” #146 for “Efficiency of legal framework in challenging regs,” #146 for “Protection of minority shareholders’ interests,” and #133 for “Reliability of police services.” In other words: it’s already like failed states.

And, going forward, the Ukrainian public won’t even have the poor government services that they’ve had up till now.

Ukraine will then be a libertarian paradise, assuming that this operation succeeds. The government will serve only the “job creators,” nobody else. No more “socialism,” except of the “National Socialist” type. [Note from Washington’s Blog: We disagree with Mr. Zuesse’s reflexive rejection of libertarianism.  We believe that some libertarians are highly-principled, while others are corrupt and cynical. Indeed, we believe that is true of all “isms”.]

On 12 May 2014, Burisma Holdings announced, “Hunter Biden Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,” and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations.”

The company’s holdings were in eastern Ukraine; so, the operation by Obama and the IMF would need to succeed in order for this appointment to make Hunter Biden a very rich man.

That could be very rich indeed. On 26 August 2012, the Anticorruption Action Center had headlined “Kings of Ukrainian Gas,” and reported that the chief of the Zasyadko gas mine had requested President Viktor Yanukovych to privatize the mine, and Yanukovych responded, “Put the gas deposits in your name, and hand half of them over to Oleksandr [Yanukovych’s son]. Then we’ll give you the mine.” So: “On November 19, 2010, the State Property Fund of Ukraine approves Order No.1710 on the privatization of the O.F. Zasyadko mine. A month later, on December 22, 2010, the government approves a decision to hand nine oil and gas fields in Eastern Ukraine to the Zasyadko mine without organizing tenders. … And the mine then transferred four of them to Inter-Regional Gas Company LLC in Donetsk in 2011.” Then, “In May this year, Inter-Regional Gas Company LLC received the Baranykivska field free-of-charge from the Luhansk Regional Council for exploration and extraction of gas. According to our sources, the company, closely associated with Oleksandr Yanukovych, will soon get five more licenses.” So, Yanukovych’s son was set to become an oligarch. But, “In fact, the tastiest and largest morsels (gas fields) were obtained not by the president’s son, but by a more experienced businessman – Ihor Kolomoisky.” A certain Mr. “Zlochevsky, former Minister of Environment and Natural Resources,” had set up “a Cypriot company – Burisma Holdings Limited,” and placed in it “the largest Ukrainian gas field – Sakhalinska,” owned by an entity, “Ukrnaftoburinnya,” and, in turn, “Ukrnaftoburinnya is owned by a Cypriot company, Deripon Commercial Ltd.” But, “In fact, the end owner of Deripon Commercial Ltd. is a company based in the British Virgin Islands – Burrad Financial Corp. This company has often been involved in various financial schemes of the Privat Group and especially with Ihor Kolomoisky.” In fact, “The Privat Group is the immediate owner” of the entire group of gas companies, including Burisma Holdings. So: Hunter Biden is now an employee of, and co-board-member with, the man who masterminded and oversaw the May 2nd massacre in Odessa.

On 15 May 2014, Voltairenet bannered “In Ukraine, Joe Biden’s Son Mixes Business with Pleasure,” and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, confirmed on 13 May 2014 the appointment of R. Hunter Biden (photo) to its Board of Directors. He will be rubbing elbows with Devon Archer, who has preceded him by a few weeks. … Devon Archer chaired the support committee for the 2004 presidential campaign of current Secretary of State, John Kerry. Devon Archer was the roommate of Christopher Heinz (John Kerry’s step-son) during their studies at Yale University.” It sounds as if the U.S. is strikingly similar to Ukraine. Moreover, it was John Kerry who had advanced Victoria Nuland, from being Hillary Clinton’s official Spokesperson at the U.S. State Department, to the powerful policymaking position of Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Asia. Had anything really changed since Nuland — raised at Yale, schooled at Choate, and sent to college at Brown — had served as the Deputy Foreign Policy Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney (who had flunked at Yale)?

And what will result if this operation fails? Two failed states: one half of the former Ukraine pro-“Western”; the other half of it dependent upon Russia, and perhaps a nuclear war being the ultimate outcome (which would be especially likely if this operation succeeds, because its success would surround Russia with nuclear-armed enemies, which would be intolerable for Russia).

