Kiev Secrecy on Report Boosts Suspicions Ukraine Shot Down MH17
Sputnik – 22.07.2015
The refusal of the Ukrainian government to release the results of the official international investigation into the Malaysia Airlines crash a year ago will increase concerns it may have been shot down by Ukrainian fighters, US experts told Sputnik.
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board, mostly Dutch citizens, died.
Forces seeking independence in eastern Ukraine were widely blamed in the West for the attack.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister for European Integration Olena Zerkal told a briefing in Kiev that the results of the international inquiry would remain classified.
“Responses to the MH17 incident have been suspect from the first,” veteran International Herald Tribune correspondent and European affairs analyst Patrick Smith told Sputnik.
“There has been a worrisome absence of hard evidence made public, apart from Russia’s report that it had satellite imagery indicating two Ukrainian fighter jets had been following the airliner prior to the explosion. This report, was of course, ignored among the Western powers.
“The latest determination by the Kiev government to classify results of an international investigation adds significantly to the concerns of many that the Ukrainian air force may have been responsible for the fatal mistake.”
The analyst also criticized the administration of President Barack Obama for its refusal to demand that the findings of the new report be published at once.
“The State Department’s silence on this development, given its energetic assertions in the past, is still more worrisome. It is no longer defensible to dismiss the thought that blame lies precisely with those who were first and readiest to point fingers.”
Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute pointed out that evidence available over the past year threw doubt on the US and Ukrainian claims that the aircraft had been shot down by the independence militants.
“The Ukrainian government kept open a commercial air corridor through a war. That is the first problem. Therefore, the only way a crime could be committed is if those who shot down the aircraft knew it was a civilian aircraft and shot it down anyway.”
New York-based foreign policy analyst and Eurasia Review columnist Michael Averko told Sputnik, the Ukrainian government’s decision to keep the new report under wraps was bound to boost suspicions around the world that they were trying to cover up a conclusion that would damage Kiev’s narrative.
“The ‘classified’ designation plays into the reasoned notion of a cover-up, relating to the belief that the rebel side shot down the MH17.”
Prior to the MH17 tragedy, Averko pointed out, the Kiev regime forces were attacking their adversary from the air in action which led to civilian deaths.
The Kiev regime had the responsibility to report on airspace within their domain which is unsafe for civilian flights, Averko added.
The Ukrainian government’s reluctance to completely disclose all ground control correspondence on this matter is suspicious, he concluded.
Mythology, Barrel Bombs, and Human Rights Watch
By Paul Larudee | CounterPunch | July 21, 2015
To read Human Rights Watch and the western mainstream media, the Syrian government army is inflicting massive casualties upon the Syrian civilian population, most especially through the use of “barrel bombs”. Thousands of bombs have been dropped, inflicting thousands of casualties.
But wait a minute. Doesn’t that imply one casualty per bomb?
Credible and reliable facts and figures are notoriously hard to come by, but Human Rights Watch intrepidly goes where angels fear to tread. They are the only ones that provide both casualty and bomb counts for a given period of time, from February, 2014 through January, 2015. According to them, more than 1,450 bombs – mostly “barrel” bombs – were dropped on the areas of Daraa and Aleppo covered by the report. HRW also reports 3,185 civilian casualties from aerial attacks for the same time period and in the same places. So roughly two casualties per bomb, even if you accept that a lot of “civilians” are actually fighters and that HRW and its sources are hardly unbiased.
That’s a lot of bombs and a lot of casualties, but no indication that “barrel” bombs are more deadly or indiscriminate than the usual gravity bombs in most air force arsenals around the world. Fighter-bomber aircraft may have sophisticated sighting equipment, but they move at hundreds of miles per hour. Helicopters that drop “barrel” bombs have the advantage of delivering them from a stationary position. “Barrel” bombs may be crude devices, but there is no evidence that they cause more casualties than conventional gravity bombs.
So what about the huge number of deaths in Syria? Doesn’t that show reckless disregard for human life by the Syrian army?
The UN estimates 220,000 deaths thus far in the Syrian war. But almost half are Syrian army soldiers or allied local militia fighters, and two thirds are combatants if we count opposition fighters. Either way, the ratio of civilian to military casualties is roughly 1:2, given that the opposition is also inflicting civilian casualties. Compare that to the roughly 3:1 ratio in the US war in Iraq and 4:1 in the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-9. (The rate of Palestinian to Israeli casualties was an astronomical 100:1.)
The Israelis also used Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions that strip the flesh off the bone and cause microscopic metal particles to penetrate the victim’s body. In addition, they used white phosphorous, which burns hot enough to eat through metal or flesh and is almost impossible to extinguish, even inside the body. And let’s not forget the four million cluster bombs that Israel spread throughout south Lebanon during the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, knowing that the fighting was ending. These parting gifts assured that Lebanese farmers and children would be killed or maimed for years to come.
Syria has used none of these disgusting weapons, while being condemned for using locally-made weapons that are in fact no worse than conventional munitions in the arsenals of every air force. Of course, even gravity bombs can create appalling casualties when used on a dense population center. The point is that such incidents are rare enough to be tabulated and recognized (on Wikipedia, for example). To the contrary, the Syrian army has been accused of the opposite: laying siege to an area and starving out the residents, and then using “barrel bombs” to clear the remaining armed elements.
In order to vilify the Syrian armed forces it was necessary to frame Syria for the use of sarin gas, a transparent fraud given that the army gained no strategic advantage and that their use had never been recorded or reported prior to U.S. President Obama’s threat to intervene, only afterward. Really, who would take such a risk for no apparent gain?
