Eric van de Beek

Exclusive Russia Insider interview with Udo Ulfkotte, German Editor Turned CIA Whistleblower. Fascinating details emerge. Leading US-funded think-tanks and German secret service are accessories. Attempted suppression by legal threats. Blackout in German media.

A senior German editor is causing a sensation with his allegations that the CIA pays German media professionals to spin stories to follow US government goals. We wrote about this two weeks ago, and the article shot up in views, becoming one of the most read articles on our site.

Udo Ulfkotte reveals in his bestseller Bought Journalists, how he was "taught to lie, to betray and not to tell the truth to the public." The former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is one of Germany’s largest newspapers, was secretly on the payroll of the CIA and German secret service, spinning the news in a way that was positive for the United States and bad for its opponents.

In his latest interview, Ulfkotte alleges that some media are nothing more than propaganda outlets of political parties, secret services, international think tanks and high finance entities. Repenting for collaborating with various agencies and organisations to manipulate the news, Ulkotte laments, "I'm ashamed I was part of it. Unfortunately I cannot reverse this." Some highlights from the interview:

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Stephen Lendman

Mass surveillance is longstanding. It's institutionalized. It's lawless. It has nothing to do with domestic or foreign threats. Or anything related to national security. America's only enemies are ones it invents. It spies globally. It watches everyone. It monitors allies. It's for control. It's for economic advantage. It's to be one up on foreign competitors. It's for information used advantageously in trade, political, and military relations. Don't expect Washington's criminal class to explain. It's bipartisan. It's government of, by, and for special interests. Ordinary ones are ignored.

Edward Snowden connected important dots for millions. He did so because it matters. He and London Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger won this year's Rights Livelihood Award (RLA). "(F)or outstanding vision and work on behalf of our planet and its people." It's the "Alternative Nobel Prize." One with real distinction. Meaning that matters. Warranting universal praise. RLA honors the best and most deserving. 'Right livelihood' is an ancient notion. Everyone deserves respect. So does the natural world. We're all responsible for the consequences of our actions. No one should take more than a fair share of world resources.

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Mike Whitney

An Interview with "The Saker" - "The Saker" is an ex-military analyst who was born in Europe to a family of Russian refugees. He now lives in Florida where he writes The Vineyard of the Saker blog and is a regular contributor to Russia Insider. The international community of Saker Blogs includes, besides the original Saker blog, French, German, Russian, Oceania and Serbian members and will soon include a Latin American member.

People dancing on Birzhevaya Ploshchad (Stock Exchange Square)

Mike Whitney: Is the United States responsible for the troubles in Ukraine?

The Saker: Yes, absolutely, there’s no doubt about it. While it’s true that the Ukrainian people were unhappy with the corrupt Yanukovich regime, the coup itself was definitely CIA orchestrated. The EU was also involved, especially Germany, but they didn’t play nearly as big a role as the U.S. The taped phone messages of (US Undersecretary of State) Victoria Nuland show who was really calling the shots behind the scenes.

Mike Whitney: What role did the Obama administration play in Kiev’s decision to launch a war on its own people in the east of Ukraine?

The Saker: A central role. You have to understand that there is no “Ukrainian” power in Kiev. Poroshenko is 100% US-run as are the people around him. The head of the notorious Ukrainian secret police (the SBU), Valentin Nalivaichenko, is a known CIA agent. It’s also true that the US refers to Poroshenko “our Ukraine insider”. All of his so called “decisions” are actually made by U.S. officials in Kiev. As for Poroshenko’s speech to Congress a few weeks ago, that was obviously written by an American.

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Bill Van Auken & David North

With US politicians and the American media engaged in an increasingly acrimonious debate over the strategy guiding the latest US war in the Middle East, the United States Army has unveiled a new document entitled the Army Operating Concept (AOC), which provides a “vision of future armed conflict” that has the most ominous implications. It is the latest in a series of documents in which the Pentagon has elaborated the underlying strategy of preventive war that was unveiled in 1992—that is, the use of war as a means of destroying potential geopolitical and economic rivals before they acquire sufficient power to block American domination of the globe.

