Hugo Moldiz Mercado

In a tactical shift toward Bolivia, the U.S. State Department has sent Jefferson Brown to the country, indicating a likely increase in subversive activity against the Morales government. He was apparently sent to clean house, and replace all embassy personnel in preparation for the July arrival of a new attaché, Peter Brennan, an uncommon diplomatic practice.

It appears that the White House has decided to make a turn - for the worse - in its relations with Bolivia. After removing Larry Memmott, considered a dove in U.S. secret services circles, the State Department has sent Jefferson Brown, as interim business attaché, who will remain on the job only through June, before handing over the position to the much more experienced hawk, Peter Brennan.

Changes at the U.S. embassy in La Paz are not limited to replacing the business attaché, the highest ranking official present in the country since President Evo Morales expelled Ambassador Philip Golberg in 2008, for engaging in subversive activity in conjunction with hard-line opposition forces in the city of Santa Cruz. All indications point toward the replacement of the entire staff, giving greater weight to secret services and an increase in efforts to destabilize the Morales government, within the framework of a regional counter-offensive. Brown arrived in Bolivia April 23, immediately after he was appointed.

According to reliable sources linked to the State Department, greater changes will take place in July, implying the nature of the task assigned Brown, a career diplomat who has worked in Brazil, El Salvador, Paraguay, Ecuador and Argentina, among other countries. He must conduct a clean-up before the arrival of Peter Brennan, who has been a State Department advisor and responsible for policies in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Cuba.

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Daniel McAdams

On June 2, a missile screamed through downtown Lugansk, in eastern Ukraine, leaving a trail of craters in a city park before slamming into a regional administration building. At least eight people were killed in the blast, as it struck in a busy pedestrian area. Blood and body parts were strewn throughout the blast zone.

Eyewitnesses said the missile was fired from one of the military jet fighters that had been circling the area.

Security camera footage from nearby seemed to confirm this. The jets had been sent in from Kiev to put down an autonomy movement in eastern Ukraine that followed a US-backed coup in Kiev in February.

An Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring team on the ground in Lugansk concurred with other eyewitnesses:

"On 2 June, shortly after 15:00 hrs, rockets hit the occupied regional administration building. Based on the SMM’s limited observation these strikes were the result of non-guided rockets shot from an aircraft. "

The US-backed government in Kiev, however, denied firing on civilians and blamed the blast on the anti-Kiev self-defense forces. The self-defense units, Kiev claimed, had blown up the administration building themselves with a heat-seeking missile that went awry. The US mainstream media dutifully reported the Kiev government line as fact. The anti-Kiev forces had blown up their own headquarters, they wrote. Just as several weeks ago they wrote that the anti-Kiev forces in Odessa had set themselves on fire.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Eastern Front: The Battle of Moscow, 1941-1942 (albumwar2.com)

In my June 6 column, “The Lies Grow More Audacious,” I mentioned that Obama and the British prime minister, who Obama has as a lap dog, just as George Bush had Tony Blair as lap dog, had managed to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion without mentioning the Russians.

I pointed out the fact, well known to historians and educated people, that the Red Army defeated Nazi Germany long before the US was able to get geared up to participate in the war. The Normandy invasion most certainly did not defeat Nazi Germany. What the Normandy invasion did was to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Europe.

As I have reported in a number of columns, many, if not most, Americans have beliefs that are not fact-based, but instead are emotion-based. So I knew that at least one person would go berserk, and he did. JD from Texas wrote to set me straight. No one but “our American boys” won that war. JD didn’t know that the Russians were even in the war.

JD had the option of consulting an encyclopedia or a history book or going online and consulting Wikipedia prior to making a fool of himself. But he chose instead to unload on me. JD epitomizes US foreign policy: rush into every fight that you know nothing about and start new ones hand over fist that someone else will win.

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