Rumour Mongering Surrounds MH17 Investigation as NATO War Games Barrel Ahead in Eastern Europe
By Roger Annis | CounterPunch | August 14, 2015
‘Could be.’ ‘Might be.’
‘Can’t show or prove anything, but maybe.’
Is there any wonder that with such language coming lately from the “official” but secretive investigation of the July 17, 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, there is little reason for confidence in a final report? And lots of reason for concern of what a flawed or reckless final report could spark?
On August 11, the Dutch Safety Board and the ‘Joint Investigation Team’ investigating the MH17 crash issued a speculative statement saying they have discovered pieces among the debris they collected from the fields in eastern Ukraine where the plane came down that “possibly originate” from a spent Buk missile.
They say they can’t be sure. “At present, the conclusion cannot be drawn that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17.” And they can’t show us anything. But they are making the statement anyway.
The statement was reported widely by Western media along with predictable spin and wild interpretation. Western media has reported all along that the thinly-equipped self-defence forces in eastern Ukraine are the “likely” culprits in bringing down the MH17, “possibly” with backing coming from ‘somewhere’ in the Russian military command.
Manipulation and misreporting of the known fact of the crash of the plane is disrespectful toward the victims and their loved ones. Much more troubling is the fact that it disregards the deadly context of events surrounding the investigation, including the string of military exercises upon which NATO is embarked in eastern Europe and now the latest news that Ukraine is moving heavy artillery back to the front line of its war in eastern Ukraine, to be unleashed on the civilian population.
Here is how the European correspondent of Canada’s daily Globe and Mail, Mark MacKinnon, reports the Dutch investigators’ statement in a special, center-spread article in the newspaper on August 12:
“The recovery of the missile fragments adds to the bulk of evidence implicating pro-Russian fighters in the downing of the passenger jet, which killed 298 people. Moscow, which accuses the Ukrainian military of shooting MH17 out of the sky, recently used its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block the establishment of an international criminal tribunal to prosecute the case.”
Who needs an official investigation with such an apparent, open and shut case? The implications of such thinking and writing are becoming unthinkable considering the exceptionally dangerous context reported in the opening of the very same Globe article:
“War between Russia and the NATO alliance should be unthinkable. But a new study of recent military exercises suggests both powers are preparing for just that possibility.
“Researchers at a European think tank [the European Leadership Network] warned that while there was no evidence that either side intended to go to war, the increasing frequency and size of military exercises on both sides [sic] of the NATO-Russia border heighten the possibility of an unplanned incident that could spark a wider conflict (Read the report PDF). The finding raises the spectre of a continent-wide clash of conventional armies, the sort not seen since Russia and the Western allies combined to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War.”
The British government is piling on by announcing that it will double the number of Ukrainian soldiers and extremist militia members that it plans to train this year, from 1,000 to 2,000. Presently, Britain says it has 75 soldiers in the country.
Speaking in Kyiv on August 11, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon described the conflict in eastern Ukraine as “red hot”.
Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine have been receiving vital humanitarian aid from the Russian government and from widespread citizen initiatives. They have also received important political/diplomatic support from the Russian government.
The Russian government makes the utterly evident argument that Kyiv should respect the terms of the Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement it co-signed signed on Feb. 12, 2015 and negotiate the grievances which the population of eastern Ukraine has expressed over Kyiv’s radical, extremist turn to a pro-Europe, anti-Russia and pro-austerity orientation for Ukraine.
The issuance of another unfounded, speculative accusation by the Dutch-led MH17 investigation, then seized upon and manipulated by reckless journalists and editors, is another reason why this investigation cannot be taken seriously.
The Dutch government is refusing demands by Dutch media that it release documentation pertaining to its response to the crash last year. A formal request to this effect was made by RTL Nieuws.
The government defends its refusal by saying that documents contain the names of individuals and that the release of the documents could have negative consequences for relations with other countries.
RTL Nieuws has said the following in response to the government’s decision:
“We think it unfortunate that the minister does not work harder to disclose more information. Of course, we understand that not every piece of information can be thrown into the street. But withholding basic facts and decisions? We will study the decision and decide if going to the courts is desirable and useful.”
Late last year, the Dutch news magazine Elsevier revealed some details of the secret agreement signed on August 8, 2014 by the four countries composing the so-called Joint Investigation Team investigating the disaster. The four are Holland, Belgium, Ukraine and Australia. (Malaysia was added to the JIT late last year following pressure and protest over its initial exclusion.) The secret agreement said that any one of the member countries of the JIT can veto release of any information gathered by the investigation.
The implications of an official report that ‘goes rogue’ by leaving vital questions unanswered and throwing anti-Russia speculation and prejudice to the wind are very serious.
The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Buk missile’ have been pounded out in tandem so frequently by Western governments and media during the past year that any speculative report of a “Buk” missile in relation to the MH17 crash just reinforces the ‘blame Russia narrative’ they have worked to establish.
A survey of the circumstances of the crash and the composition of the investigation underlines the danger of the situation.
The armed forces of Ukraine and quite possibly the extremist, right-wing militias allied with it possess the Buk missile system. The government in Kyiv failed to close the airspace over eastern Ukraine when it launched a war there in the spring of 2014. This flew in the face of decisions by the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States and major international airlines months before the MH17 crash to prohibit passenger planes from flying there.