The document was formally released at this week’s Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference, an annual event bringing together senior officers and Defense Department officials for a series of speeches and panel discussions, along with a giant trade show mounted by arms manufacturers to show off their latest weapons systems and pursue lucrative Pentagon contracts.

Much of this year’s proceedings were dominated by dire warnings about the impact of cuts to the Army’s troop strength brought about by sequestration. Gen. Raymond Odierno, chief of staff of the Army, told reporters at the AUSA conference Monday that he was “starting to worry about our end strength” and regretting having told Congress in 2012 that the Army could manage with 490,000 active-duty soldiers.

In addition to the 490,000, there are 350,000 National Guard soldiers and 205,000 reservists, for a combined force—referred to by the Pentagon as the Total Army—of well over one million American troops. The answer to why such a gargantuan armed force would seem inadequate to Gen. Odierno can be found in the new Army Operating Concept (AOC), a reckless and dangerous document laying out a strategy of total war that encompasses the entire planet, including the United States itself.

The document makes clear that in regard to the ongoing debate over “boots on the ground,” for the top brass of the US Army there is no question: there will be boots and plenty of them.

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Gilad Atzmon

GA: The following is my book review of Shlomo Sand's latest book. It was published a year ago. Following the publication of the English edition of How I Stopped Being A Jew last week, I decided to post it again.

Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being A Jew, is a tragic testimony made by a morally awakened Israeli Jew who comes to realise that his spiritual, cultural and political existence is contaminated with Judeo-centric exclusivism and is fuelled by ethno-centric racism. Shlomo Sand decides to stop being a Jew – but has he succeeded?

Sand, as we all know, is a wonderful writer; witty, innovative, poetic and fluent, his voice is personal, at times funny, occasionally sarcastic and always genuinely pessimistic.

Sand’s writing is scholarly, deep, reflective and imaginative; however, his scholarship is pretty much limited to French liberal thinking and early post-modernist theory. The outcome is disappointing at times. How I Stopped To Be A Jew is a ‘politically correct’ text, saturated with endless caveats inserted to disassociate the author from any possible affiliation with anyone who may be viewed as an opponent of Jewish power, critical of Jewish identity politics or a challenger of the mainstream historicity of the Holocaust.

“I don’t write for anti-Semites, I regard them as totally ignorant or people who suffer from an incurable disease,” (p. 21/Hebrew edition) writes the author who claims to be humanist, universalist and far removed from Jewish exclusivism.[*] It all sounds very Jewish to me. When it comes to the Holocaust, Sand uses the same tactic and somehow manages to lose all wit and scholarly fashion. The Nazis are “beasts”, their rise to power metaphorically described as a “beast awakening from its lair.” I would expect a leading historian and ex-Jew to have moved on beyond these kinds of banal clichés.

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Stephen Lendman

Demagogic doublespeak dots his rhetoric. So do mumbo jumbo Big Lies. They systematically drown out truth. It's consistent Obama policy. He mocks democratic values. Justifying the unjustifiable. Defending the indefensible. Supporting the unthinkable. Believing militarism is the be all and end all. Waging permanent wars on humanity. It may not survive on his watch.

Removing him is a moral imperative. An urgent necessity. He presides over a police state apparatus. He institutionalized tyranny. It's headed toward full-blown. He's advancing America's imperium ruthlessly. He's a war criminal multiple times over. He's guilty of high crimes against peace. He risks WW III.

On October 11, he spoke in San Francisco. At a scripted DNC event. Selected guests alone were invited. He repeated one Big Lie after another. "(N)ews lately has been dominated by what's taking place overseas," he said. He bears full responsibility for what he called "scary to people, and understandably so."