A world with no accountability for aristocrats has served them well, but even they might end up suffering from what they are now doing.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

 

 

William Blum: God, country, and torture

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More articles on the redacted CIA torture report at Global Research including
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-senate-cia-torture-report-dick-cheney-the-report-is-full-of-crap-highlights-executive-summary/5419604
—————————————————————–

Global Research, December 12, 2014
Originally published May 13, 2004
http://www.globalresearch.ca/god-country-and-torture/5419566

This incisive article on torture by Bill Blum was published by Global Research more than ten years ago. It is of particular relevance in our understanding of the insidious Senate report on CIA torture

On October 21, 1994, the United States became a State Party to the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”.  Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: ”No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”‘

“If you open the window [of torture], even just a crack, the cold air of the middle ages will fill the whole room.”{1}

“The thing with the soldiers there, they think because we’re Americans, you can do whatever you want,” said Spc. Ramon Leal, an MP who served at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“You get a burning in your stomach, a rush, a feeling of hot lead running through your veins, and you get a sense of power,” said another soldier.  “Imagine wearing point-blank body armor, an M-16 and all the power in the world, and the authority of God. That power is very addictive.”{2}

America and God … Bush, Cheney, and other eminences of the imperial mafia know well how to invoke these feelings; with the help of the rest of flag-wavin’ and bible-wavin’ America the proper emotions can be easily imparted down to the ranks.  The American part — the mystique of “America” — can also be exported, and has been for decades.  Here’s Chief Inspector Basil Lambrou, one of Athens’ well-known torturers under the infamous Greek junta of 1967-74.  Hundreds of prisoners listened to this little speech given by the Inspector, who sat behind his desk which displayed the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid.  He tried to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance:  “You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything.  The world is divided in two.  There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world.  The Russians and the Americans, no one else.  What are we?  Americans.  Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S.  You can’t fight us, we are Americans.”{3}

And here’s Colin Powell at the 1996 Republican Convention: America is “a country where the best is always yet to come, a country that exists by divine providence.”  He then punched his fist into the air and shouted out, “America!”{4}

Defenders of the American soldiers accused of abusing the prisoners in Iraq have been insisting that the soldiers were only following orders.  At the end of the Second World War, however, we read moral lectures to the German people on the inadmissibility of pleading that their participation in the holocaust was in obedience to their legitimate government.  To prove that we were serious, we hanged the leading examples of such patriotic loyalty and imprisoned many of the rest.

Notes

  1. Hans Christian Stroebele, Green Party member of the German parliament. 2. Knight Ridder newspapers, May 10, 2004 3. James Becket, Barbarism in Greece (New York, 1970), p.16.  Becket was sent to Greece in December 1967 by Amnesty International. 4. The Economist (London), August 17, 1996, U.S. Edition

William Blum <bblum6@aol.com > is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2

Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
www.killinghope.org
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

 

 

U.S. torture report exposes European powers’ involvement in CIA crimes

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From World Socialist Web Site, December 12, 2014
By Alex Lantier
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/12/euto-d12.html

The publication of the US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture has exposed the European powers’ complicity in ghastly crimes of US intelligence. Even though European states’ complicity in CIA torture and rendition operations has been documented for nearly a decade, no European officials have been held accountable.

In 2005, the Council of Europe tasked former Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty with preparing a report on secret CIA prisons in Europe. He released two reports, in 2006 and 2007, documenting the complicity of dozens of European states in setting up facilities for illegal CIA rendition and torture. The states involved included Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Albania.

The existence of approximately 1,000 CIA flights and of secret prisons in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Bucharest (Romania), Antavilas (Lithuania), and Stare Kiejkuty (Poland) has since been confirmed.

Nonetheless, after the US Senate recognized CIA use of the grisliest forms of torture—including murder, sexual assault, sleep deprivation and forcing inmates to stand on broken limbs—officials across Europe reacted by insisting that they should enjoy immunity.

Top officials of the Polish government, which is appealing a July ruling against it over its role in CIA torture by the European Court on Human Rights, denounced the report. “Certain secrets should stay that way,” said Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak.