Following the crash/shoot down, Ukraine ignored the July 21, 2014 resolution at the Security Council demanding that the investigation be given unfettered access to the crash site. Investigators were forced in and out of the area, according to the exigencies of the war which Kyiv declined to put on hold. To the point where parts of the plane and parts of bodies are still being randomly discovered today by visitors to the scene.
The circumstances of the crash should easily argue in favour of excluding Ukraine from the official, international investigation, or at the very least, they argue for including Russia since its border lies only a few dozen kilometers away from the crash site. But no, the JIT investigation is being conducted by governments that are hostile to Russia and to the pro-autonomy rebellion in eastern Ukraine.
Malaysia showed its colours last month when it introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council on July 29 proposing that a witchhunt-style tribunal be established by the Security Council to investigate matters. The resolution was a win-win for the anti-Russia crowd. A special tribunal could conduct an investigation without having to go through the motions of impartiality required of the JIT. The terms of the Dutch-led investigation is that it establish the facts, not search for guilt.
Russia vetoed the resolution. The Russian government argued that with two investigations already taking place, what was the purpose of adding a third? Russia’s suspicions were already on high alert given the fact that its offers to cooperate with the investigation have been rebuffed or treated at arm’s length.
Russia’s ambassador to Britain explained his country’s vote: “Our partners preferred to conduct a vote that is impossible to explain by any other motive than seeking a fresh pretext for pointing a finger at Russia.”
“Progress towards justice must be seen. So far, we have seen nothing.”
The vetoed Security Council resolution looked for all the world as a staged ‘aha’ moment. As in, ‘Aha, what is Russia trying to hide by vetoing a tribunal?’ That’s exactly how much of Western media and Western governments reported the veto.
Moscow-based writer John Helmer has been following and reporting the MH17 story closely and provided a comment about the latest developments:
“So far, as I have reported, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) stands out for an investigation that has failed to bring to light and analyze the most obvious sources of data or explain why the Board, the Dutch police and prosecutors have failed to do this.
“For example, in public disclosure so far, there has been no analysis of U.S. satellite images, including infrared images, of the MH17 site just before, during, and just after the strike and crash, and no disclosure of whether the Dutch investigators requested this data, what they were told, or if the Dutch believe the data exist and is being withheld from the investigation.
“I’ve seen no DSB analysis of the silence on the last four seconds of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, and no explanation of how this is possible. There has been no published analysis of the Ukrainian air traffic control radar and radio tapes or confirmation of whether Kiev handed them over to the Dutch, and if they haven’t been handed over, why not. So far, too, there has been no disclosure of evidence from the autopsy and post-mortem data collected from the victims’ bodies.
“What is missing is obvious. So what to make of particles of evidence whose provenance, authenticity and authority of disclosure are far from obvious? The Dutch want to be thought of as careful, methodical, clean. Why so careless all of a sudden?”
Read also:
MH17 – ‘Buk plume’ burns witness – Part I, by Max van der Werff, July 26, 2015
Black boxes and black holes in the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 investigation, by John Helmer, July 17, 2015
The website New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond contains an extensive dossier of articles on the July 17, 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. These include the extensive writings on the subject by U.S. journalist Robert Parry.
Roger Annis is an editor of the website The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond. On June 12, he gave a talk in Vancouver, Canada reporting on his visit to Donetsk, eastern Ukraine in April 2015 as part of a media tour group. A video broadcast of that talk is here: The NATO offensive in eastern Europe and the class and the national dynamics of the war in eastern Ukraine.
Escalating the Anti-Iran Propaganda
By Jonathan Marshall | Consortium News | August 13, 2015
The United States and five other powers that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran based it on verification, not on trust. The media need to start applying to same standard rather than trusting the often questionable claims of their favorite expert on nuclear proliferation, David Albright.
Albright, who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, has long been a loud and oft-quoted critic of Iran’s nuclear intentions. His latest salvo was his widely reported claim that Iran is engaging in suspicious activity at Parchin, a military facility in northern Iran, that “could be related” to “sanitization efforts” to defeat verification efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Albright’s suspicions were buttressed by two anti-Iran-deal columnists who reported that the “U.S. intelligence community” was also studying recent photos of the site for possible evidence of clean-up work ahead of planned inspections. His claims were touted by the Washington Post’s right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin as one more reason to reject the Iran nuclear deal. The Post’s neoconservative-leaning opinion page also gave Albright a column to repeat his assertions, and to ridicule as “mirthful” Iran’s denials.
But credible experts with much more serious credentials than Albright have undercut his latest report along with many of his earlier warnings about Iran’s nuclear plans. Needless to say, they have received much less media attention.
Albright’s Aug. 5 report — a mere one page of text along with three photos — began by describing Parchin as a facility “that is linked to past high explosive work on nuclear weapons.” That unqualified phrase should have concerned reporters right from the start.
Yes, there have been unproven claims that Iran tested non-nuclear high-explosive devices at Parchin — but they have been debunked by no less an authority than Robert Kelley, former director of the Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory and former director of the IAEA’s nuclear inspections in Iraq. Moreover, IAEA found nothing amiss during two unrestricted visits to Parchin in 2005, though Iran has rebuffed its requests for return visits.