His Afghan war continues. It's America's longest conflict. Responsible for millions of deaths. No end in sight looms. He made Libya a cauldron of violence. A dystopian wasteland. North Africa's most developed country no longer exists. He's waging Iraq War III. Without Security Council or congressional authorization. All US wars are illegal. Aggressive. Premeditated. Ones of choice.

Obama bears full responsibility for Syria's war. In March 2011, he launched it. Using imported proxy death squads. Radicalized Islamists. US special forces and CIA operatives arm, fund, train and direct them. Deploy them against Assad. Wanting pro-Western stooge governance replacing him. Bombing since late September. Headed for deploying US troops. Hundreds infest Iraq already. Perhaps many more covertly.

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Richard Seymour

I'll tell you what I think. I think this country is going to the dogs. I think it's being flooded, over-run, taken over. By thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of right-wing racist scum.

You can't even hear proper English spoken on a train any more. It's all "faaackin immigrants" this and "faaaackin immigrants" that. And they're not happy behind the privet-hedges any more. They're not comfortable in their cosy little ruts, their weekends of beer, barbecues and bigotry. They suddenly think they can run the country.

I wish I could say that this was the UKIPisation of politics. The answer then would be simple: send them back. Send them back to their provinces, their suburbs, their village Wetherspoon's, their urban overspill conurbations, their motorway service stations famed for dogging. But it's much, much worse than that.

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Stephen Lendman

Nahida Izzat: The Expression of Hatred for Gentiles

Decades of Israeli high crimes against peace are reason enough for all Jews [who are] for justice to renounce Judaism.

Shlomo Sand for one. On October 10, he headlined his London Guardian commentary " 'I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.' "

Zionism harms Jews and non-Jews alike. Its roots date from the late 19th century.

In his book titled "Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine," Joel Kovel said:

Zionism seeks "the restoration of tribalism in the guise of a modern, highly militarized and aggressive state." It "cut Jews off from (their) history…It "led to a fateful identity of interests with antisemitism the only thing that united them." It "fell into the ways of imperialist expansion and militarism…(It) show(s) signs of the fascist malignancy." If you accept "the idea of a Jewish state," you mix its twin notions of "particularism (and) exceptionalism…" They're "the bane of Judaism…" They give "racism an objective, enduring, institutionalized and obdurate character." Doing so turns Israel "into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses…"

Three former prime ministers were terrorists. Menachem Begin (1977 - 83), Yitzhak Shamir (1983 - 84 and 1986 - 92), and Ariel Sharon (2001 - 06) dispelled the illusion of Israeli democracy, morality and respect for rule of law principles. Today's "world would be a far better place without Zionism('s) corrosive effects," Kovel stresses.

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Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The United States is doing its best to estrange the European Union from Russia to get the upper hand in a free trade deal, and also, to manipulate European countries into buying America’s relatively more expensive natural gas.

The TTIP and Ukraine - The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a Euro-Atlantic free trade agreement that is the subject of ongoing negotiations between the US and the EU. The deadline for finalizing the TTIP free trade agreement is in 2015. Its goal is to create what is referred to as the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) and to cement the European Union with the United States as one supranational trading bloc.

These trade negations have been passing under the public’s radar, because they have been taking place very discreetly behind closed doors. The very TTIP’s name is designed to conceal, and was selected by policy and trade mandarins, because of their fears that a public backlash could erupt against the negotiations, as it did in the case of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks in 2001. Like the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which was signed in Ottawa between Canada and the EU on September 26, wordsmiths calculatingly picked the name TTIP to try to hide the fact that it is a free trade agreement.

Washington is doing its best to disrupt trade ties between its EU partners and the Russian Federation in order to get greater leverage in the TTIP negotiations. Its strategy is to economically weaken its European partners by getting them to cut ties with Moscow through anti-Russia sanctions that will directly hurt their economies too. Washington calculates that this will force a weakened EU to maximize the economic concessions to the US in the TTIP talks.