The Syrian army relies on loyal soldiers defending their country and their homes from a heavily subsidized, markedly foreign incursion, including many mercenaries paid by the Gulf monarchies and trained by the US. And the army is loyal because they know that although great sacrifices will be asked of them, they will be defending, not sacrificing, their families and loved ones. The rest of the world that supposedly cares about Syria can start by making it unnecessary for them to make such sacrifices.
Paul Larudee is on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement.
The Terrorism Pretext: Mass Surveillance is About Money and Power
By Bill Blunden | CounterPunch | July 20, 2015
“We are under pressure from the Treasury to justify our budget, and commercial espionage is one way of making a direct contribution to the nation’s balance of payments” – Sir Colin McColl, former MI6 Chief
For years public figures have condemned cyber espionage committed against the United States by intruders launching their attacks out of China. These same officials then turn around and justify America’s far-reaching surveillance apparatus in terms of preventing terrorist attacks. Yet classified documents published by WikiLeaks reveal just how empty these talking points are. Specifically, top-secret intercepts prove that economic spying by the United States is pervasive, that not even allies are safe, and that it’s wielded to benefit powerful corporate interests.
At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire Hillary Clinton accused China of “trying to hack into everything that doesn’t move in America.” Clinton’s hyperbole is redolent of similar claims from the American Deep State. For example, who could forget the statement made by former NSA director Keith Alexander that Chinese cyber espionage represents the greatest transfer of wealth in history? Alexander has obviously never heard of quantitative easing (QE) or the self-perpetuating “global war on terror” which has likewise eaten through trillions of dollars. Losses due to cyber espionage are a rounding error compared to the tidal wave of money channeled through QE and the war on terror.
When discussing the NSA’s surveillance programs Keith Alexander boldly asserted that they played a vital role with regard to preventing dozens of terrorist attacks, an argument that fell apart rapidly under scrutiny. Likewise, in the days preceding the passage of the USA Freedom Act of 2015 President Obama advised that bulk phone metadata collection was essential “to keep the American people safe and secure.” Never mind that decision makers have failed to provide any evidence that bulk collection of telephone records has prevented terrorist attacks.
If American political leaders insist on naming and shaming other countries with regard to cyber espionage perhaps it would help if they didn’t sponsor so much of it themselves. And make no mistake, thanks to WikiLeaks the entire world knows that U.S. spies are up to their eyeballs in economic espionage. Against NATO partners like France and Germany, no less. And also against developing countries like Brazil and news outlets like Der Spiegel.
These disclosures confirm what Ed Snowden said in an open letter to Brazil: terrorism is primarily a mechanism to bolster public acquiescence for runaway data collection. The actual focus of intelligence programs center around “economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation.” Who benefits from this sort of activity? The same large multinational corporate interests that have spent billions of dollars to achieve state capture.
Why is the threat posed by China inflated so heavily? The following excerpt from an intelligence briefing might offer some insight. In a conversation with a colleague during the summer of 2011 the EU’s chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Hiddo Houben, described the treaty as an attempt by the United State to antagonize China:
“Houben insisted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is a U.S. initiative, appears to be designed to force future negotiations with China. Washington, he pointed out, is negotiating with every nation that borders China, asking for commitments that exceed those countries’ administrative capacities, so as to ‘confront’ Beijing. If, however, the TPP agreement takes 10 years to negotiate, the world–and China–will have changed so much that that country likely will have become disinterested in the process, according to Houben. When that happens, the U.S. will have no alternative but to return to the WTO.”
American business interests are eager to “open markets in Asia” and “provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment.” At least, that’s how Hillary Clinton phrased it back when she was the Secretary of State. China represents a potential competitor and so American political leaders need an enemy that they can demonize so that they can justify massive intelligence budgets and the myriad clandestine operations that they approve. The American Deep State wishes to maintain economic dominance and U.S. spies have been working diligently to this end.
Medical Journal Lancet Discloses Financial Interest of Pro-HPV Vaccine Article Author
By Sharyl Atkisson | July 19, 2015
As a result of my inquiry for the article “What you didn’t know about a doctor’s stance on the HPV vaccine,” the medical journal Lancet has now issued a correction to its publication.
The correction acknowledges formerly undisclosed financial conflicts of interest between the article’s lead author and makers of the controversial human papillomavirus (HPV) cervical cancer vaccine.
The article by Dr. Sharon J. B. Hanley defended the vaccine and criticized the Japanese government’s decision to stop promoting the vaccine amid concerns about injuries. It also implied patients are incorrectly blaming the HPV vaccine for unrelated ills.
Hanley did not disclose in the original version that she receives funding from entities supported by makers of both HPV vaccines: Gardasil and Cevarix. In addition, she has previously said the vaccine makers are among those who have paid her “lecture fees.” But Hanley implied the lecture fee disclosure was not required for the recent article because Lancet only asks publishers to account for monetary gain in the most recent three year period.
Critics said it’s an example of hidden cronyism among physicians and corporations who use medical journals to influence public policy.
Read Lancet’s correction in full.
Key points of Russian position on flight MH17
By Dr Alexander Yakovenko* | RT | July 19, 2015
We express our deepest condolences to the relatives of all 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers – victims of the dreadful tragedy, the downing of MH17 one year ago.
- We condemn the destruction of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by unidentified individuals and confirm our position in favor of the inevitability of punishment for having committed this criminal act once the investigation is completed.