Albright’s report then analyzed several recent satellite photos, which show something happening on the roofs of two buildings, several “possible oil spills,” and a couple of vehicles, possibly including a bulldozer. In contrast, a photo taken before the signing of the agreement showed “little activity” and no vehicles. In addition, two new structures “of unknown purpose” had been erected since May. All of this pointed, in Albright’s fevered imagination, to a “last ditch effort to try to ensure that no incriminating evidence will be found.”
He offered not a shred of evidence to link the mundane visual clues to his dramatic conclusion. One wonders if any reporters actually looked at his photo evidence critically.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, stated in response that the activities at Parchin were related to road construction. Opponents of the deal “have spread these lies before,” he added. “Their goal is to damage the agreement.”
In his Washington Post column, Albright twisted Zarif’s words to claim that he “chose to deny the visible evidence in commercial satellite imagery. Iran’s comments would be mirthful if the topic were not so serious.” Of course, Zarif was disputing not the imagery but the tendentious conclusions that Albright drew from it.
Albright’s conclusions were also disputed by Kelley, the American nuclear weapons scientist and inspector, who studied a much larger sample of satellite photos over the past five years and found no evidence of any unexplained activity. He also took issue with a subsequent Albright “imagery brief” calling suspicious attention to more than 20 cars parked between Parchin and a nearby dam.
“The ‘parking lot of death’ has been imaged dozens of times and there are clear patterns of passenger cars parked there,” Kelley told Bloomberg News. “There have been no indicators of a change in Iranian activities of any significance — no earth moving or sanitization whatsoever.”
Other experts also derided Albright’s overheated conclusions. “Parchin is an active site and movement is inevitable,” said Paul Ingram, executive director of the British American Security Information Council. “Attempting an impossible cleanup in full view of satellites and just before Congressional votes would be stretching conspiracy theories beyond breaking point.”
Who should one believe? Expert nuclear inspectors like Kelley, or Albright, who apparently has no advanced training as a nuclear engineer or photographic interpreter?
Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector and IAEA consultant, unloaded on Albright several years ago, saying he has “a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme. Eventually, one must begin to question the motives of Albright and ISIS” (the unfortunate acronym of Albright’s organization).
Ritter cited example after example of Albright peddling misinformation: “On each occasion, Albright is fed sensitive information from a third party, and then packages it in a manner that is consumable by the media. The media, engrossed with Albright’s misleading résumé (“former U.N. weapons inspector,” “Doctor,” “physicist” and “nuclear expert”), give Albright a full hearing, during which time the particulars the third-party source wanted made public are broadcast or printed for all the world to see. More often than not, it turns out that the core of the story pushed by Albright is, in fact, wrong.”
Ritter concluded his blast, “It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.”
Judging by the latest dust-up, Albright remains a media darling, able to garner headlines whenever he lobs new charges into the political battlefield. The issues at stake in the Iran nuclear deal, to echo Ritter, are simply too serious to be muddied by such irresponsible speculation. It’s high time the media began subjecting Albright — and all quoted experts — to more careful verification of their credentials and claims.
For more on Albright and other fake experts on Iran’s nuclear program, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Israel Clears the Bench in Iran Fight.”
David Albright: Congress’ Favorite Fear-Monger
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep In America | August 5, 2015
This just in! David Albright of the Washington-based propaganda factory Institute for Science and International Security is making predictions about
After years and years of his utter nonsense, how can anyone take this guy and his ridiculous analysis seriously?
Here’s a quick trip – just using his own reports, not his endless appearances spouting disingenuous garbage in the media – down memory hole lane:
But don’t worry, Albright will never pay any professional price for his endless, agenda-driven drivel. And he’ll surely be back soon with more scary predictions and alarming speculation. We won’t have to wait long.
MH17 investigators to RT: No proof east Ukraine fragments from ‘Russian’ Buk missile
RT | August 11, 2015
Investigators probing the downing of MH17 flight told RT that they cannot confirm that fragments found in eastern Ukraine are from a Buk missile system, refuting media reports that the parts belong to a Russian surface-to-air complex.
On Tuesday, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) released a statement saying that it is investigating “several parts, possibly originating from a Buk surface-air-missile system.”
Following the release of the report, numerous media reports indicated that it was a “Russian” or “Russian-made” missile system – something JIT spokesman Wim de Bruin rejected to RT, stressing that “it’s too early to draw any conclusion at this moment.”
He described the whole procedure as a “forensic investigation to establish whether these parts… were parts of a Buk [missile] system or not” and added that it is difficult to set the deadlines for the final report to be presented.
The one thing the JIT is absolutely sure about, de Bruin said, is that “those parts were found in eastern Ukraine.”
JIT said in its statement that “at present the conclusion cannot be drawn that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17.”
The fragments “possibly” originating from a Buk surface-air-missile system were discovered during a recovery mission in eastern Ukraine and are in possession of the investigators.
Dutch prosecutors say that the parts found at the site “are of particular interest to the criminal investigation as they can possibly provide more information about who was involved in the crash of MH17.”
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was brought down over war-torn eastern Ukraine July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
As Palestinians Die, NY Times Shields Israel
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | August 9, 2015
One week has passed since a Palestinian toddler died in an arson fire, one day since the boy’s father also perished from burns, and The New York Times has provided us with some half dozen stories on the tragedy. Only one of these was deemed fit to make the front page, however, and this fact is instructive: The favored story was not the original crime or the deaths of two villagers but a report on Israeli angst.
