New scandalous information about the 2014 Maidan coup d’état in Ukraine has emerged that implicates Lithuania’s important role in instigating the violent events. David Zhvania, a former Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, revealed on his YouTube channel that the seizure of power in Ukraine was financed in “several ways.”
“One of the external sources was the Lithuanian embassy, through which money and weapons were transferred, and the internal channel was Diamantbank. I have documented evidence to support my words,” said the former ally of Petro Poroshenko, the previous president of Ukraine.
Zhvania called on Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova to initiate criminal proceedings and to summon him for questioning. According to the former MP, “Ukrainians should finally find out the truth” on who funded Maidan and who was bribed. He then admitted he was a member of a “criminal group that carried out a coup.”
“To help the conspirators, I used my political influence and my position as head of the State-Building Committee,” he said, adding that he would testify against himself, “but with one condition.”
“Please guarantee my security because I know who the people of Poroshenko are. They can easily order me to be removed,” he stressed.
Mass protests in Kiev began in November 2013 after preparations for the signing of an association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union were suspended. This set off mass anti-Russian hysteria and by the end of February 2014, a coup d’état took place in Ukraine, ousting President Viktor Yanukovych from power. This led to Petro Poroshenko becoming president and ultra-nationalists, including neo-Nazis, gained significant power in Ukraine and instigated a war with the Russian-speaking minority of Eastern Ukraine.
Although U.S. and Western European involvement in Maidan are well documented and known, Zhvania’s admissions are the first admittance of how a small Baltic country of under 3 million people played a key role in destabilizing Ukraine. Lithuania’s role was not only with financial support, but also with arms transfers. Although some may be sceptical that Lithuania played such a role, Zhvania is confident enough in his allegations that he announced he is willing to submit “documented evidence” to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
The question arises whether the Prosecutor’s Office will accept Zhvania’s testimony and evidence. Such a testimony and submission of evidence would further question the legitimacy of the Maidan events as a fight for freedom and democracy in Ukraine. If the legitimacy of Maidan is questioned, ultra-nationalists in Ukraine could become hysterical and instigate political destabilization to maintain and protect the powers they attained when Yanukovych was ousted. This is something the Prosecutor’s Office would be considering.
Lithuania was an active supporter of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution that brought pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko to power in Ukraine. Although Yushchenko was unconstitutionally brought to power, for Lithuania this was not a problem so long as Kiev had a pro-Western orientation. It is therefore not surprising that in 2014 it again supported reactionary forces in Ukraine. From the beginning of the conflict in Donbass, the eastern region of Ukraine where the majority of the Russian-speaking minority are, Lithuania started to provide official military support to Ukraine with armaments and advisers, and informally by recruiting and sending mercenaries.
As Lithuania has taken a pro-American position since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country’s leadership has aggressively served Washington’s ambitions of limiting Russian influence and expanding American interests in the post-Soviet space. It is for this reason that Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland created the “Lublin Triangle,” a trilateral platform for these three countries to counter supposed “ongoing Russian aggression” and show their “firm support” for Western institutions. In their joint declaration published online, the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the three countries condemned Russia’s “ongoing aggression” and its “attempted annexation” of Crimea, while welcoming Ukraine’s “European choice.” Effectively the trilateral platform is a pillar for the three countries to enact Washington’s main foreign policy priorities in the region, that they call “Central Europe” instead of Eastern Europe. Claiming that Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine are in Central Europe instead of the geographical reality that they are in Eastern Europe, is an awkward attempt by these countries to disassociate themselves from Western orientalization that the East is primitive and/or backwards.
If Zhvania’s statements that Lithuania’s role in Maidan are confirmed to be true, it would certainly not come as a surprise, but as mentioned, they delegitimize the initial claims that the movement was a struggle for democracy and Western European values in Ukraine. It would also confirm that Lithuania interfered in the internal affairs of another state and participated in an unconstitutional coup. Effectively, if proven true, the supposed values of Western Europe that Maidan struggled for would prove to be a sham as it was not achieved through the will of the people, but rather through foreign funds and weapons, including those from seemingly insignificant states like Lithuania.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Donald Trump might be described as unique as a president of the United States in that he constantly impulsively self-promotes in a bizarre fashion which the Independent has described as “wild days of authoritarian and incoherent outbursts.” But normally politicians are canny enough to steal and connive out of sight without letting on what they are doing or thinking. Given that, you know you are in deep trouble as a nation when a major political party is so tone deaf as to persist in introducing spokesmen who suffer from serious negative perceptions to boost the chances of their current candidates for office. That is precisely what the Democratic Party has been doing when it keeps employing the Obamas and Clintons to promote the Democratic National Committee platform and its candidates for the November elections while also supporting the campaign of Honest Joe Biden.
