Stephen Lendman

As things now stand, Obama won. EU partners won. Fascist extremists won. Russia lost. So did ordinary Ukrainians. Months of struggling for something better apparently turned out in vain. More on this below. Events remain fast-moving.

Overnight negotiations produced an early Friday morning deal. Talks lasted eight hours. Opposition leaders Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok and Vitali Klitschko were involved. So were Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russian Human Rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

Ukraine's ruling Party of Regions called on

"everyone involved in the confrontation to lay down their arms." "This deed will be your greatest contribution to Ukraine's future," it said. "We should all consolidate around the common goal of restoring peaceful life on our soil." "We should stop this fratricidal war for the sake of peace, for the sake of justice and for the sake of Ukraine's future."

On Thursday, Ukraine's parliament passed a resolution near unanimously. It condemned the use of force against protesters. It prohibits Ukrainian Security Council counterterrorism. Yanukovych expressed willingness to hold early presidential and parliamentary elections later this year. He's amenable to constitutional change before summer. He's willing to form a national unity government in days.

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John W. Whitehead

Paranoia, Surveillance and Military Tactics: Have We Become Enemies of the Government?

“Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government… Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America has succumbed to a form of historical amnesia fed by a culture of fear, militarization and precarity. Relegated to the dustbin of organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America’s intelligence agencies and the public’s long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy.” ~ Professor Henry Giroux

Relationships are fragile things, none more so than the relationship between a citizen and his government. Unfortunately for the American people, the contract entered into more than 200 years ago has been reduced to little more than a marriage of convenience and fiscal duty, marked by distrust, lying, infidelity, hostility, disillusion, paranoia and domestic abuse on the part of the government officials entrusted with ensuring the citizenry’s safety and happiness.

Don’t believe me? Just take a stroll through your city’s downtown. Spend an afternoon in your local mall. Get in your car and drive to your parents’ house. Catch the next flight to that business conference. While you’re doing so, pay careful attention to how you and your fellow citizens are treated by government officials—the ones whose salaries you are paying.

You might walk past a police officer outfitted in tactical gear, holding an assault rifle, or drive past a police cruiser scanning license plates. There might be a surveillance camera on the street corner tracking your movements. At the airport, you may be put through your paces by government agents who will want to either pat you down or run scans of your body. And each time you make a call or send a text message, your communications will most likely be logged and filed. When you return home, you might find that government agents have been questioning your neighbors about you, as part of a “census” questionnaire. After you retire to sleep, you might find yourself awakened by a SWAT team crashing through your door (you’ll later discover they were at the wrong address), and if you make the mistake of reaching for your eyeglasses, you might find yourself shot by a cop who felt threatened.

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David Swanson

Annie Jacobsen's new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. It isn't terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent. Jacobsen has added some details, and the U.S. government is still hiding many more. But the basic facts have been available; they're just left out of most U.S. history books, movies, and television programs.

After World War II, the U.S. military hired sixteen hundred former Nazi scientists and doctors, including some of Adolf Hitler's closest collaborators, including men responsible for murder, slavery, and human experimentation, including men convicted of war crimes, men acquitted of war crimes, and men who never stood trial. Some of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg had already been working for the U.S. in either Germany or the U.S. prior to the trials. Some were protected from their past by the U.S. government for years, as they lived and worked in Boston Harbor, Long Island, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and elsewhere, or were flown by the U.S. government to Argentina to protect them from prosecution. Some trial transcripts were classified in their entirety to avoid exposing the pasts of important U.S. scientists. Some of the Nazis brought over were frauds who had passed themselves off as scientists, some of whom subsequently learned their fields while working for the U.S. military.

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