This maneuver was just one more piece of evidence that the Times has tried to provide an Israeli spin to this story. The paper has also adopted the government line that the concern here is extremism, not official policies and actions, and it has failed to provide the full context of settler violence in occupied Palestine.
When the story broke, the Times placed the news that 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned to death on page 4 of the Aug. 1 of the print edition. The brief article about his father’s demise appears on page 9 today. Other stories—concerning protests, accusations and additional responses to the news—were also on inside pages.
It was only when Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren filed an article on Israeli “soul searching” that the editors saw fit to give the story a prominent spot in its Friday edition.
The print article, “Two Killings Make Israelis Look Inward,” received a favored site on page 1 above the fold. This, the editors are saying, is the real news here—not the shocking death of a helpless child, the lingering and painful death of his father or even the legacy of settler attacks—but the feelings of ordinary Israelis.
The arson attack has received this much attention in the Times only because it was impossible to ignore: It made headlines worldwide and forced Israeli officials to condemn the act and vow to take action. But the Times stories have failed to report the full extent of violence against Palestinians and official complicity in these actions.
Readers of the newspaper are unlikely to know that Israeli settlers have often resorted to arson and that their actions have never, until now, caused much concern among government officials. B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, reports that “in recent years Israeli civilians set fire to dozens of homes, mosques, businesses, agricultural land and vehicles in the West Bank. The vast majority of these cases were never solved, and in many of them the Israeli police did not even bother taking elementary investigative actions.”
B’Tselem also notes that West Bank Palestinians are tried in military courts, with minimal rights and protection, while settlers living in the same area appear in civilian courts. Most shocking of all: The conviction rate for Palestinians in military courts is 99.74 percent.
The Times has acknowledged the charges of unequal treatment in an Isabel Kershner story titled “Israeli Justice in West Bank Is Seen as Often Uneven,” but the headline leaves the impression that we are dealing with opinions here, not facts, and the story fails to provide the data that would reveal just how uneven the system is.
In fact, B’Tselem reports that over an 11-year period only 11 percent of settler violence cases resulted in an indictment, nearly a quarter of the cases were never investigated and in the few cases where settlers were tried and convicted, they usually received “extremely light sentences.” The numbers are even more glaring when we note that Palestinians, knowing the outcomes and facing obstacles, often fail to file complaints.
These percentages, however, are less scandalous than the statistics concerning security forces. The Israeli monitoring group Yesh Din reports that 94 percent of the investigations into complaints about Israeli soldiers suspected of violence against Palestinians and their property are closed without action.
Yet the Times, following the lead of the Israeli government, has focused on “extremists” as the problem, ignoring the officially sanctioned destruction wrought by the military: In defiance of international law, the army helps the state confiscate land and destroy property to make room for illegal Jewish settlements.
In recent weeks and months, the Israeli army has been responsible for widespread destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank. Here are a few examples:
- On July 22 the army invaded the village of Beit Ula and destroyed a Roman-era water well and 450 olive trees.
- On July 2 the army uprooted an acre of agricultural land west of Hebron and issued demolition orders for a home and a water well.
- On June 15 the Israeli army uprooted dozens of olive tree saplings over five acres in Husan, a village west of Bethlehem.
- On May 4 the army evacuated the residents of Wadi al Maleh in the Jordan Valley for “training exercises” and set fire to grazing land using live ammunition. Residents were denied access to the land to put out the fires.
- During the month of June in the Jordan Valley the army forced hundreds of Palestinians from their homes for “military maneuvers” and used live ammunition that set fire to acres of grazing land.
- As of Aug. 3 the army was responsible for demolishing 302 Palestinian structures in 2015, displacing 304 people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Times readers almost never read of these actions taken by the military with the official blessing of the government, and they rarely learn of most settler attacks. (Nor do they learn that settlers are allowed to carry weapons while Palestinians are denied even the most basic arms for defense.)
Now the Times, in the face of an international scandal, has done what it can to minimize the damage to Israel, muting the charges of unequal justice, placing Israeli “soul searching” on prominent display, joining the Israeli effort to blame extremists and ignoring the officially sanctioned crimes against Palestinians.
Israeli angst is fit to print in the Times, but Israeli crimes against Palestinians are something else again. If they are deemed worthy of notice, they may come to light in the back pages, under evasive headlines—all part of an effort to protect Israel at the expense of our right to be informed.
Mainstream Media Stock Prices Collapsing as People Choose Internet Over TV
Nick Bernabe | ANTIMEDIA |August 7, 2015
The long-term decline in viewership for America’s big TV outlets is finally starting to catch up to their stock prices. Since 2009, media stocks have been some of the best performers in S&P 500, but the last few days have seen $50 billion wiped from these companies.
According to Bloomberg, “Ignited by a plunge in Walt Disney Co., shares tracked by the 15-company S&P 500 Media Index have tumbled 8.2 percent in two days, the biggest slump for the group since 2008…In just five stocks — Disney, Time Warner Inc., Fox, CBS and Comcast Corp. — almost $50 billion of value was erased in two days. Viacom slid 14 percent on Thursday alone, its biggest drop since October 2008.”
Stock analysts say the reason behind the drop is simple on the surface: many of the media companies missed their profit projections, prompting investors to drop their stocks. Disney has lowered its growth projections for its sports brand, ESPN, while Viacom reported lower revenues than expected, which triggered a sell-off.