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Vladislav Gulevich

The independent Ukraine boasts a rather short history. The relations with minorities have never been a feather in the hat of Kiev authorities. The real state of things was largely muted to make it a smouldering problem. The «national revolution» has exacerbated the situation to the boiling point, especially talking about Hungarians and Romanians.

Romanians are the second largest group in Bucovina (historically the region has been Russian, now the northern part of it belongs to Ukraine). 97% Romanians live in Chernovitsy (115 thousand) and Transcarpathia (32 thousand). According to CEMES (Centre for European Migration and Ethnic Studies), the main problems faced by the Romanian community are social development and their low representative proportion in higher education and in professional work. Numerous reports from Romanian-based sources raise concerns for the situation of the Romanian minority in Ukraine and specifically criticize the availability of educational opportunities in the Romanian language. The 2012 law «On the principles of the state language policy» was abolished as a result of the 2014 coup pouring even more fuel on the discontent among Ukrainian Romanians. Kiev refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing when reproached for its neglect of Romanian culture. This attitude makes the situation worse. In June 2014 the Bessarabia Romanians held a convention in Odessa with assistance of Romanian Cultural Institute (Romania). There were many voices raised calling for opening new Romanian cultural centers (there are too few of them and quite often the staff has no command of the language). The head of Odessa regional national-cultural association Bessarabia said that the main problem for the Romanian community in the Odessa region is the availability of schools teaching in Romanian language and their funding.

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Stephen Lendman

It was just a matter of time before China surpassed America as the world's leading economy based on purchasing power parity (PPP). It's an exchange rate between currencies measured by the cost of a representative basket of goods in one country v. another.

Surprisingly, China's growth happened faster than experts expected. In 2011, IMF economists estimated it would overtake America in 2016. At the time, they projected its PPP GDP at $18,975.7 trillion v. $18,807.5 trillion for America. They now estimate America's 2014 PPP GDP at $17.4 trillion v. $17.6 trillion for China.

The speed of China's growth is remarkable. As recently as 2005, its economy was less than half the size of America's. By 2019, IMF economists expect it to be 20% larger based on PPP. Its phenomenon reflects overall emerging market growth v. developed ones. In 2007, they accounted for around half of global output. It's now about 57% and rising. By the 2020s, it may approach, reach or surpass two-thirds. Overall emerging market growth is extraordinary by any standard. Since 2007, it's ninefold what developed nations achieved. Analysts call China's growth over the past three and a half decades one of the greatest success stories in modern times.

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John Pilger

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves". As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

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Gilad Atzmon

Jews and philosophy have had a pretty troubled relationship. The collision between ‘the tribal’ and ‘the universal’ or, more accurately, between Jerusalem and Athens, is inevitable. The few great Jewish thinkers who transcended the tribal, such as Spinoza or Otto Weininger, have been harassed and labelled by the rabbis as ‘self haters’ and enemies of the Jews.

Some contemporary Zionist merchants insist upon wrapping their Judeo centrism in crypto philosophical arguments. Bernard-Henri Levy, for instance, advocates his Zionist warmongering using a pseudo ‘moralist’ terminology.

Today I came across a uniquely banal rant by Asa Kasher, a Jewish ‘philosopher’ at Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also authored the ‘IDF ethical code,’ defended Israel’s military conduct in the recent Gaza campaign in an article published in the Jewish Review of Books.

Kasher wrote, “Hamas unscrupulously violates every norm in the book.” And I wonder, what book? I would like to find out, at a minimum, what ‘book’ grants the Jewish State the right to uproot an entire nation in the name of a Jewish homecoming? Is there a book that permits the Jews to turn a city into an open-air prison? Is there a book that legitimates reducing Gaza into a pile of rubble? I am afraid that the answer is affirmative. There is more than one such book. But these books aren’t exactly philosophical texts. These books are the prime Judaic texts. The Talmud and The Old Testament are suffocated by Goy hatred and stories of Jews and their God pouring their ‘wrath on the Goyim.’ Rabbinical Judaism has historically been very careful in the way it treated some of those vile and barbaric Judaic verses and teachings. But Israel and Zionism draw inspiration from those genocidal verses, and the outcome is evident in the shattered urban landscape of Gaza.