Polish prosecutors have been investigating the case for six years, including a two-year investigation of former Polish intelligence chief Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, without bringing any charges. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was waterboarded as soon as he arrived at Stare Kiejkuty. One medical officer there noted: “We are basically doing a series of near-drownings.”

Other detainees at Stare Kiejkuty, which housed Saudi, Algerian and Yemeni detainees, were subjected to mock executions with a power drill while standing hooded and naked.

Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski lamely claimed that CIA officials did not explain how they planned to use their secret prisons in Poland. “It was a question as we saw it only of creating secret sites,” he said, adding that he closed down the facility in 2003 because “the Americans’ secret activities began to worry” Polish authorities.

Lithuanian officials confirmed that the black site named “detention center Violet” by the US Senate report appears to be the Lithuanian detention center near the capital, Vilnius, identified in a 2009-2010 parliamentary investigation. Lawmaker Arvydas Anusauskas told Reuters, “The US Senate report, to me, makes a convincing case that prisoners were indeed held at the Lithuanian site.”

Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi detainee now kept at Guantanamo Bay, has stated that he was kept and tortured at the site. Washington paid the Lithuanian government $1 million to “show appreciation” for operating the prison, according to the US Senate report, though the funds were reportedly paid out through “complex mechanisms.”

Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius has asked Washington to confirm whether or not the CIA tortured prisoners at its secret prisons in Lithuania.

British Prime Minister David Cameron dismissed the issue of torture and Britain’s role in rendition flights to countries including Libya, saying that it had been “dealt with from a British perspective.” He told the public to trust British intelligence to police itself, as official investigations had “produced a series of questions that the intelligence and security community will look at … I’m satisfied that our system is dealing with all of these issues.”

In fact, the CIA torture report has revealed the advanced state of collapse of democratic forms of rule not only in the United States, but also in Europe. What has emerged across Europe since the September 11 attacks is the framework of a police state far more technically powerful than even the most ruthless dictatorships of twentieth-century Europe. The methods deployed as part of the “war on terror” will also be used against opposition in the working class to unpopular policies of austerity and war.

European governments participate in the digital spying on telecommunications and Internet activities of the European population, carried out by the US National Security Agency and its local counterparts, as revealed by Edward Snowden. They also are planning joint repression of social protests, based on talks between German federal police, France’s Gendarmerie, and other security forces with the European Commission.

“During my investigation, people called me a traitor and said I was making things up,” Marty told the Tribune de Genève. “The Europeans disappointed me. Germany, the United Kingdom, and many others blocked the establishment of the truth. In fact, most European countries actively participated in a system that legitimated large-scale state crimes.”

“I think we must recall, and it is very important, that this operation, this anti-terrorist policy, was decided and carried out under the aegis of NATO,” Marty told Swiss television channel RTS.

“The United States invoked Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which says that if one member of the alliance is attacked militarily [e.g., as Washington claimed, on September 11], all NATO members are required to come to its aid,” Marty said. Once this was accepted, he added, “there were a whole series of secret accords between the United States and European powers. And all the European countries pledged to grant total immunity to CIA agents, which is manifestly illegal.”

The European powers’ participation in the CIA torture program underscores the utter hypocrisy of the humanitarian pretensions used to justify operations ranging from NATO wars in Syria and Libya to this February’s NATO-backed, fascist-led putsch in Ukraine.

The ferocious opposition of the European ruling elites to attempts to bring this criminality to light is the clearest indication that the democratic rights of the population cannot be secured by appeals to any section of the state. The defense of the population’s democratic and social rights is a question of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class in an international struggle against European capitalism.

Re-posted at

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-torture-report-exposes-european-powers-involvement-in-cia-crimes/5419480

 

Petition demands full release of Senate report on CIA torture

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Petition and letter from former U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich:
http://action.kucinich.us/page/s/call-upon-the-us-senate-intelligence-committee