However, there is a larger trend at play here—one that the mainstream media—which is owned by these very companies facing the stock beat-down—doesn’t want to talk about. People are simply outgrowing the old media paradigm, and instead, are turning to the internet for both their news and entertainment at a break-neck pace. As we reported last month, Netflix will have more viewers than ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox by 2016.
Viewership of television media is dropping — and it’s left the old media scrambling for answers. According to the Huffington Post,
“Though overall video viewing is up thanks to a plethora of new online services, fewer people are sitting down in front of a television set and a growing number of households — roughly 2.6 million, or 2.8 percent — are becoming ‘broadband only,’ forgoing cable and broadcast signals altogether. In the third quarter of 2014, the average viewer watched 141 hours of TV a month, down 6 hours from the same time last year, and a full 12 minutes less per day.
Digital, on the other hand, has shown strong growth over the past year across all age groups, with viewership up 53 percent among people 18-49, up 62 percent among people 25-54, and up 55 percent among those 55 and older since the third quarter of 2013.”
In the past, TV news outlets relied on a virtual monopoly between the big six companies that own 90% of the media to make their numbers. This left viewers with no choice but to consume media from one of these companies if they watched TV.
But now, as people have multiple sources and choices of news thanks to the internet and independent media, the monopoly is coming under pressure. Aging generations, which will probably never break their TV habits, are now the only reliable audiences for the likes of CNN, Fox News, NBC, CBS, and the rest of the mainstream media. Members of the internet age would rather have choices and read or watch news from sources they both trust and believe in. This is major problem for the old media, as poll after poll has shown eroding trust in the big six. According to Gallup polling numbers, Americans’ confidence in the media’s ability to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” reached an all-time low of 40% in 2014.
The reason for the falling ratings and trust in the media is not mentioned in the poll, but one could speculate that younger generations have become disillusioned by endless war mongering, partisanship, racial bias, politician and police worship, reality TV, and celebrity media frenzies that have become the trademarks of TV news. However, one thing is clear: television media will soon suffer the same fate as the near-extinct newspaper industry—barring some unexpected miracle—and that is a positive development for the well being of the political and social conversation in America. America’s new media is becoming more like America as a whole: diverse.
Hillary’s Libyan Torturers
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | August 4, 2015
Remember when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was so intent on a US attack on Libya that she disregarded the US Intelligence Community, the Pentagon, and even her colleagues in the Obama Administration to force her “humanitarian intervention”? Clinton was so distrusted by the Pentagon that they opened up their own lines of communication with Libyan officials — they knew she was feeding them and the State Department boldfaced lies.
Even members of Hillary’s own party in Congress were skeptical of her claims.
Gaddafi’s son and presumed heir, Saif, told then-Rep. Dennis Kucinich (an RPI Board Member) that Hillary was using false information to justify the coming US attack on his country. (Thankfully, Mr. Kucinich understood his Constitutional obligation to act as member of an equal branch of government and did his own investigation of Hillary’s claims.)
Saif told Kucinich that Hillary’s “information” about Libya was:
[L]ike the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report. Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya.
Hillary’s rebels, according to Saif were, as a Washington Times article reports, “not freedom fighters” but rather jihadists whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”
Hillary got her war. The Washington Post, ever the lickspittle in the service of the US regime, shortly after the attack praised Hillary’s great foresight in forcing the US war on Libya:
Seven months later, with longtime U.S. nemesis Moammar Gaddafi dead and Libya’s onetime rebels now in charge, the coalition air campaign has emerged as a foreign policy success for the Obama administration and its most famous Cabinet member, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What a success! Libya is now in the hands of ISIS and various Islamist terror gangs. The population is devastated. Saif was right: they were a bunch of terrorist jihadists.
Gaddafi’s other son, Saadi, is currently being held by “Libyan Dawn,” an al-Qaeda group that has emerged since the US “liberation” and has taken control of key parts of Libya. This week we see in a new video that Hillary’s humanitarian freedom fighters have taken to torturing Saadi Gaddafi in the must un-humanitarian manner (warning, graphic). Hillary’s humanitarians are a bunch of torturing thugs, and it’s all there on the tape. Will she be challenged on this? Don’t bet on it.
Meanwhile, another group of Hillary’s extremists have sentenced Saif to death in a mass trial with scores of others from the previous government. The trials were so bad they were even condemned by the International Criminal Court, which would also like to get its hands on Saif. The defendants had little access to legal council in what was a textbook show trial.
Hillary Clinton squealed with joy when Muammar Gaddafi was sodomized with a knife and murdered by her rebels. Is she likewise giggling somewhere as Gaddafi’s son has his feet beaten to a pulp with a metal rod while he is bound and slapped in the face and his other son is sentenced to death in a trial with no semblance to actual rule of law?
This is human rights, Hillary-style.
‘War is Peace’: US Neocons Urge Washington to Flood Ukraine With Weapons
Sputnik – 06.08.2015
American hawks are calling upon the US government to “flood” Ukraine with weapons because they are more concerned about their own wallets than about European security, US journalist Lee Fang points out.
Although the United States Institute of Peace and its chairman Stephen Hadley profess that they promote international peace through nonviolent conflict resolution, it is not what they are actually doing, US journalist and writer Lee Fang underscores.
“Stephen Hadley is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a member of its board of directors,” the journalist revealed.