Reminding the national electorate of the legacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama guarantees that voters normally inclined to vote Republican or even independent will be energized and turn out in large numbers in spite of their disdain for Trump’s style. Hillary, after all, should still be in jail for her mishandling of classified information while Barack ought to be in prison for life for having given the orders to assassinate American citizens without due process while also using the intelligence and law enforcement agencies to undermine the Donald Trump campaign. Hillary and Barack were also complicit in unnecessary wars against Libya and Syria that have devastated both countries.
Hillary is a co-founder of Onward Together, a Democratic Party front group that is affiliated to other activist organizations. In a recent e-mail she played the race card in a bid to solidify the black vote behind the Democratic Party, writing “Friend, George Floyd’s life mattered. Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor’s lives mattered. Black lives matter. Against a backdrop of a pandemic that has disproportionately ravaged communities of color, we are being painfully reminded right now that we are long overdue for honest reckoning and meaningful action to dismantle systemic racism.”
It is, of course, a not-so-subtle bid to buy votes using the currently popular code words “systemic racism” as a pledge that the Democrats will take steps to materially benefit blacks if the party wins the White House and a majority in the Senate. She ends her e-mail with an odd commitment, “I promise to keep fighting alongside all of you to make the United States a place where all men and all women are treated as equals, just as we are and just as we deserve to be.” The comment is odd because she is on one hand promising to promote the interests of one group based on skin color while also stating that everyone should be “treated as equals.” Someone should tip her off to the fact that employment and educational racial preferences and reparations are not the hallmarks of a government that treats everyone the same.
But if one really wants to dig into the depths of the Democratic Party soul, or lack thereof, there is no one who is better than former U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, the estimable Madeleine Albright. She too has written an e-mail that recently went out to Democratic Party supporters, saying:
“I’m deeply concerned. Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our standing in the world and continues to threaten the decades of diplomatic progress we had made. It is easy to forget from the comfort of our homes that for many people, America is a beacon of hope and opportunity. We’re known as a country that keeps our promises and upholds justice and democracy, and that didn’t just happen overnight. We’ve spent decades building our nation’s reputation on the world stage through careful, strategic diplomacy — but in just under four years, Trump has done unspeakable damage to those relationships and has insulted even our closest allies.”
Albright, who is perhaps most famous for having stated that she thought that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. imposed sanctions was “worth it,” is living in a fantasy bubble that many politicians and high government officials seem to inhabit. She embraces the America the “Essential Nation” concept because it makes her and her former boss Bill Clinton look like great statesmen. She once enthused nonsensically that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
Madeleine Albright’s view that “America is a beacon of hope and opportunity… known as a country that keeps our promises and upholds justice and democracy” is also, of course, completely delusional, as opinion polls regularly indicate that nearly the entire world considers the U.S. to be extremely dangerous and virtually a rogue state in its blind pursuit of narrow self-interest combined with an unwillingness to uphold international law. And that has been true under both Democratic and Republican recent presidents, including Clinton. It is not just Trump.
Albright is clearly on a roll and has also submitted to a New York Timesinterview, further enlightening that paper’s readership on why the Trump administration is failing in its job of protecting the American people. The questions and answers are singularly, perhaps deliberately, unexciting and are largely focused on coronavirus and the new world order that it is shaping. Albright faults Trump for not promoting an international effort to defeat the virus, which is perhaps a bridge too far for most Americans who are not even very receptive to a nationally mandated pandemic response, let alone one requiring cooperation with “foreigners.”