Yesterday, the US Senate Intelligence committee released its long-awaited report of the CIA torture practices.
As some of you may remember, six years ago I brought some of the same information about illegal torture in Article XVIII of the Impeachment President Bush.
One surprising response in the Senate report is that the torture, called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’  was “ineffective,” as if torture would have been OK if the torturers at the CIA had gained ‘useful’ information!
The CIA’s post-911 history of the use of torture, documented in the Senate report should cause every American to demand release of the full, unredacted report. There should be no hiding place nor refuge for anyone who was involved in the program. Torturers and those who authorized them ought to be brought to justice.
Sign the petition here demanding full release of the Senate’s Report on CIA Torture. Please contribute to our on-going efforts to keep the American people aware of the truth and of a path to action to reclaim our nation.
Once again we see the need for a US Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, where the American people can finally come face to face with the lies which our nation has been living since 911, address those lies and chart a new course of truth, at home and in the world.
It is imperative that the American people know what was done in our name and what continues to be done by our government and its agencies to promote division and war around the world.
Petition text:

WE THE UNDERSIGNED…

… call upon the US Senate Intelligence Committee to access and release the full, unredacted, unedited report on CIA torture.

We demand the creation of a US Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, modeled after such a commission formed in post-apartheid South Africa. Congress and the President must appoint such a commission to invite torture victims and witnesses to provide written or in-person testimony. The commission should compel all those Americans involved in torture to testify with appropriate penalties for noncompliance and provision for amnesty for those who cooperate and tell the truth.

To sign the petition: http://action.kucinich.us/page/s/call-upon-the-us-senate-intelligence-committee

Hungary’s Viktor Orban: Washington’s new enemy image

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This article was written before the South Stream pipeline was stopped.

From New Eastern Outlook Journal, November 21, 2014
By William Engdahl
http://journal-neo.org/2014/11/21/hungary-s-viktor-orban-washington-s-new-enemy-image/

Hungary and its populist nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban have come into the cross-hairs of Washington’s political elites. His sin? Not buckling under to the often destructive diktats of the Brussels EU Commission; attempting to define a Hungarian national identity. But his cardinal sin is his deepening relationship with Russia and his defiance of Washington in signing an agreement with Gazprom for bringing the Russian South Stream gas pipeline into the EU via Hungary.

Orban has himself undergone a political journey since he was elected as Hungary’s second-youngest Prime Ministers in 1998. Back then he oversaw the entry of Hungary along with Poland and the Czech Republic into NATO over Russia’s protest, and into the EU. As Prime Minister during far more prosperous economic times in the EU, Orban cut taxes, abolished university tuition for qualified students, expanded maternity benefits, and attracted German industry with low-cost Hungarian labor. One of his American “advisers” then was James Denton, linked with the Color Revolution Washington NGO, Freedom House. Orban seemed the darling of Washington’s neo-cons. In 2001 he was given the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s Freedom Award.

But in 2010 after six years in the opposition, Orban returned, this time with a resounding majority for his Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union Party, Fidesz for short. In fact Fidesz won a 68% supermajority in Parliament, giving it the necessary votes to alter the Constitution and pass new laws, which it did. Ironically, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, the United States Obama Administration and the European Parliament for placing too much power in the hands of Fidesz. Orban was accused by Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the European Greens of making Hungary on the model of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. He was definitely not playing by the approved Brussels Rulebook for politically submissive EU politicians. Fidesz began to be demonized in EU media as the Hungarian version of United Russia and Orban as the Hungarian Putin. That was in 2012.

Now it’s getting alarming for the Atlanticists and their EU followers. Orban has defied EU demands to stop construction of Russia’s important South Stream gas pipeline.

Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline would guarantee EU gas together with German-Russian Nord Stream that could bypass the war in Ukraine something Washington bitterly opposes for obvious reasons

Last January Orban’s government announced a € 10 billion deal with the Russian state nuclear energy company to refurbish Hungary’s only nuclear power plant at Paks, originally built during the Soviet era with Russian technology.

That caused some attention in Washington. Similarly when Orban criticized the United States this past summer for failing to ultimately resolve the global financial crisis its banks and its lax regulation caused, and praised China, Turkey and Russia as better models. He declared in words not too different from what I have often used that Western democracies, “will probably be incapable of maintaining their global competitiveness in the upcoming decades and will instead be scaled down unless they are capable of changing themselves significantly.” In addition, Orban’s government managed to free Hungary from decades of devastating IMF bondage. In August 2013, the Hungarian Economic Ministry announced that it had, thanks to a “disciplined budget policy,” repaid the remaining €2.2 billion owed to the IMF. No more onerous IMF-forced state privatizations or conditionalities. The head of the Hungarian Central Bank then demanded the IMF close its offices in Budapest. In addition, echoing Iceland, the State Attorney General brought charges against the country’s three previous prime ministers because of the criminal amount of debt into which they plunged the nation. That’s a precedent that surely causes cold sweat in some capitals of the EU or Washington and Wall Street.