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Sam Kriss
Idiot Joy Showland

Pictured: front-page reviews of Stephen Fry’s latest TV drama

Hallowe’en is coming. If, like all sensible decent right-thinking people, you live in the temperate portion of the northern hemisphere, you’ll have noticed its portents already. The night draws its claws from one languidly extended arm; the days are racked by a series of shuddering contractions. These temporal shifts leave debris everywhere. As we begin to approach the winter solstice the nocturnal howls of the neighbourhood dogs are drawn out longer and longer with every passing night; by the time Christmas starts to roll around even the flimsiest yappiest terrier can sustain a single note for up to thirty-five minutes. Meanwhile as the sunlight hours – or what passes for them – are condensed into an ever-smaller period of time, the tiny specks of water vapour in the air are forced together: the clear skies of summer cloud over, and it rains for days on end. Maybe it’s all the fault of the trees. When their leaves crinkle into those soft yellows and burnished browns people are so fond of it’s because they’re being filled with a summer’s worth of poisons. Then the leaves fall and get mulched up into the earth, and their rot drifts up into the atmosphere to feed the endless nights. If they didn’t put on this prismatic striptease for our distraction maybe none of it would happen – but they do, and so Hallowe’en is coming. For one night in the year, the spirits of the dead once again walk the earth; according to some experts, the Devil is granted free reign over the sublunar world. Like all earthquakes, it has its tremors. Already several respected media outlets are reporting on an epidemic of black-eyed ghost children, ferocious snarling creatures haunting our public spaces and wreaking strange vengeance on our cherished local businesses. Lock your doors, hug your loved ones: the frost outside has fangs.

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Stephen Lendman

US-controlled NATO operates lawlessly. It's a killing machine. A monster threatening world peace and stability. Anders Fogh Rassmussen is gone. Jens Stoltenberg replaced him. He did so seamlessly. He's an imperial tool. A puppet serving US interests. His marching orders are clear. Instituting Washington's policy. Serving Western monied interests. Benefitting war-profiteers. Like his predecessor and others before him, he's a convenient US stooge.

He wasted no time proving it. On Sunday, he said NATO will deploy forces wherever it wants. For any reason. Anywhere. "These capabilities already exist. We have them, and we can deploy them in individual regions. And this is only an add-on to what the alliance already has," he said. It intends using its might how it wishes. Regardless of potential harm. No matter the consequences. He was in Poland at the time. Visiting Lask Air Base.

Heading for Kiev on Wednesday. Meeting with illegitimate putschist foreign affairs minister Pavlo Klimkin. Doing so to plot resumed war strategy once Ukraine's battered military finishes regrouping. He expressed gratitude to Alliance members for prioritizing regional security. He praised their commitment to NATO.

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Charles Bausman

Ukrainian military and right wing political leaders say they are. The evidence seems to support them.

In the past two weeks persistent rumors that Kiev has been hiding thousands of killed and wounded Ukrainian servicemen and ‘volunteers battalion’ casualties have forced their way into the Ukrainian press.

The most vocal allegations of a cover-up of Ukrainian combat deaths comes not from Russian media or the leaders of the ‘separatist’ Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, but from right wing MP and Radical Party leader Oleh Lyashko, and from the commander of Kiev’s ‘Donbas Battalion’ Semyon Semchenko.

Last month on his Facebook page Lyashko directly accused President Petro Poroshenko of hiding over 8,000 Ukrainian combat deaths — a number nearly eight times the ‘official’ KIA figures reported by the English-language Kyiv Post, which as of Friday was still stubbornly reporting ‘only’ 974 confirmed Ukrainian combat deaths - a highly dubious figure that has barely budged since the disastrous battle for Ilovaisk in early September.