- We consider the issue of establishing an international tribunal concerning the MH17 catastrophe to be premature and counterproductive. We are convinced that UNSC Resolution 2166 remains the only basis – acceptable to all – for international cooperation in the interests of an independent and transparent investigation of downing the Malaysian airliner. We call for a return to the legal framework of this resolution and for the full implementation of the investigation mechanisms provided for in this document.
- Russia is interested in a thorough and objective international investigation of the catastrophe of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. We do not see this happening at the moment. This is due in part to the fact that Russia has been barred from any substantive participation in the investigation (the involvement of the Russian representative has been purely nominal and has not resulted in his opinion, and the data presented by Russia, being taken into account). Russia has been intentionally excluded from required objective standards of ‘transparency’ by those who conducted the investigation – for example, Russian specialists were essentially denied full and equitable access to the materials which were in the possession of the Joint Investigation Team. The Ukrainian side has refused, up to this moment, to make public the recording of the air-traffic controllers’ radio exchange with the pilots of flight MH17.
- Russia has been insisting on making the investigation transparent to the fullest possible degree, first of all, with respect to the UN Security Council. We have proposed discussing the course of the investigation in the Council, so as to find answers to the most obvious questions (a list of such questions was distributed by Russia to the council in 2014). There has been no reaction to these proposals from members of the council.
- We are forced to conclude that UNSC Resolution 2166, which set out clear and professionally-founded requirements for investigating the MH17 catastrophe, has not been implemented.
- There are many serious questions concerning the organization and conduct of the investigation. Russia’s numerous calls for making use of the UN Security Council to monitor the implementation of UNSC Resolution 2166 have been consistently ignored. The investigation is being conducted without due observance of international aviation standards and without recognition of the key role of ICAO in such matters.
- We are surprised by the fact that the members of the Joint Investigation Team have not undertaken preparatory work on the basis of UNSC Resolution 2166 and have not discussed with the council their plan of further actions. Instead, they have tabled a far-reaching draft resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. UNSC Resolution 2166 does not qualify the downing of the plane as a threat to international peace and security. The tragedy, though horrifying and tragic, was an isolated act of a criminal nature. Thus a trial could be organized on the basis of national, international or mixed law. In any case, this matter does not fall within the Security Council’s purview.
- Russia is surprised by the proposal of adopting – literally within a number of days – such a fundamental decision, without even discussing any other possible options.
- Despite the provisions of UNSC Resolution 2166, the UN secretary-general has not identified and submitted to the council possible options for United Nations support to the investigation.
- Since the day of the disaster we have been witnessing a powerful information attack on our country in international media and fora (including the UNSC). It has been groundlessly claimed that Russia or “separatists controlled by Russia” were responsible for the downing of flight MH17. Such irresponsible and unproven statements are being issued up to this moment. Their aim is to negatively influence the media background surrounding the investigation. We consider such statements and unfounded accusations as an attempt to dissimulate the true facts concerning the catastrophe and to cover up the identities of the true perpetrators of the crime.
- UNSC practice shows that the mere principle of establishing international judicial mechanisms by a decision of the Council has become a subject of serious and robust criticism by many countries and the international legal expert community. The practice of the existing international tribunals – the ICTY (former Yugoslavia) and ICTR (Rwanda) – confirm the validity of such skepticism. The activities of these two judicial organs are costly, inefficient and slow. Their decisions are highly politicized. They have not been able to finish their work – for over two decades – with acceptable results.
- Up to this moment there has been no precedent in creating an international tribunal for bringing to justice those who were accused of perpetrating an act of violence against a civilian airliner: not when a Russian airliner belonging to the Sibir air company was shot down in 2001 by Ukrainian armed forces over the Black Sea; not when the American Navy destroyed Iran Air flight IR655 over the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988; not after Pan American flight PA103 was blown up as a result of a terrorist act over Lockerbie in 1988, or Cubana de Aviacion flight CU455 over Barbados in 1976; not after Libyan Arab Airlines flight LN114 was shot down as a result of Israeli Air Force action in 1973. No international tribunals were created in other similar circumstances.
- The haste in pushing the adoption of a resolution and its extended scope of reference seem to indicate that the UN Security Council is being used to find a pretext for using the MH17 tragedy to organize a ‘trial’ over Russia on the Ukrainian dossier.
- In view of the above, Russia will not engage in textual work on the draft resolution on the establishment of an international tribunal or its proposed draft charter. At the same time we hope that our partners will understand our position and support completion of the investigation in a transparent manner which would provide a solid basis for a subsequent identification of a suitable trial formula.
*Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011).
Bill Kristol on Iran Deal: ‘Its Munich!’
By Daniel McAdams | Neocon Watch | July 18, 2015
Bill Kristol is the epitome of the neocon mindset: cultivating a staid and urbane image while writing the most unhinged and mendacious claptrap. In his utterly predictable denunciation of the successful Iran nuclear talks, Kristol frames the issue in the crudest terms: if the deal goes through on the US end it will mean the return of $150 billion that was seized from the Iranians by the United States — and that money will be used to commit terrorism against the United States!
Writes Kristol: “How can we debate [the deal] without attending to the $150 billion that is going to a regime with American blood on its hands?”
Kristol cites the National Review which makes the fatuous claim (first made by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which is headed by a close advisor to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu) that Iran has killed 1,000 Americans since 9/11. It turns out any weapon used in Iraq or Afghanistan against an invading US military that might have Iranian manufacturing origins means that the Iranians are responsible for that kill.