But the real alarm bells rang when Orban and his Fidesz party approved a go-ahead, together with neighboring Austria, of the South Stream Russian pipeline, ignoring EU claims it violated EU rules. Orben proclaimed at a meeting with Germany’s Horst Seehofer in Munich on November 6, “”Es lebe die österreichisch-ungarische Energiemonarchie” („The Austro-Hungarian Energy Monarchy Lives.“)

The US elites sounded the alarm immediately. The ultra-establishment New York Times ran a lead editorial, “Hungary’s Dangerous Slide.” They declared, “The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is sliding toward authoritarianism and defying the fundamental values of the European Union — and getting away with it.”

The Times revealed the real cause of Washington and Wall Street alarm: “Hungary’s most recent expression of contempt for the European Union is its passage of a law on Monday that clears the way for Russia’s South Stream natural gas pipeline to traverse Hungary. The new law is in clear violation of the European Parliament’s call in September for member states to cancel South Stream, and of the economic sanctions against Russia imposed by the European Union and the United States after Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Instead of issuing tepid expressions of concern over antidemocratic policies, the European Union should be moving to sanction Hungary. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, should exercise his power to force Mr. Navracsics to resign.” Tibor Navracsics, has just been named the new European Commissioner of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, a post in Brussels that has arguably little to do with gas pipelines.

Next we can expect the National Endowment for Democracy and the usual US Government-backed NGO’s to find an excuse to launch mass opposition protests against Fidesz and Orban for his unforgivable crime of trying to make Hungary’s energy independent of the US-created insanity in Ukraine.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2014/11/21/hungary-s-viktor-orban-washington-s-new-enemy-image/

 

U.S. House of Representatives votes 98% to donate U.S. weapons to Ukraine. U.S. public is 67% against. Is this democracy?

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By Eric Zuesse, December 7, 2014

In a remarkable disjunction between voters and their elected (supposed) representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, the members of the House voted on December 4th, by  411 “Yea” to 10 “Nay,” to donate U.S. weapons to the bankrupt Ukrainian Government, which is engaged in trying to eliminate the civilian population of the portion of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the former Ukrainian President whom the U.S. Government (CIA, State Department, USAID, etc.) had overthrown in a violent coup in February of this year. (Click onto that link for full documentation.)

This 411 to 10 vote margin is 98%, and it contrasts starkly against the 62% of Americans who, in the most recent poll, opposed sending U.S. arms to the Ukrainian Government; 30% favored sending those weapons. (8% had no opinion.) (The above link includes also that poll-result.) So, 67% of those who had an opinion (62% divided by 92% is 67%) shared the view of the 10 members (2%) of the U.S. House who voted against this measure. Only 33% of the surveyed Americans who had an opinion on it shared the view of the 411 House members (98%) who voted in favor of this measure.

This is a war-and-peace issue, so the U.S. Constitution assigns it to the Congress; the President is assigned the executive function of carrying out the will of Congress, as the Commander-in-Chief and U.S. Chief Executive Officer.

However, the situation here is actually even a bit more extreme than that, because the way that the Pew poll of the U.S. public was phrased, it had the U.S. “sending arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government,” and not “donating arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government.” The Ukrainian Government cannot possibly actually pay back all of the financial obligations that it already has, much less pay those plus interest, and buy more weapons. As was documented in the first of the links within the linked report above, “The only reason that things haven’t totally imploded [for the Ukrainian Government] is because of the $18 billion package of assistance from the IMF and the $9 billion in additional assistance pledged by the United States and the European Union.” All of the weapons that the U.S. will be technically ‘selling’ to Ukraine will now go to the back of the line of creditors for Ukrainian debt — never be paid. U.S. arms-makers will receive payment for those arms from U.S. taxpayers (the sale won’t be merely technical for them, nor for the lobbyists they pay), it won’t be paid actually by the Ukrainian Government. Consequently, the U.S. taxpayer is totally funding Ukraine’s bombing campaign going forward, to eliminate the residents in the area which overwhelmingly supported the previous Ukrainian President.