Albright’s persistence as a go-to media “expert” on international relations is befuddling given her own history as an integral part of the inept foreign policy promoted by the Clinton Administration. She and Bill Clinton became cheerleaders for an unnecessary Balkan war that still resonates and were responsible for what was possibly the greatest foreign policy blunder (with the possible exception of the Iraq War) since the Second World War. That consisted of ignoring the commitment to post-Soviet Russia to not take advantage of the 1991 end of Communism by expanding U.S. or NATO military presence into Eastern Europe. Clinton/Albright reneged on that understanding and opened the door for many of the former Soviet allied states to enter NATO, thereby introducing a hostile military presence right up to Russia’s border.
Simultaneously, the U.S. enabled the election as Russian president of the hapless drunk Boris Yeltsin, who, guided by advisers sent by the White House, oversaw the western looting of his country’s natural resources. The bad decision-making under the Clintons led inevitably to the rise of Vladimir Putin as a corrective, which, exacerbated by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and a maladroit Donald Trump, has in turn produced the poisoned bilateral relationship between Washington and Moscow that currently prevails.
So, one might reasonably suggest to Joe Biden that if he really wants to get elected in November it would be a good idea to keep the Clintons, Albright and maybe even Obama carefully hidden away somewhere. Albright’s interview characteristically concludes with her plan for an “Avengers style dream team” to “fix the world right now.” She said that “Well, it certainly would be a female team. Without naming names, I would really try to look for women who are in office, both in the executive and legislative branch. I would try to have a female C.E.O., but also somebody who heads up a nongovernmental organization. You don’t want everybody that’s exactly the same. Oh, and I’m about to do a program for the National Democratic Institute with Angelina Jolie, and she made the most amazing movie about what was going on in Bosnia, so I would want her on my team.”
No men allowed and a Hollywood actress who is regarded as somewhat odd? Right.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
Media outlets from the New York Times to CNN to Newsweek have offered Joe Biden various reasons over the past several days to skip debates with President Donald Trump. None mentions Biden’s fading ability to speak coherently.
A New York Times opinion piece Monday suggested that presidential debates should be scrapped altogether because they’ve “never made sense as a test for presidential leadership.”
We didn’t need the debates to tell us that Trump had chosen to be the P.T. Barnum of American politics. For him, it was (and still is) all about the show, about distracting the public from reality.
CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart, formerly press secretary for President Bill Clinton, wrote last week that it would be “a fool’s errand to enter the ring with someone who can’t follow the rules or tell the truth.”
“Biden will undoubtedly take heat from Republicans and the media for skipping the debates. But it’s worth the risk as trying to debate someone incapable of telling the truth is an impossible contest to win.”
Newsweek noted Saturday that supporters are urging Biden to avoid the debates for various reasons, such as “Trump is not a legitimate candidate” and debates are “outdated political rituals.”
There have been similar stories in the past couple of months, including a July 7 New York Times column suggesting that Biden participate in the debates only if Trump releases his tax returns to the public and agrees to have real-time fact checkers report on misleading statements during the events.
But the calls for Biden to cancel the debates are growing louder and more frequent as the battles draw nearer – three presidential debates are scheduled to be held from September 29 to October 22 – and as the Democrat candidate’s cognitive struggles continue and possibly worsen.
Biden has made a series of infamous gaffes, such as welcoming his audience to the wrong place, then trying to pass it off as a joke, when he gave a speech last week in his home state of Delaware. When he is able to string a sentence clearly together, the message is often puzzling, such as “We choose truth over facts,” or “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Biden also has invented such tales as being arrested in South Africa and a war story that the Washington Post found to be false in “almost every detail.” Biden claimed in February to have negotiated the 2016 Paris Climate Accord with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The problem was, Deng died in 1997.
Mainstream media outlets don’t talk about concerns over the 77-year-old Biden’s mental acuity when wishing the debates away. In fact, they feign confidence in their candidate’s ability to perform well in a battle of words with Trump. The New York Times piece saying that debates should be ended said, “This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long stretch of such contests. The point is that ‘winning’ a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.”
CNN, the same network now opining that Biden should skip the debates, did a “fact check” article in June saying that Trump had falsely claimed Biden was trying to get out of the debates. Biden didn’t have to beg out of the debates. The media was prepared to do it for him.