In June, during his speech at Poland’s Wroclaw Global Forum, the Institute of Peace chairman insisted that Washington should provide weapons to Kiev in order to “raise the cost for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.”
“[E]ven President Putin is sensitive to body bags — it sounds coarse to say, but it’s true — but body bags of Russian soldiers who have been killed,” Hadley stressed, not bothering to present any evidence to confirm his statement about Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine.
“The call to flood Ukraine with weapons not only contrasts sharply with the stated mission of the Institute of Peace, but many scholars believe doing so would provoke more conflict,” Fang remarked, adding that Hadley also urged European governments to boost their military spending substantially.
Although Hadley’s statement sounds downright Orwellian, there is an obvious explanation for his illogical behavior: Stephen Hadley also serves as a highly paid board member of Raytheon, a major American defense contractor.
“Hadley has been a Raytheon board member since 2009 and was paid cash and stock awards worth $290,025 in 2014 alone,” the journalist highlighted, adding that for companies like Raytheon, regional strife and intervention have always been “good for business.”
The conflict in Ukraine is obviously playing into hands of Raytheon and other US defense manufacturers. Remarkably, Raytheon has recently announced that “strong international demand” for its weaponry had resulted in unexpectedly high quarterly revenues, making its shares significantly higher.
Raytheon’s Chief Executive Tom Kennedy elaborated that the international orders reached a record 44 percent of the defense contractor’s backlog at the end of the second quarter, in contrast with 38 percent a year ago.
Citing Raytheon’s chief financial officer Dave Wajsgras, Lee Fang pointed out that European states are increasing their defense spending due to the ongoing turmoil in Ukraine, facilitating the company’s revenues growth.
Curiously enough, it is not the first time the US Institute of Peace has joined the chorus of American hawks and warmongers. Fang pointed out that in the 1980s the institute’s first president, Robert Turner, expressed his active support for the Contras, right-wing insurgents in Nicaragua. The Contras were infamous for using terrorist tactics in their war against the Nicaraguan government, but nevertheless they received financial and military support from Washington.
Today the institute’s neoconservative board members call for the invasion of Middle Eastern countries, particularly Iran, as well as for the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern European NATO members — former Warsaw Pact states — in order to confront Russia.
However, arming Ukraine is a very bad idea the journalist noted, citing Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University.
“The core problem is that Ukraine’s political alignment is a vital interest for Russia, which is why it intervened in the first place. It is right next door to Russia, which means Moscow both cares more about the outcome and can escalate there much more easily than we can. Doubling down now will intensify and prolong the fighting and get more Ukrainians killed,” Walt stressed, as cited by Lee Fang.
IAEA Director General’s Appearance Before U.S. Senate a Major Error in Judgment
By William O. Beeman | Dissident Voice | August 6, 2015
This decision by Director General Yukia Amano to appear before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to testify on Iran’s nuclear program is regrettable, but it is also not surprising. Amano has been consulting with the U.S. Government on a regular basis ever since his appointment as Director General. This is well documented.
The dramatic change in the language of IAEA reports after Amano took over from Mohammad el-Baradei (whom the U.S. tried to kick out of office until he won the Nobel Peace Prize) shows the direct influence of the United States and Israel trying to indict Iran for nuclear weapons activity. Amano’s directorship resulted in a sudden eruption of meaningless, tortured weasel-word language about “not being able to verify” that Iran was “not” engaging in technology that might lead to military activity. This language contradicted every previous report under previous directors Hans Blix and el-Baradei.
But in the end the IAEA in every report issued under Amano verified that Iran had “not diverted fissile material for any military purpose.”
Amano has simply been a tool of U.S. officials bent on making hostile accusations toward Iran, looking for “expert” evidence to support their specious claims. Specifically, the agency’s tortured language has been twisted by U.S. opponents of an accord with Iran to bolster their claims that Iran was making nuclear weapons–claims that, despite the Amano-influenced IAEA reports — remained utterly unsubstantiated by any evidence anywhere.
It is also noteworthy that Amano expressed confidence that his office could carry out the inspections activities mandated by the accords. Thus he was caught in a bit of a bind–seeming to imply that Iranian activities were suspect and “unable to be verified as peaceful” and at the same time asserting the effectiveness of his agency–and his leadership–in carrying out the inspections. So which is it? Is the IAEA capable or incapable of carrying out its duties under his leadership? Honestly, I think Amano needs to step down. He appears to have lost all credibility as an independent administrator of his agency.
I have no doubt that Amano’s testimony continued the mealy-mouthed, but not-quite-definitive support for attacking the Vienna accords favored by President Obama’s detractors, and those who still want to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran.
William O. Beeman is a Professor, Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Visit William’s website.
Shame on UK for Sham Litvinenko Trial
By William DUNKERLEY | Oriental Review | Aug 3, 2015
What started off as a massive fabrication in 2006 just received a great boost from a complicit British government. The mysterious polonium death of reputed former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko is the focus.
An inexplicably long series of official UK hearings on this nearly 9 year old case has just concluded. That’s prompted a new flurry of sensational media reports.
A recent Daily Mail headline reads “Putin ‘personally ordered Litvinenko’s murder.’” The Irish Independent said, “Vladimir Putin should be held responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.” BBC reported, “Vladimir Putin ‘ordered killing’, Litvinenko [official UK] inquiry hears.”
