Stephen Lendman

A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO
played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led
to the collapse of the elected government. (F. William Engdahl)

Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet confirmed it. On February 25 , he and EU foreign policy Catherine Ashton spoke. They were monitored. They didn't know it at the time. Their discussion was leaked. Paet talked to Ashton after returning from Kiev, he said. "At the time, (he) was already in Estonia," he added. On Wednesday, he held a press conference. He issued a statement saying Euromaidan killings demand an independent investigation.

Estonia's Foreign Ministry confirmed the leaked phone call's authenticity. "We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition's involvement in the violence," it stressed.

It's impossible reinterpreting what he meant. He only commented on what he heard in Kiev. He spilled the beans. Intentionally or not, he confirmed what's been independently believed all along. Ukraine's legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych was wrongfully blamed. He had nothing to do with Euromaidan killings. The operation was a classic false flag. It was staged to blame him. It's now exposed.

Cui bono matters most. Yanukovych's involvement had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Catherine Ashton's spokesperson, Maja Kocijancic, was silent. "(W)e don't comment on leaked phone conversations," she said.

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F. William Engdahl

Members of UNA-UNSO marching in Lviv.

The events in Ukraine since November 2013 are so astonishing as almost to defy belief.

An legitimately-elected (said by all international monitors) Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovich, has been driven from office, forced to flee as a war criminal after more than three months of violent protest and terrorist killings by so-called opposition.

His “crime” according to protest leaders was that he rejected an EU offer of a vaguely-defined associate EU membership that offered little to Ukraine in favor of a concrete deal with Russia that gave immediate €15 billion debt relief and a huge reduction in Russian gas import prices. Washington at that point went into high gear and the result today is catastrophe.

A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led to the collapse of the elected government.

But the West is not finished with destroying Ukraine. Now comes the IMF with severe conditionalities as prerequisite to any Western financial help.

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F. William Engdahl

● President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.
● A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
● Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

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F. William Engdahl
Global Research

[Click on map to enlarge. NationMaster]

On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.

Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, "The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year... The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP."[1].

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Marat Kunaev

"American-German freelance journalist F. William Engdahl analyzed the much-talked-about "100 Orders" of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and concluded that Iraq actually had been looted. The only prominent characteristic of today’s state of Iraqi democracy is the "freedom" to sell pornography on the streets of Baghdad."

The many images of American troops leaving Iraq remind one of the ones of the Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan. The latter, however, did not leave in the dead of night. But still the difference between the consequences of the Soviet military "presence" in Afghanistan and the American one in Iraq are much more relevant than some fleeting impressions.

Soviet Union entered Afghanistan as an ally of a certain native power group — the one having rather significant public support. Perhaps Soviet leadership could have influenced the concept of socialism and Marxism of their Afghan colleagues but it did not predefine the political system in the country — it was established before the entry of the Soviet troops and managed to exist for a few years after their leave. Mujahidin, however, failed, to secure their power, having lost their position to Talibs, whom numerous Pashto military specialists (and former servicemen of pro-Soviet Afghan army) have joined prior to that. Talibs — as well as the monarchic Daoud regime, overthrown by the left officers, and the Afghan communists from the PDPA themselves — were the unitary power, unifying the country. It was the ideology that was different and the victory of one project other another was defined by the whole set of internal and external factors of Afghan contemporary history. Today Afghanistan is buried in chaos. The situation in Iraq is by no means better — in the long term it might as well turn out to be worse.

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Israel Shamir

WikiLeaks Афганистаны дайны тухай маш нууц материалуудыг
ил гаргав, by AagiiNxS [A tentative translation from Mongolian:
A spokesman for the Afghan military reported that a suspected
car bomb belonging to insurgents was neutralized.]

After the tremendous coup of Wikileaks, this semi-clandestine site and organisation, which had recently brought to public knowledge so many government crimes through so many hundreds of thousands of documents (with even more of the way), has predictably come under attack. Not only from Pentagon hacks, but also from various bodies we would expect to back them rather than knife them in the back.

Reporters Without Borders accused Wikileaks of being irresponsible, for having published the names of US agents in Afghanistan. This accusation reveals the true nature of these Reporters. They do not care about freedom of the press, they care about protecting American interests and American spies. Whoever is old enough to remember the revelations of Philip Agee will recognise the pattern: All of a sudden these guys, who normally do not mind murdering others, recognise their own mortality and vulnerability. This is very good. Spies and agents should be outed: it will cause them to behave responsibly.

So much for the pro-establishment line. What a pity that some of our friends in the blogosphere joined in the chorus of detractors. Theirs are familiar and respected names of the free web: F. William Engdahl, Gordon Duff, Zahir Ebrahim. Psychologically, one understands them. Could it be that all of a sudden we got such a windfall? Is it not a bit like those emails from Nigeria offering us millions for the simple information about our bank account? A diffident man is likely to get cold feet when a beautiful girl smiles back and proposes having a drink in a pub. The Wikileaks-deniers created an elaborate conspiracy theory: these hundreds of thousands of real documents were fabricated by the CIA and offered to an innocent public.

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F. William Engdahl

The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.

In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]

According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” [2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.

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William Bowles

“In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building” — The Heritage Foundation

And just in case you still haven’t got the point, the same Heritage Foundation document, dated 25 September, 2002 went on to tell us,

“Protect Iraq’s energy infrastructure against internal sabotage or foreign attack to return Iraq to global energy markets and ensure that U.S. and world energy markets have access to its resources.”[1]

Anything that says otherwise in the corporate or state press is just propaganda and/or lies. Period.

The turning point when oil took centre stage came significantly as the 20th century began with the world’s most powerful imperial navies, the German and British switching from burning coal to burning oil. From that point on the destinies of Persia and the Arab world irrevocably became central to Western imperial ambitions, so much so that to this day we are living (and dying) with the results, most notably the Palestinians and the Iraqis, not to mention two World Wars where oil was central for all the combatants, not only to fight with but to control.

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F. William Engdahl

On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.

Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, “The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year…The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP.” [1]

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F. William Engdahl

For months the US Government has insisted that the worst of the “recession” is nearing an end and that “green shoots” of recovery are at hand. The reality is opposite. The financial crisis that began in August 2007 in the small “sub-prime” or high-risk segment of the $20 trillion mortgage debt market is now spreading, lawfully, to the “prime” or high-quality segment. The economy of the world’s sole Superpower is coming to resemble more than of the Roman Empire in the fourth Century as it collapsed into anarchy, debt and chaos.

Nations of the world are taking steps to move away from dollar dependency. China, Russia, Brazil, Kazakhstan are calling for a new reserve currency. China is quietly making bilateral currency swap agreements with Asian trade partners as well as Latin American and former Soviet Union countries. The major trade currency of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area will not likely be the dollar. In Latin America the ALBA countries are switching to sucre as a trade currency instead of dollar starting from January 2010. MERCOSUR is going to refuse dollar in foreign trade in 2011. The worst is yet to come for the world reserve currency.

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