It’s no wonder that conservatives aren’t buying the press’s explanations. “As predicted, the media effort to help Joe Biden get himself out of debating Trump is now in full swing,” an account named Reagan Battalion said Monday on Twitter. Radio host Ben Shapiro said, “’Let’s just wheel Joe Biden into the Oval Office on a gurney’ is a hell of a campaign slogan.”
Trump, who’s trailing in the polls, may be counting on the debates to help turn the tide against Biden. Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said the president wants more debates with Biden and for the events to take place sooner, before early voting begins.
By Tony Cox is a US journalist who has edited or written for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy.
Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars.
Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.
As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.
This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth.
No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out.
Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.
This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.
As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place.
Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.
Among the material realities of green energy:
Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than five million smartphones; a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.
Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over three million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh says the country will reach almost a full natural gas penetration rate next summer.
Zanganeh said on Monday that more than 95 percent of all households in Iran would have access to natural gas once the current administrative government leaves office in August 2021.
Zanganeh said that the figure, which he described as unique in the world, would be above a target set in 2013.
“We do not have such a level of extensive gas penetration in the world, this is an important infrastructure which people have a good grasp of it,” he said.
Iran is the second largest holder of natural gas reserves in the world. It has significantly boosted production in recent years despite sanctions imposed by the United States on the country’s energy sector.
Growing production has become possible thanks to massive development plans in the sprawling South Pares gas field, the world’s largest gas reserve which is shared between Iran and Qatar in the Persian Gulf.
Zanganeh, who was speaking at a video conference session to inaugurate new gas projects, said building out South Pars had allowed Iran to expand the coverage of its national gas network to thousands of villages across the country.
Elaborating on gas export figures, he said that Iran is currently pumping some 75 million cubic meters (mcm) of gas through pipelines to neighboring countries.
He said production at South Pars would reach 750 mcm by March 2021, adding that the figure would almost be a three-fold increase compared to 2012.
Iran’s total gas production is set to break through one billion cubic meters per day by next year. Total consumption by households normally hits record highs of 600 mcm a day during cold winter months.
Since particularly the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, a sea change in the US policies vis-à-vis China has taken place. Its latest manifestation came on July 23 when the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, delivered what has been called the American “Iron curtain” speech. Pompeo’s “Communist China and the Free World’s Future” speech does provide a significant insight into how the US is trying to establish a ‘new cold war’ global politics whereby it can place itself once again as the leader of the ‘free world’ against China, the so-called epitome of “threat” to America—its unilateral supremacy, its hegemonic domination of the world politics since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its increasing tilt towards sabotaging multilateral agreements, such as the Iran nuclear deal, to extend its own and those of its allies’ supremacy, even if it comes at the expense of peace. Pompeo’s speech does show that the US is projecting China as an ‘evil power’ that needs to be countered. To quote him:
“If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world. General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannise inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it. Now, this isn’t about containment. Don’t buy that. It’s about a complex new challenge that we’ve never faced before. The USSR was closed off from the free world. Communist China is already within our borders. So we can’t face this challenge alone. The United Nations, NATO, the G7 countries, the G20, our combined economic, diplomatic, and military power is surely enough to meet this challenge if we direct it clearly and with great courage.”
However, while Pompeo refused to call it “containment”, the ‘new cold war’ strategy is more of a roll back of China from the US and Europe. Simply put, the US is selling the ‘decoupling’ mantra to its allies both in Europe and elsewhere. This is how the US aims to regain the leadership position it has lost in last few years. Accordingly, while ‘decoupling’ from China is important, it is only “America”, which “is perfectly positioned to lead” this endeavour, argued Pompeo.
But the question is: how well is the US’ ‘new cold war’ rhetoric being received? As Pompeo himself said, the US alone cannot achieve this objective. The US allies, however, seem to have an all together different mindset when it comes to defining their relations with China. To the US’ dismay, not many of the allies, even if their relations with China are not typically ‘friendly’, think that following the US in its footsteps is a good idea. Not many of them seem to believe that a ‘new cold war’ is required to first de-couple and then contain China.
This was particularly evident when the Australian foreign minister Marise Payne recently visited the US even as the pandemic is truly raging there. While the minister did say that they have differences with China, Australia, like the US, has a its own position vis-à-vis China. As the minister, standing alongside Pompeo, explained further, their position is far from a potential or even real decoupling. In fact, it is that of engagement. To quote her:
“But most importantly from our perspective, we make our own decisions, our own judgments in the Australian national interest and about upholding our security, our prosperity, and our values. “So we deal with China in the same way. We have a strong economic engagement, other engagement, and it works in the interests of both countries.”