Do they want to extrapolate that methodology to include every bullet sold by the US military-industrial complex to every despot overseas?
But you can see how this works: A Netanyahu think tank makes an outlandish claim, it is picked up by the National Review and thus laundered from its biased foreign origins, and then recycled and further laundered by Kristol in his publication. Cute trick.
And Kristol’s objection to foreigners with American blood on their hands is highly selective. The Marxist-jihadist death cult Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MeK) has plenty of American blood on its hands, but Kristol’s own magazine joined other neocon voices in urging the US to remove the terrorists from the US list of terror organizations. Why? Because they are Kristol’s kind of terrorists: they infiltrate Iran to assassinate civilians and foment unrest, while passing off laptops with Mossad-fabricated data made to look like Iranian nuclear weapons activity.
The other thing that has Kristol up in arms over the deal is what he calls the “notorious” Annex III.D.10 of the agreement, which he claims will “help the Iranian regime fight off attempts by others to slow its nuclear program, and more.”
But what does that annex really say?
10. Co-operation in the form of training courses and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to prevent, protect and respond to nuclear security threats to nuclear facilities and systems as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems;
10. Co-operation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems.
In other words, the parties to the agreement will help Iran protect against attempts to attack and sabotage Iran’s peaceful and legal nuclear program. Recall the Israeli/US cyberattack on Iranian nuclear facilities and simultaneous programs to assassinate Iranian scientists. Kristol is furious that anyone would find such illegal and murderous activity to be objectionable. After all, blood on one’s hands doesn’t count if it is Iranian or other Muslim blood.
Oh, and, writes Kristol: “Munich!!!” That is obligatory any time diplomacy supplants neocon lust for war.
That Kristol remains a favored foreign policy “expert” on stations like FoxNews and ABC says very little about the quality of his analysis and much more about his saying what the mainstream media want their audiences to hear.
Who can forget Bill Kristol’s greatest hits, such as this 2011 piece on the “liberation” of Libya titled “The Party of Freedom“? In it he writes:
And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him. … Our invasions have in fact been liberations… in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.
Ah yes, that glorious liberation of Libya!
Indeed the timeline of his faulty predictions would no-doubt span the equator. Imagine any other profession where one can be so consistently wrong and still be considered (and handsomely remunerated as) an expert. Imagine your doctor was wrong in his diagnosis 95 percent of the time. Imagine your financial advisor consistently lost 95 percent of anything you invest with him. Yet Kristol continues to drop his golden turds from the hallowed heights of the foreign policy firmament. What a country…
MH17: ‘No one deserves to die that way’
RT | July 17, 2015
With debris of Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 still covering the crash site in eastern Ukraine, the investigation of the July 17, 2014 tragedy is surrounded by secrecy. RT talked to international experts and the victims’ families, still waiting for answers.
“He was a good man, a good brother. He promised to take me one day on board of his plane… He wanted to take me to Europe, but instead I brought his body home from Amsterdam on a plane,” the younger sister of flight MH17 captain, Wan Lailatul Mustarah Bt. Wan Hussin told RT Documentary (RTD).
RTD’s team visited Captain’s Wan Amran’s family in Malaysia. They couldn’t talk to the pilot’s wife, as she was sick, suffering from mental problems resulting from the trauma she experienced after her husband was killed in the crash.
“At first the youngest son couldn’t accept this all, he was always saying that his father would come back,” the captain’s older sister, Wan Aini Bt. Wan Hussin, told RTD.
The Malaysian captain’s family was shown a picture of his body, which they say “wasn’t damaged, just slightly burnt.”
“I was able to identify him. The person who cleaned the bodies told us that our brother’s body was in the best condition, with nothing missing,” Wan Lailatul Mustarah Bt. Wan Hussin said. The family, like all victims’ families, were not allowed to open the coffins by the government, they told RTD.
“The government is keeping quiet,” the captain’s sister said, adding that the family doesn’t blame anybody. “We just want and hope somebody will come up with something, especially from the black box,” she said.
“We want the facts, we don’t want propaganda,” Malaysian engineer Azahar Zanudin told RTD. “I’d like to know the real things about the disaster of MH17, because in MH17 case there is something wrong about the investigation,” the engineer said. Blaming the local media for “following the western media” bias, Zanudin has created a Facebook page, where he collects the news about the crash from around the world “for the people to see.”
“You can study the whole world behind your laptop, but the best thing you can do is check the spot yourself,” Dutch blogger Max Van Der Werff told RTD. The blogger has visited the crash site in Ukraine, and said that in the one week he spent there, he had learned more about the crash “than in a whole year behind my laptop.”
“The Netherlands is the official head of the investigation… (but) we are part of NATO, we are part of anti-Russian alliance, so we are not independent investigators,” Van Der Werff said, adding that the MH17 crash should have been investigated by the UN, “not a biased country like the Netherlands.”
Another independent researcher from the West also changed his opinion on the possible cause of the tragedy after visiting the crash site. “I thought that the story of (another) plane taking the Boeing was a propaganda of Russia,” German independent journalist Billy Six shared with RTD. Then he visited the site in eastern Ukraine and spoke to witnesses who claimed they saw military jets flying in the area, but no BUK missile launcher vapor trail.
“When I reached the crash site, my first impression was quite eye-opening. I saw that the mass media coverage claiming that it’s a very large field of 45-50 square kilometers (about 20 square miles) of wreckage – which gives a conclusion to people that the plane was smashed into pieces in the air – is not true,” Billy Six said, adding that he saw just two places where the MH17 wreckage was largely concentrated.