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James Petras

Introduction: In order to overcome massive US and world public opposition to new wars in the Middle East, Obama relied on the horrific internet broadcasts of ISIS slaughtering two American hostages, the journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff, by decapitation. These brutal murders were Obama’s main propaganda tool to set a new Middle East war agenda – his own casus belli bonanza!

This explains the US Administration’s threats of criminal prosecution against the families of Foley and Stoloff when they sought to ransom their captive sons from ISIS.

With the American mass media repeatedly showing the severed heads of these two helpless men, public indignation and disgust were aroused with calls for US military involvement to stop the terror. US and EU political leaders presented the decapitations of Western hostages by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) as a direct and mortal threat to the safety of civilians in the US and Europe. The imagery evoked was of black-clad faceless terrorists, armed to the teeth, invading Europe and the US and executing innocent families as they begged for rescue and mercy.

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Finian Cunningham

Coup plotters Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt greet the so-
called «President of Ukraine», Petro Poroshenko, in Warsaw.

In an ominous sign that the war in Ukraine is set to further escalate, US state department official Victoria Nuland arrived in Kiev where she met with senior members of the Western-backed regime.

In recent days the ceasefire brokered on September 5 has come under intense pressure as Kiev military forces have stepped up their barrage of the eastern city of Donetsk, with several civilian casualties reported almost on a daily basis.

As civilian homes burn in Donetsk, the Kiev regime has also begun openly talking about resuming its war footing by «raising combat readiness» and mobilising new army units toward the eastern Donbass regions, where it is trying to suppress a pro-independence movement in the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

For the past month, the Kiev regime has been talking out of both sides of its mouth. At times it has been declaring commitment to a ceasefire brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At other times, hardliners in the regime have been warning that there was no such truce in practice, and that it was on the verge of an all-out war with Russia.

All the while, the putative ceasefire has been in tatters largely because Kiev’s forces have refused to withdraw from the conflict lines and continued to shell civilians centres.

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Stephen Lendman

Conflict continues. Peace is a convenient illusion. Fascists don't wage wars to quit. Washington manipulates events destructively. It uses its installed stooge government to solidify unchallenged control over Ukraine.

Straightaway after assuming power, oligarch president Petro Poroshenko said:

"The first steps that we will take at the beginning of our presidential term should be focused on stopping the war, to put an end to this chaos and bring peace to a united Ukraine."

Days later he promised to crush

"pro-Russian separatist war being waged against our country." "We will end this terror," he said. "The anti-terrorist operation has finally just truly begun."

Washington offers support, encouragement and military aid. Poroshenko promised no civilian attacks. He willfully unleashed Kiev forces against them. He wrongfully blames Russia for Kiev crimes. He shamelessly accused Southeastern Ukrainian freedom fighters for earlier regime ceasefire violations.

Previous articles called chances for durable peace virtually zero. One month after both sides accepted ceasefire terms, intermittent conflict persists daily. Shelling of Donetsk continues. Residents say it never stopped.

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Patrick Martin

Speaking to students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Forum Thursday, US Vice President Joseph Biden committed what the US media characterizes as a “gaffe.” In other words, he told an embarrassing truth about US government policy, one that is usually obfuscated in the remarks of government officials and the commentaries of media pundits.

Asked about US policy in Syria, Biden touched on the dirty secret of the current US-led war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS (or ISIL as the Obama administration terms it) is essentially the creation of the United States and its allies who fomented civil war in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Referring to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Biden said,

“They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad—except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

“Now you think I’m exaggerating,” he continued, to emphasize his point. “Take a look! Where did all of this go?” Biden claimed that the US opposed arming these al Qaeda-linked groups, which included ISIS, adding, “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

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