Adding further, the minister said,
“As my prime minister put it recently, the relationship that we have with China is important, and we have no intention of injuring it.”
While the US would have obviously wanted to enlist Australian support to counter China in the Pacific, Europe, too, is not particularly enthusiastic about the US’ ‘new cold war.’ In fact, US-Europe relations are already becoming too fragile to tackle what Pompeo called ‘a new challenge.’
How integral fragility is to the US-Europe relations is evident from the US decision to cut the size of its troops from Germany, a country which is not only no longer on good terms with the US, but also is actively seeking to cultivate China as a reliable economic partner for Europe. Indeed, German and Chinese leadership have established a frequency of contact that even the US does not have with Europe.
Even the UK, despite its on-going tensions with China over Hong Kong and its decision to roll back Chinese 5G, is not in line with US thinking on a grand strategy and a grand alliance versus China. Indeed, when the UK’s foreign secretary recently framed China policy in his July 20 speech to the House of Commons, he emphasised cooperation over confrontation, saying “We want to work with China. There is enormous scope for positive, constructive, engagement. There are wide-ranging opportunities, from increasing trade, to cooperation in tackling climate change.”
The US effort, therefore, to create a new iron curtain is highly unlikely to attract any bidders, ready to jump on the bandwagon, from Europe or elsewhere. Significantly enough, if Europe continues to maintain a calculated distance with the US over its China policies, other US allies, such as Australia, too will feel encouraged to chart an independent course of action.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
Mobsters running riot on the streets of the Iranian capital Tehran amid a UK- and US-backed August 1953 coup against the country’s first-ever democratic government
A report shows how an MI6 intelligence officer was allowed to spend as much money as he desired to overthrow Iran’s first democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq and restore the Pahlavi regime in 1953.
“My brief was very simple,” said the officer, Norman Darbyshire, according to transcripts censored out of the 1980s Granada documentary, titled “End of Empire,” The Guardianrevealed in a report on Sunday. “Go out there, don’t inform the ambassador, and use the intelligence service for any money you might need to secure the overthrow of Mosaddegh by legal or quasi-legal means,” the transcript went on.
The MI6 officer, who died in 1993, goes on to explain that he spent “vast sums of money, well over a million-and-a-half pounds,” adding, “I was personally giving orders and directing the street uprising.”
The Iranian premier, Mosaddeq had played a key role in the country’s 1951 movement that resulted in the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which had been mainly controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), now known as BP.
“[Former British] Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposed the rule of the country’s first democratic leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, largely because it threatened Britain’s interests in Iran’s oil industry,” The Guardian likewise notes.
In August 1953, the British intelligence agency and its American counterpart, the CIA, initiated the coup by the Iranian military, setting off a series of events, including riots on the streets of the capital Tehran, which led to the overthrow and arrest of Mosaddeq.
The coup, which was followed by the temporary rule of CIA- and MI6-approved General Fazlollah Zahedi, enabled the monarch, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi’s return from exile in Italy. It also consolidated the monarch’s rule for the following 26 years until the victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, led by Imam Khomeini, which toppled the Pahlavi regime.
Mosaddeq, who was convicted of treason by a court martial after the coup, served three years in solitary confinement and eventually died under house arrest in exile in 1967.
The historic overthrow, though, is still given as a reason for the Iranians’ mistrust of the UK and the US.
The censored transcript of the MI6 officer Darbyshire’s remarks was discovered by Taghi Amirani, a film director, who used it in a documentary that was released last August under the title “Coup 53.”
“Coup 53 now makes a clear case that the British were orchestrating an uprising, going as far as kidnapping, torturing, and paying for protesters to go out on to the streets of Tehran,” The Guardian writes.
“This coup shaped not only western relations with Iran for 60 years, but changed the Middle East. Imagine if there had been a democracy there,” Amirani was quoted by the paper as saying.
Experts say the upheaval, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad Coup, was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the West’s oil interests in the country.