A lot of pieces of evidence can still be found in the area. On finding parts of the Boeing, people bring them to the local administration, which is said to be in touch with Dutch experts.
Whoever launched the rocket is “a different story,” Elmar Gimulla, a Berlin lawyer who represents the families of aviation crashes victims, told RTD. But the Ukrainian government “has failed” and is to blame for allowing the passenger plane to fly above the military zone, he said.
“Only two days before this crash occurred, a military plane was downed by the rebels. In that situation it was a responsibility of the Ukrainian government to close the air space for civilian flights,” Elmar Gimulla told RTD, adding that he had received threatening emails after news broke that he was aiding German families in launching a suit against Ukraine over the MH17 crash. Once, someone from Ukraine describing himself as “a Nazi” wrote the lawyer with the warning: “be careful what you do.”
“There is too much secrecy regarding the investigation,” former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad told RTD. Saying that the country is “very neutral because there is no real evidence,” the politician said that the investigation of the Malaysia Airlines crash, which claimed the lives of all 298 people on board, was “quite unusual.”“Involvement of Malaysia is limited,” the ex-prime minister said.
U.S. officials flex their power over Ukrainian parliament
Nuland and Pyatt, lords of the Verkhovna Rada
By Dmitry Rodonov | SVPressa | July 17, 2015
(Excerpts)
Yesterday the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, introduced to the parliament constitutional amendments on the special status of Donbass. …
The amendments were introduced during the visit to Ukraine by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, who along with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt was present of the floor of the Verkhovna Rada.
Nuland said that the constitutional amendments made by Kiev suggest that Ukraine has fulfilled its obligations under the Minsk Agreement.
According to her, at a meeting with President Petro Poroshenko, they discussed the importance of Ukraine’s compliance with its obligations under the Minsk Agreement. She paid particular attention to the need for legislative recognition of the special status of Donbass. In her opinion, this is necessary for the restoration of peace and territorial integrity in eastern Ukraine.
The special status of Donbass will be “the answer to any question about Ukraine’s compliance with the Minsk agreement,” she said.
Political analyst Victor Shapinov said that to accept constitutional changes you need a minimum of 300 votes of the deputies (out of 450), whereas the draft proposed by Poroshenko received only 288 votes, and will now be sent to the Constitutional Court for examination.
Victor Shapinov: So the case drags on. The law itself was enacted under unprecedented pressure from the United States. Victoria Nuland personally came to the Parliament to conduct the ballot – an unprecedented case even for puppet regimes like South Vietnam. The United States, and even more so the EU, has already “got” the situation where the Kiev regime is defiantly not fulfilling the Minsk agreement. On the other hand, the Kiev regime, under the dictation of the United States, “complied” in such a way that Donbass can under no circumstances accept it.
Once again there is an impasse – which probably suits the Washington strategists.
The Russian media response is surprising, with some beginning to say that Poroshenko’s proposal is exactly what the Donbass republics sought. In fact, the population of the republics initially demanded at least federalization of the country, and then voted in a referendum for complete independence from Ukraine and the creation of their own state.
Free Press: The adopted amendments really look like a mockery of Minsk, which is recognized in Donetsk and Lugansk, and in Moscow. What do you think?
VS: The same. Even Poroshenko said that his proposals do not provide for special status for Donbass and the “additional provisions for the peculiarities of local self-government in some areas of eastern Ukraine.” This is a direct mockery of the spirit and letter of the Minsk accords.
Kiev’s maneuver is obvious — to simulate the execution of Minsk, but in fact leave no chance for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics to agree to its proposals. It is an attempt to shift responsibility for the escalation of the war onto the republics and put Russia in an awkward position: either Moscow abandons the republics to Kiev under unacceptable conditions, or it becomes responsible for a new round of war.
However, the Kiev authorities have not taken into account that the tail can’t wag the dog. Or if so, not for long. Kiev’s European senior partners have repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the collapse of Minsk-2. Now Washington is unhappy with its satellite. And they don’t hesitate to show this openly. Before our eyes Kiev goes from being a convenient tool in the hands of the West to an inconvenient one. They shame Kiev. And from this it is only one step to withdrawal of support, which the Kiev regime clearly would not survive.
FP: They speak of completely unprecedented pressure on Kiev from the West to adopt this decision. Why now?
VS: Washington is now talking about the need for cooperation with Russia on the situation in Syria and the Middle East as a whole. Apparently, by “turning up the heat” on official Kiev, they are trying to show Moscow that an agreement is possible, that for the U.S. the Ukrainian conflict is not so fundamental, and they are willing to compromise. Another thing is that any compromise will be rotten.
FP: Is the adoption of the amendments connected with the intensification of fighting in Donbass?
VS: Quite the opposite. They were training and preparing the intensification of hostilities. Now the United States showed that they can rein in their satellite if necessary. They demonstrate their control over Kiev in tradeoff with Russia.
FP: Will the adopted amendments complicate the standoff with the authorities, provoking another coup by ultra-right radicals?
VS: So far, since Mukachevo, the so-called radicals have demonstrated very limited resources for mobilization. Without the support of the Ukrainian oligarchy and a “signal” from the West, they hardly dare to do anything serious. The United States continues to support Poroshenko, and the EU follows in their footsteps in this regard. The “radicals,” the Nazis, are only a tool of the oligarchy for suppressing street opposition and dissent. No one takes them seriously as contenders for power — at best, merely as junior partners.