They support a premise that’s been around since the beginning. It implicates Russian president Vladimir Putin in the yet-to-be explained death.
You might think that reliable evidence has been presented to back up all the accusations. But careful examination shows the reports are no more than unsubstantiated allegations. No reliable facts are reported. Meanwhile, there is an abundance of evidence that this has been a nefarious witch hunt all along.
The official UK hearing has been made out to be a kind of trial, one aimed at bringing justice in the mysterious death case. The widow Marina Litvinenko told BBC, “The truth has finally been uncovered.”
That’s actually quite the opposite of the truth. Here are some facts:
–The prosecutor in the case was unable to unearth any incriminating factual evidence, only “grave suspicions” about Russian culpability. He never had a sufficient case to bring to trial.
–The current official inquiry has no capability to mete out justice. It hasn’t been a real trial at all. There are accused individuals. But they have no right to question their accusers. The inquiry doesn’t have the ability to convict anybody.
–No coroner has ever ruled that Litvinenko’s death was even a homicide. That leaves open the possibility of accidental poisoning or suicide.
–The KGB spy moniker given Litvinenko in the media is fallacious; he never did espionage work. But it added spice to all the misleading headlines.
–Litvinenko himself is on record believing an Italian named Mario Scaramella poisoned him.
–The “Putin did it” scenario that went mainstream was a highly successful fraud of massive proportion. It was instigated by Putin arch enemy Boris Berezovsky, a Russian robber baron who was hiding out in London from criminal prosecution back home. Berezovsky was angling to see Putin overthrown in a violent revolution and replaced by a monarch. No kidding. I’m not just alleging that. He said so in his own words.
–A rogue coroner dodged his statutory duty to rule on the manner and cause of death, and instead conducted a Berezovskyesque witch hunt for Russian culpability.
–He subsequently was told by Home Secretary Theresa May to cut out the witch hunt and perform his duty to rule on the manner and cause of death. She also told him that any further official inquiry was unnecessary.
–That would have ended the folly for good. But instead Prime Minister David Cameron reversed the Home Secretary and reopened the witch hunt. This came amidst the sanctions frenzy against Putin over the Ukraine crisis. It was a highly politicized move, not a search for justice.
–The result has been the just-concluded hearings, part of Cameron’s official inquiry.
Cameron has charged forward despite the obvious speciousness of the case. It’s not hard to see that fraud has been afoot all along. For instance, there was a widely-reported deathbed statement dictated by Litvinenko. News of it didn’t come out until after Litvinenko’s death. The statement blames Putin for the poisoning.
But I’ve found that Litvinenko never dictated any such statement. The story was a hoax. The hoaxer has even confessed that the words were his own, and that he had no factual basis for his allegation.
Isn’t Cameron aware of these specious claims in the Litvinenko case? If there is a real evidentiary basis, why is the record founded on outright fabrications like the deathbed statement? The case is replete with nonsense like the deathbed hoax.
So the truth that needs to be known is that the Litvinenko case has been a fraud right from the start, and continues as such to this day. I don’t know whether or not Putin or any other Russian had complicity in the death. But I do know that principals behind the accusations have been lying.
The biggest news here is that Cameron has put the weight of the UK government behind the fraud. What an extravagant affront to justice. He should be ashamed of himself.
William Dunkerley is a media analyst and a Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow.
The Soft Power Hoax
By Mike Lofgren | Consortium News | August 2, 2015
A recurrent buzz phrase of the Washington mandarinate in the last two decades has been “soft power.” The term was coined by Joseph Nye, a Harvard academic, in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. What he meant by the term is that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants [it] might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.”
Soft power he defined as the putatively attractive political, social and cultural traits of a country that induce admiration in a target people, and, presumably, a desire both to emulate those traits and to willingly comply with the wishes of the country projecting the soft power.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress about the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. (Photo from C-SPAN coverage)
The term has gotten a workout by American politicians and national security bureaucrats, particularly since the manifest failure of military power to make Iraqis love us. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has used the term, saying he would like to augment U.S. soft power by “a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security – diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action and economic reconstruction and development.”
As might be expected, the idea is most loved by State Department officials, principally because they believe it could give them a leg up in the Washington budget battles with their colossal rival, DOD, the repository of “hard” power. A Google search of “Hillary Clinton smart power” gets about 3.7 million hits. Smart power is the former Secretary of State’s pet term for a fusion of hard and soft power. John Kerry is also fond of the concept.
It is easy to see why the national security establishment, casting about for some alternative to the usual bluster leading to military action, would be drawn to the magical notion that our presumed cultural attractiveness, combined with a really cool Twitter feed, could advance American interests (as the Beltway elite defines them) throughout the world.
Democrats, in particular, looking for some substitute to the brain-dead neoconservative policies that some of them were briefly enamored of when President George W. Bush was Stockholm Syndroming them, are magnetically pulled to a concept that sounds like the first cousin to the dorm room philosophizing that so many of their kind indulged in during their formative years in the Ivy League.
“If we just explain our policies to them in the right way in a Facebook post, and maybe open an Apple Store in downtown Chișinău, ordinary Moldovans will be clamoring to join NATO!”
It is surely preferable to think in this manner than to act like a warmongering troglodyte, even if some soft power ploys, like John Kerry bringing James “You’ve Got a Friend” Taylor to Paris to console them after a terrorist attack, seem frivolous if not embarrassing – one can hardly picture Charles Francis Adams or George Kennan doing likewise.