The MI6 and CIA’s role was first revealed in a 1985 news story by The Observer, The Guardian’s sister paper, but the report was suppressed. Nor did the “End of Empire” series get to feature either Darbyshire or his testimony.
European diplomats signed a letter denouncing Israel’s plans to begin construction on the E1 project in occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinian WAFA News Agency reported.
Executive Member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) pressured EU officials to act on its words, and force Israel to abandon its plans.
A European Union (EU) representative, with 15 ambassadors, recently submitted a letter in opposition to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, regarding its intention to start building in E1 area, east of occupied Jerusalem.
“We welcome the protest letter… however, we believe that the EU, as well as the governments of these 15 states (including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) should… deter Israel from persisting on the path of illegality, impunity, and de facto annexation.” Dr. Hanan Ashrawi said.
“While the international community is concerned with the ‘possibility’ of annexation, Israel is implementing its scheme on the ground without any deterrence,” she continued, “This includes the siege and ethnic cleansing of Silwan, Al-‘Isawiya, and Wadi Al-Joz (Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem) by way of home demolitions and systemic violence.”
Dr. Ashrawi pressed that states “must not allow Israel to persist in this cynical ruse. The principle of accountability is undermined and rendered irrelevant when international actors insist on giving Israel a free pass on egregious violations of Palestinian rights and international law.”
Russia’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna says Iran’s nuclear capacity is “absolutely legitimate” as it fits within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
“These opportunities and capabilities are absolutely legitimate as a long as they are used for peaceful purposes,” Mikhail Ulyanov tweeted on Sunday.
“The duty of IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) is to certify non-diversion of nuclear materials,” he added. He was apparently referring to the United Nations nuclear agency’s repeated verification of non-diversion of Iran’s nuclear energy program.
The envoy made the assertions in response to a tweet by Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ policy institute that has been identified as part of the Israeli lobby in the United States, and works hard to promote Washington’s policies against certain countries, including Russia and Iran.
In that tweet, Dubowitz had criticized what he called the “atomic capability” given to Iran under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2015 nuclear agreement between the Islamic Republic and world countries.
Ulyanov, however, asserted, “The atomic opportunities were given to Iran by #NPT.” He added that those who disagree with the nature of the IAEA’s duty being verification of various nuclear programs’ non-diversion ”work against NPT.”
The United States left the JCPOA in 2018, despite the fact that the agreement has been ratified by the UN Security Council as its Resolution 2231.
Ever since, Washington has been ceaselessly trying to undermine the deal.
Washington has also been threatening other JCPOA signatories into forsaking their duties under the accord.
In House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic, an AIDS film like no other, the HIV/AIDS story is being rewritten. This is the first film to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players; in their own settings, in their own words. It rocks the foundation upon which all conventional wisdom regarding HIV/AIDS is based. House of Numbers could well be the opening volley in a battle to bring sanity and clarity to an epidemic gone awry.
A coalition of over two dozen parties, all backing opposition figurehead Juan Guaido, have announced they will not take part in the upcoming parliamentary vote in December, claiming any outcome is an “electoral fraud” by default.
Although the election is to be held five months from now, on December 6, the block has already denounced it as fraudulent, arguing that the electoral system itself is unfair. The coalition at the same time rejected the notion that they are abstaining from the vote, arguing that it was “not an election” they have refused to participate in.
The statement, which was signed by 26 parties, comprising the coalition, accuses the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro government of cracking down on the deputies and having the Supreme Court to appoint members of the electoral board that favour Caracas.
The parties also claim that the government violated the constitution by increasing the total number of deputies from the current 167 to 277.
The coalition allege that they represent “the voice of the vast majority of the people of Venezuela,” calling on the international community to denounce the election as a fraud.
While critics have accused Guaido of foregoing an election so he can claim he still commands broad support among those opposing Maduro, there is not even a single opinion as to who leads the National Assembly in the country, plagued by a political crisis exacerbated by biting US sanctions.