Ukrainian journalist Andriy Manchuk stressed that yesterday’s events in Parliament showed that the foreign policy of Ukraine is dictated from outside — and, moreover, no one considers it necessary to conceal this fact from the public.
Andriy Manchuk: Nuland and Pyatt put direct pressure on the ruling coalition to force them to inscribe in the constitution a new version of the special status for the Donbass territory outside Kiev’s control. Of course, it looks like a humiliation for Ukraine’s national dignity, as with some of the Latin American “banana republics” of the last century — even though Latin American society usually responds much more forcefully to such cynical external dictates. And one can be sure that the nationalist rhetoric adopted by the regime is a cover for our country’s loss of sovereignty – even many of its ideological supporters are now becoming aware of that.
Internal policies of Ukraine are determined from the outside — across the full spectrum of major important political and economic issues. And it’s not the Kremlin’s doing.
FP: Adoption of the amendments comes amidst the government’s conflict with the radicals in the west. Is there a connection between these events?
AM: The conflict with the ultra-right, combined with the fact that Poroshenko was unable to hold a vote on the Donbas without the personal intervention of U.S. politicians and diplomats, really shows that the government does not control fully the situation in Ukraine. Another thing is that it fully coincides with the traditional political line of the U.S. State Department, which always seeks to act as an external arbiter between political forces weakened by internal conflicts in countries dependent on the U.S.
FP: Why did the U.S. suddenly decide to put pressure on Poroshenko?
AM: The reasons that the United States forced the Ukrainian parliament to take yesterday’s decision likely has a complex character — that is, it’s determined by different aspects of U.S.-Russian relations on a wide range of issues, from the Iranian and Syrian issue to behind-the-scenes dialogue on the Ukrainian problem. Both sides are maneuvering in the context of an acute conflict, and are very far from ending the war – as shown by the escalated fighting at the front.
First, despite the fact that most citizens of Ukraine are waiting for peace, the politicians of the ruling coalition, as well as officials and businessmen who profit from this war — not to mention their clientele from among far-right militants, “civil society activists” and pro-government media — are categorically not interested in ending the conflict. And they will do all they can to make it last as long as possible. Second, external political forces that define our country’s policies also see the special status as something very vague that could be disavowed at any time, no more than a political bargaining chip, where the conditional “carrot” balances the “stick” of the proposed tribunal for Boeing [the MH17 crash].
FP: Do you see any non-military solution to the conflict? The media often write about the prospects of a Transnistrian or Bosnian scenario…
AM: Donbass is not Bosnia or Transnistria, and the economic and political situation in Europe and around the world today not at all similar to the situation in the early ‘90s. Peace is possible in the Donbass — the only question is, how many months or years of war separate us from it, and will this conflict be a prelude to more global shocks? I do not think Washington, Brussels or Moscow know the exact answer to this question.
Translated by Greg Butterfield
MH-17 Mystery: A New Tonkin Gulf Case?
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | July 17, 2015
One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal – and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia.
Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin’s face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.
In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal “anti-terrorism operation” that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called “brothers” of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear.
Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia.
But the propaganda linchpin to the West’s extreme anger toward Russia remains the MH-17 shoot-down, which the United States and the West continue to pin on the Russian rebels – and by extension – Russia and Putin. The latest examples are media reports about the Dutch crash investigation suggesting that an anti-aircraft missile, allegedly involved in destroying MH-17, was fired from rebel-controlled territory.
Yet, the U.S. mainstream media remains stunningly disinterested in the “dog-not-barking” question of why the U.S. intelligence community has been so quiet about its MH-17 analysis since it released a sketchy report relying mostly on “social media” on July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down. A source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the reason for the intelligence community’s silence is that more definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the pro-regime oligarchs.
The source said that if this U.S. analysis were to see the light of day, the Ukrainian “narrative” that has supplied the international pressure on Russia would collapse. In other words, the Obama administration is giving a higher priority to keeping Putin on the defensive than to bringing the MH-17 killers to justice.
Like the Tonkin Gulf case, the evidence on the MH-17 case was shaky and contradictory from the start. But, in both cases, U.S. officials confidently pointed fingers at the “enemy.” President Lyndon Johnson blamed North Vietnam in 1964 and Secretary of State John Kerry implicated ethnic Russian rebels and their backers in Moscow in 2014. In both cases, analysts in the U.S. intelligence community were less certain and even reached contrary conclusions once more evidence was available.
In both cases, those divergent assessments appear to have been suppressed so as not to interfere with what was regarded as a national security priority – confronting “North Vietnamese aggression” in 1964 and “Russian aggression” in 2014. To put out the contrary information would have undermined the government’s policy and damaged “credibility.” So the facts – or at least the conflicting judgments – were hidden.
The Price of Silence
In the case of the Tonkin Gulf, it took years for the truth to finally emerge and – in the meantime – tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives. Yet, much of the reality was known soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident on Aug. 4, 1964.
Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts – in his 2002 book Secrets – how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy captain relaying confused sonar readings and then with that false storyline presented to the American people.
As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling “the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on ‘routine patrol in international waters’; that this was clearly a ‘deliberate’ pattern of ‘naked aggression’; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was ‘unequivocal’; that the attack had been ‘unprovoked’; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war.”
Ellsberg wrote: “By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of those assurances was false.” Yet, the White House made no effort to clarify the false or misleading statements. The falsehoods were left standing for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the war by dispatching a half million soldiers to Vietnam.
In the MH-17 case, we saw something similar. Within three days of the July 17, 2014 crash, Secretary Kerry rushed onto all five Sunday talk shows with his rush to judgment, citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked, “Are you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?”
Kerry: “There’s a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a determination. But it’s pretty clear when – there’s a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I’m a former prosecutor. I’ve tried cases on circumstantial evidence; it’s powerful here.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment.”]
Two days later, on July 22, the Director of National Intelligence authorized the release of a brief report essentially repeating Kerry’s allegations. The DNI’s report also cited “social media” as implicating the ethnic Russian rebels, but the report stopped short of claiming that the Russians gave the rebels the sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down the plane.
Instead, the report cited “an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; it claimed that Russia “continues to provide training – including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia”; and its noted the rebels “have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”
Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report didn’t say – which is often more significant than what is said in these white papers – was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.
The assessment also didn’t say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia, despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or other large vehicles.
Rising Doubts
I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S. analysts who also couldn’t say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.
The Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of a Ukrainian ‘Defector.’”]
The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored – or ridiculed – their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a Ukrainian jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.
The Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had “evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,” according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.
On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.
“As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information,” the group wrote. “As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence.”
But the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.
Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-Russian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]
Last October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.
And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BND’s briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8, 2014. But none of the BND’s evidence was made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]
Dog Still Doesn’t Bark
When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by “high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the “dog-not-barking” issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.
In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing on MH-17.
Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).
But the larger dog-not-barking question is why the U.S. intelligence community has clammed up for nearly one year, even after I reported that I was being told that U.S. analysts had veered off in a different direction – from the initial blame-the-Russians approach – toward one focusing on a rogue Ukrainian attack.
For its part, the DNI’s office has cited the need for secrecy even as it continues to refer to its July 22 report. But didn’t DNI James Clapper waive any secrecy privilege when he rushed out a report five days after the MH-17 shoot-down? Why was secrecy asserted only after the U.S. intelligence community had time to thoroughly review its photographic and electronic intelligence?
Over the past 11 months, the DNI’s office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence has made no refinements of its understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.
If what I’ve been told is true, the reason for this silence would likely be that a reversal of the initial rush to judgment would be both embarrassing for the Obama administration and detrimental to an “information warfare” strategy designed to keep the Russians on the defensive.
But if that’s the case, President Barack Obama may be acting even more recklessly than President Johnson did in 1964. As horrific as the Vietnam War was, a nuclear showdown with Russia could be even worse.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
From Kosovo to Crimea: Obama’s Strange Position on Referendums
By Brian Cloughley | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 16, 2015
After the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region.
The destruction and outcome were not quite as tragic and catastrophic as those from NATO’s fatuously-named Operation Unified Protector against Libya in 2011 when its seven month aerial jamboree of 9,658 air strikes caused collapse of governance and gave rise to the present infestation of Islamic savages and a massive refugee problem, but it was still calamitous, as blitzes go.
NATO said its air bombardment of Serbia was essential to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and justified the deaths of hundreds of women and children as being necessary to defeat a “great evil.” The air attacks were not authorized by the United Nations Security Council and there is no article in the North Atlantic Treaty that justifies such a war. It resulted, however, in Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia in 2008.
As reported by the Washington Post, NATO supported the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army whose members are now, belatedly, being convicted of war crimes.
On March 26, 2014 President Barack Obama said in a speech in Brussels that regarding the 1999 war on Yugoslavia, “NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years. And Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbours.”
The President of the United States, whose State Department has some 15,000 experts to keep him informed about international affairs, told the world that Kosovo had held an independence referendum “in careful cooperation” with the United Nations Organization. He added that “None of that even came close to happening in Crimea,” which was an intriguing pronouncement.
Because as reported on Fox News, “During his speech in Brussels, President Obama showed a lack of knowledge of the political situation in Kosovo. Kosovo never organized any kind of referendum, but the Assembly of Provisional Institutions of self-government of Kosovo made a unilateral declaration of independence on February 17th 2008.”
Fox News went on to report Doctor James Ker-Lindsay, a Senior Research Fellow on the Politics of South East Europe at the London School of Economics, as saying that “Surely there must have been someone at hand who would have known that there was no UN organised referendum in Kosovo. It really was not that long ago . . . It will be interesting to see if a retraction or correction is issued by the White House.”
And correction came there none.
Although there was no referendum in Kosovo before its declaration of independence from Serbia it is apparent that the majority of Kosovans desired independence and would have voted for separation from Serbia if they had been given the opportunity to do so. And according to Mr Obama there was and remains no reason for their wishes to be denied.
After all, in 2010 the UN International Court’s Advisory Opinion concerning Kosovo indicated that “international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence,” a clear-cut endorsement of Kosovo’s actions — and of other such decisions around the world.
No doubt Mr Obama approved of the opportunity given to the people of Scotland to vote in an Independence Referendum a few months after his enthusiastic endorsement of a non-existent plebiscite in Kosovo. In the Scottish Referendum I wasn’t allowed to vote, in spite of being Scottish-born and educated, because I live outside Scotland (in France, in which place of residence I have a vote in the UK’s general elections — in a Scottish constituency).
In other blatant attempts to influence voting, the Scottish National Party decided (in the already independent Scottish Parliament which met first in May 1999, coincidentally at the height of the US-NATO blitz on Serbia) to reduce the voting age from 18 to 16 and to forbid Scottish soldiers serving outside Scotland — in Afghanistan, for example — to vote unless they had a residence address in Scotland.