Yet soft power, while less pernicious, still springs from the same roots as neoconservative militarism. It arises from the near-universal belief among the Beltway illuminati in American Exceptionalism, the fairy tale that the United States dwells outside the normal processes of history and has a duty as a global redeemer. It is what H.L. Mencken would have classified as “the bilge of American idealism,” and it ranks right up there with intelligent design and a conviction that real estate will always go up among the foolish things Americans have believed in.
Was the invasion of Iraq and the whole Bush-era nightmare really the polar opposite of what the soft power advocates wanted? With the fall of Baghdad, a military campaign that took only a month, the whole soft power apparatus swung into action: passing out soccer balls to children, rebuilding the municipal sewer system, and opening a Baghdad stock market on the assumption that the benighted Iraqi masses were pining for the fruits of American-style capitalism.
In 2015, vastly more Iraqis speak English than in 2003. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent $50 billion in the country. Yet has all that money and all the cultural export of Americana accomplished anything? And could we not draw the identical conclusion about Afghanistan?
The whole soft power hallucination was born of the end of the Cold War in a particularly hubristic moment of American triumphalism. It was at that time that Francis Fukuyama wrote his extraordinarily silly discourse prophesying the end of history and the ushering in of a capitalist-consumerist utopia – a kind of upside-down Marxist dialectic.
That is the fallacy at the heart of soft power: the belief that consumer goods, or some latent yearning for a Disney-fied lifestyle, or some technological gimmick like Snapchat, will liberate the foreign masses yearning to breathe free.
In the 1990s, one could see the apotheosis of this mentality in the pontifications of The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, who claimed that no two countries that had McDonald’s franchises would go to war with each other – a thesis that has proven false several times. But one can see why Corporate America might love the idea of soft power as a way of selling Philadelphia cheese steaks in Burundi. They might even get an Export-Import Bank loan to facilitate peddling their wares because of the alleged diplomatic value.
We have seen the fruits of this delusion in the Middle East. Saddam’s Iraq, a secular if tyrannical government, at least allowed unveiled women to attend university and beer to be served in outdoor cafes. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s longtime foreign minister, was a Chaldean Catholic. Iraq is now a far more dogmatically Muslim country than it was 15 years ago.
The same could apply to most of the Middle East: blue jeans, smartphones, and contact with Westerners did not make most Middle Eastern peoples more Western psychologically, it did just the opposite. The botched Washington reaction to the so-called Arab spring was a case in point: mesmerized by the fact that the Tahrir Square demonstrators used social media, Foggy Bottom could not quite grasp that the popular democracy demanded by the Cairo throng may have had little in common with the vision of democracy of Kennedy School of Government professors.
The fact that Saudi princes drive Bugatti Veyrons, own flats in Mayfair, and get their cholesterol checked at the Cleveland Clinic, does not stay them from lopping off the heads of those they deem miscreants or sorcerers at a record rate.
It is precisely the money grubbing, pop-culture aspect of American soft power that has made it such a hard sell in the Middle East. Sayyid Qutb, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood in early post-World War II Egypt, attended university in Colorado, where he was repelled by what he saw as the rampant materialism and superficiality of American life. He went back to Egypt determined to reverse the growing Westernization of his country. So much for the Kumbaya effect of cultural exchange.
It is common for educated, progressive Americans to be appalled by the increasing intolerance of Muslim societies and their treatment of women, and to declare that these are broken, dysfunctional societies. There may be some validity in that judgment. But they ought to reflect that the antics of the Kardashians, Duck Dynasty, and the World Wrestling Federation, not even to mention the candidacy of Donald Trump, do not exactly broadcast to the world the image of America as the Last, Best Hope of Mankind.
We should have known that dressing up the outer man in Gap clothing does not change the inner man. One of the most profoundly exotic societies in the Nineteenth Century, from a Western point of view, was Japan.
Yet in an amazingly short time, the Japanese adopted the outward, physical trappings of a Western society. Their naval personnel donned U.S. Navy-style uniforms and their officers grew addicted to playing bridge as if they were barnacle-encrusted old English seadogs at the Admiralty. Their diplomats strutted around in wing collars, frock coats, and top hats like any respectable gentleman at the Court of Saint James. They adopted the superficial accoutrements of parliamentary rule. The Japanese industrialized rapidly. Babe Ruth turned them into baseball fans.
Yet Japan simultaneously became a violently aggressive country whose militarism astonished the world. Parallel with its outward “Westernization,” Japan’s elites confected a jingoistic Shinto emperor worship that was at once reactionary and yet new: an arresting analogue to the increasingly violent brands of Islam that have arisen in recent decades along with rising contact with the West. And these same Islamic fanatics, namely in ISIS, are now experts in social media, a talent that is giving the FBI director fits.
Soft power, the hula hoop craze of a segment of the national security establishment, is one more peculiar aspect of American parochialism and ethnocentrism, such as hewing to the English system of weights and measures, or the archaic use of a.m. and p.m. on airline schedules rather than the more rational 24-hour clock.
It is no substitute for traditional diplomacy that emphasizes horse-trading, reciprocity, and the fact that other countries just might, after all, have legitimate interests. A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken is no suitable door prize for peoples whose sense of cultural pride could very well be as strong as our own.
~
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013. His new book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, will be published in January 2016.
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