Well, what a surprise. US puppet @jguaido and fellow puppets decide not to participate in the December parliamentary elections. It makes sense. Why run in elections when you can just proclaim stuff? https://t.co/eKFFni0zRy
Guaido, who declared himself ‘interim president’ in early 2019, while being a leader of the opposition-led National Assembly, was ousted as the head of the legislature this January in a vote by fellow MPs. Guaido claimed that he was barred from entering the assembly, with a dramatic video showing him climbing a fence to get into the parliament. However, other footage showed that Guaido in effect himself refused to enter the building, unless several other MPs, stripped of parliamentary immunity, would be allowed in. Subsequently, Guaido convened his own “national assembly” at the headquarters of El Nacional newspaper, with its members electing him a “leader” of the de-facto parallel structure.
While the Venezuelan Supreme Court ratified another opposition lawmaker, Luis Parra, as the head of the National Assembly in May, the US and its allies as well as the EU still back Guaido as the congressional president despite his push for a regime change somewhat losing momentum.
Despite the West’s continuous support of Guaido, Maduro has managed to withstand every US-backed forces attempt to overthrow him so far, including the failed military coup by Guaido supporters in April 2019 as well as sanctions on oil exports and the seizure of Venezuelan gold and oil assets. In May, a group of militants led by two Americans attempted to infiltrate Venezuela and kidnap Maduro. While there have been documents leaked to the media that appear to link Guaido to the group, the opposition leader has denied the Maduro government’s accusations of being the mastermind behind the op.
The Egyptian military has deployed about 150 troops on the frontline in the Syrian region of Greater Idlib to support forces of the Damascus government, Turkish sources claimed on July 30.
“The troops were later deployed in the Khan al-Asal area in the western countryside of Aleppo and around the city of Saraqib in the southern countryside of Idlib,” the Anadolu Agency quoted its source as saying. The news agency claimed that the Egyptian service members had arrived via the Hama Air Base.
Later, Youssef al-Hamoud, a spokesman for the Syrian National Army, a coalition of Turkish proxy groups based in northern Aleppo, said that the number of Egyptian troops is in fact 148. They supposedly deployed in Syria in 3 groups via the Hama Air Base. According to him, 98 Egyptian personnel reportedly came from the city of Ismailia on July 26 and then were deployed in Khan al-Asal. 50 others arrived from Cairo Airport on July 27. They are supposedly deployed in Saraqib.
However, no flights from Egypt to the said base were recorded over the past few days. Furthermore, it is almost impossible to hide the deployment of foreign troops on the frontline in the conditions of the Syrian war, when almost every second fighter has a mobile phone and social media accounts and uses them to share pictures and videos from the battlefield.
Most likely, Turkish state media and proxy groups loyal to Ankara found a new original way to justify the illegal presence of their own forces in Syria. The accusation of other parties doing something that the Erdogan government does itself is something that Turkish media outlets regularly do.
In the earlier stages of the conflict, Turkey and its intelligence services openly allowed various terrorists aiming to join ISIS and al-Qaeda to use the territory of Turkey and camps on the Syrian-Turkish border as a transport hub on their route to Syria. At the same time, Turkey was actively involved in illegal oil trading with ISIS.
Later, when the Russian military operation, including mass bombings of ISIS oil infrastructure, convoys, and public revelation of the facts of Turkish cooperation with ISIS, put an end to this, Turkish official propaganda shifted its attention to accusations of all other parties involved in the conflict of cooperation with ISIS. It even claimed that its military operation against Kurdish militias in Afrin was aimed against ISIS.
Ankara sent almost 10,000 Syrian militants to Libya to support the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord. Nonetheless, Turkish outlets are crying foul about the small number of Russia-linked private military contractors hired by the UAE to support the Libyan National Army against Turkish-backed forces.
Over the past years, Turkey has occupied a notable part of northern Syria and deployed thousands of troops in Greater Idlib to protect al-Qaeda-linked terrorists there from the Syrian Army. Therefore, it would be logical for Ankara to find some ‘foreign force’ that it can accuse of deploying its own troops in the country.
At the same time, if the deployment of Egyptian troops to support the Syrian Army turns out to be true, this will be really bad news for Turkey. Ankara still seems to be unable to control its local al-Qaeda partners and the chances of a new round of escalations in the region are increasing.
The mighty Turkish Armed Forces have thus far failed to defeat the Syrian Army exhausted by years of conflict with terrorists. The outcome of the new escalation will be even more gloomy for Turkey if Egyptian forces will join the coalition supporting Damascus.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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