All the attempted manipulation didn’t work, and the majority of Scots voted against independence (much to the vexation of many English people), but justice was seen to be done.
Just as justice was done in the Crimea referendum.
I wrote last year that “some 90% of the inhabitants of Crimea are Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and Russian-educated, and it would be strange if they did not vote for accession to a country that welcomes their kinship, empathy and loyalty” and that there was not “a single case of bloodshed in the run-up to the plebiscite, the free vote as to whether the population wished to accede to Russia or support the “status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was asked by the government of Crimea to send representatives to monitor the referendum but refused to do so.”
It was not surprising that the OSCE rejected the offer to observe the referendum and provide independent assessments of its conduct, because its findings would have been extremely embarrassing for the West and especially for Washington which had no intention of accepting the result of any referendum in which voters would favour Russia. Obama’s assertion that the popular accession of Crimea to Russia was “annexation” is on the same level as his imaginative claim about a non-existent referendum by the citizens of Kosovo.
There were energetic attempts in the West to paint the post-accession treatment of Ukrainian military personnel in Crimea as harsh, but some newspapers refrained from deliberate lies. Even the ultra-right-wing British Daily Telegraph reported that “Like many of the Ukrainian servicemen in Crimea, the 600-strong marine battalion in Feodosia has strong local links. Many of the men are either local recruits or have served here so long they have put down roots. Only about 140 of the 600-strong battalion stationed here are expected to return to Ukraine. The remainder, with local family and friends, have opted to remain in Crimea — the land they call home.”
To President Obama it is irrelevant that the vast majority of Crimean citizens want to belong to Russia. His hatred of Russia and especially of President Putin has tipped any intellectual balance he may have possessed and is now extreme to the point of being malevolently insulting. He is increasingly intent on confrontation and has stated that the decision of the citizens of Crimea to accede to Russia is illegal. The White House announced that “We reject the ‘referendum’ that took place today in the Crimean region of Ukraine,” and Obama declared “I again call on Russia to end its occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea.”
But what is Obama going to do about Crimea? Does he seriously believe that 1.2 million Crimean Russians could accept domination by Ukraine’s Poroshenko? There would be civil insurrection and mayhem if Ukraine took over the country as suggested by Obama.
Mr Obama’s claim that “Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbours,” was bizarrely untruthful — but was clear indication that he approves of UN-supervised independence plebiscites in territories whose citizens indicate that they wish to alter their circumstances of governance.
Given the practicalities of his admirable moral stance it is obvious that in order to clarify matters to his satisfaction he should propose another referendum in Crimea.
‘US interest in Kyrgyzstan: Strategy of global dominance’
RT | July 17, 2015
Washington has given a human rights award to a Kyrgyz man who was arrested for instigating ethnic strife in his country, in yet another example of the US exerting its strategy of full spectrum global dominance, political analyst Srdja Trifkovic told RT.
The US State Department has decided to hand its Human Rights Defenders Award to Kyrgyz national, Azimzhan Askarov, who, in 2010, played an active role in ethnic riots between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in his country. Askarov was arrested during the violence and convicted of taking part in the murder of a Kyrgyz police officer.
RT: Askarov was actively supported by US diplomats. Richard Miles even called him ‘the father of the colored revolutions’. What’s the significance of his involvement?
Srdja Trifkovic: When he’s on the scene, you can be sure that there can be destabilization of the regime under the auspices of ‘democratic change.’ The context is quite clear. Only ten days ago, Kyrgyzstan officially became a member of the Eurasian economic union, after passing the accession process by the parliaments of other members: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia – which, of course, is a red flag to the State Department. A year earlier, the US lease at Manas Air Base had ceased, and effectively, the US was watching one of the putative, important geostrategic assets in Central Asia slipping away. It’s curious that they weren’t so concerned about this particular human rights case – as they call it – while they were still in possession of the Manas Airport. The sentencing came in 2011, several months after the ethnic riots, and secondly, there’s no doubt we’re witnessing an activist for Uzbek separatism being lionized in much the same way as Albanian separatists in Serbia, who were actively involved in the clashes with police and the military in the late 1990s, were being celebrated and feted in Washington as human rights activists and victims of violence.
So this is just more of the same: whenever relations between the US and a certain country deteriorate because the country is no longer keen to be the US strategic asset – like a joker from the sleeve – human rights activists are produced, in this particular case, most likely, guilty of grievous crimes.
RT: Let’s speak more about the significance of Kyrgyzstan. The US had a presence at the country’s Manas Air Base for many years. How important is the country to the Americans?
ST: It’s funny that there is no country in the world that isn’t important to the Americans nowadays. Central Asia is the very heart of what Scottish geographer [Halford] Mackinder would have called the heartland. And it’s obviously an area where ostensibly the US doesn’t have vital interests. It’s a land-locked country, one of many in the former Soviet Central Asia, an area which is logically – if we look at the map – a field where Russia, China, and perhaps to a lesser extent, India, have vital interests – but certainly not the US. The US interest in Kyrgyzstan is purely the reflection of the strategy of full spectrum global dominance. In other words, there isn’t a single square foot in the world where vital US national interests are not involved.
I’m rather glad that Kirgizstan has seen the light and decided to throw in its lot with Eurasian Economic Union, because in practical terms, in terms of its economic development, especially agriculture; and in geopolitical terms that’s where it should look for its future, that’s where the future investment will come from. Depending on an umbilical cord that is 7,000-8,000 miles long, with distant friends on the other side of the Atlantic in this particular case, would not have been a rational strategy for the nation.
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Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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