In fact, on September 18th, when the U.S.-installed new Ukrainian President was greeted with standing ovations by a special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, he addressed them and the weapons-lobbyists to cheers as if he were a hero; he said that this was “the forefront of the global fight for democracy,” and said “I urge America to help us, I urge America to lead the way.” He was doing a sell-job for them and their financial backers. Of course, those financial backers also fund the sale of these politicians to the public.

His use of the term “democracy” there was interesting. A secretly recorded phone conversation on 25 February 2014, right after the coup, was subsequently uploaded to the Internet, and the discussants were Catherine Ashton, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister, and her appointed investigator into how Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych came to be ousted on February 22nd, Urmas Paet. In it, was revealed that the snipers who precipitated the coup had been hired by “somebody from the new coalition” (perhaps the U.S. CIA) that replaced Yanukovych, and that, “it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, … they don’t want to investigate [since they were its beneficiaries].” Paet told Ashton that, “what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko — and so when he became ‘democratically elected’ as President of all of Ukraine on May 25th, he already knew this] told [Paet] that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.” So, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag (meaning set up so as to falsely blame the other side) U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor. So, there can be no reasonable doubt that, despite his rhetoric when speaking before the Special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on September 18th, Poroshenko actually knew, by no later than February 25th, that the regime that replaced Yanukovych was being appointed by the United States Government, hardly a ‘democratic Maidan’ event (though it is sold as if it were). Continue reading →

Ukraine receives new weapons and tanks

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From Global Research, December 8, 2014
By Eric Zuesse

The Government of Ukraine held a ceremony on Saturday, December 6th, with the country’s President, Petro Poroshenko, reviewing newly donated weapons, from undisclosed donors.

According to the official announcement, “The Armed Forces’ units received tanks Т-64BМ ‘Bulat’, tanks Т-64 BV, Т-72 B1, Т-72UA, Т-72A, BТR-3е and BТR-4е, self-propelled artillery 2C1 and helicopters Mi-8 and Mi-2. The President personally inspected all.”

Poroshenko said:

“We are providing the troops with new armored vehicles, precise anti-tank means, counterbattery means, means of communication and protection systems. At the same time, we are holding negotiations with our partners on the procurement of modern weapons that are not produced in Ukraine.”

Weapons bought from other countries can be paid for only with borrowed money, because the Government of Ukraine is basically broke and soaring even deeper into debt, and is sharply cutting back on pensions and other expenditures than military, which is receiving the Government’s virtually total focus. Any added loans will never be able to be paid back, because Ukraine will not be able to pay back all of the existing loans. Consequently, all countries that are now ‘lending’ additional funds to Ukraine are simply donating to Ukraine. Furthermore, the IMF is demanding that the breakaway Ukrainian areas be conquered in order for additional loans to be made to the Ukrainian Government. So, all newly loaned money will be going to Ukraine’s military.

Here are the new tanks:

http://www.president.gov.ua/en/gallery/2369.html#39924

These weapons will be sent to the southeast, in order to conquer the breakaway republics that reject the regime that was forced upon them on February 22nd, in an extremely violent coup against the then-existing President, Viktor Yanukovych, for whom the residents in that area had voted approximately 90%. That rejection of the coup-regime sparked an on-again, off-again, invasion from the Ukrainian armed forces, which can be seen at various sites, such as here and here and here and here.

The official announcement of this ceremony said that the new weapons will “help Ukrainian warriors win and liberate the Ukrainian territories from the occupants.”

The election of President Poroshenko was held only in the areas of Ukraine that accepted the coup-imposed regime. “The occupants” (as the President there referred to them) in the other area did not participate in that election, the election of him, though his Government demands they accept that Government as representing them, nonetheless. After the new regime started dropping bombs on them, and sending tanks in to kill as many of them as fast as possible, their determination not to accept this Government only hardened.

The last Ukrainian Government election in which those people, “the occupants,” were voting, occurred in 2010, at which Viktor Yanukovych won above 80% in some districts, and above 90% in other districts. A map showing the vote in each district of Ukraine, in that election — the last fully national Ukrainian election — can be seen here: