Elena Bondarenko

Eric Zuesse: The following letter, written months ago but unfortunately unpublishable in the Ukrainian dictatorship that was imposed in February, was finally posted publicly at the Russian fortruss website on Sunday, December 14th, by Elena Bondarenko, a member of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party.

My friends, here is my declaration. I ask that you share it to the extent possible. If you can translate it into other languages, please do!

I, Elena Bondarenko, People’s Deputy from the Party of Regions, finding myself in opposition to the current power in Ukraine, wish to declare that this administration has resorted to direct threats of physical elimination of the opposition in Ukraine; has resorted to suspending the right of freedom of speech, in parliament and out, and is implicated in complicity in crimes not just against politicians, but even against their children. The everyday life of an opposition deputy is this: constant threats, unofficial ban from the airwaves, targeted persecution. Everyone who calls for peace is immediately branded as an enemy of the people, just as in 1930’s Germany, or in McCarthyite US.

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Eric Zuesse

They think its a plot by Washington directed at Russia intended to cause rifts between Russia and Ukraine and Russia and Europe. Introduction by Russia Insider: This article, with its extensive quotations from an interview by the well-known Russian economist Sergei Glazyev, is a rare example of a fair-minded western explanation of the Russian view of the Ukrainian crisis. Glazyev's views on this are very widespread among the Russian elite, and it is fair to say, are a very accurate reflection of what Russian elites believe. The article grasps that for the Russians the key fact of the Ukrainian crisis is not Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU or Crimea’s unification with Russia or the uprising in the Donbas. It is the violent and unconstitutional overthrow with western support of the democratically elected government of Ukraine led by Viktor Yanukovych. For the Russians what has followed since: Crimea’s secession and its reunion with Russia and the civil war in the east, are the natural outcome of that event. The extracts in the article from Glazyev’s interview shows how many Russians see the Ukrainian crisis as ultimately directed at themselves – as an attempt by the US to draw them into war and to obstruct the development of their economy and society by creating divisions between Russia and Ukraine and between Russia and Europe. This article originally appeared in Washington's Blog.

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Robert Barsocchini

Throughout history, as the various empires use overpowering ultra-violence to achieve domination over and profit from smaller, weaker groups, the empires have driven their victims deeper and deeper into their own extremism, as the victims try to maintain motivation for their usually hopeless resistance efforts.

Essayist Dan Sanchez here uses history to help us take a much-needed look in the mirror as we continue to look down our noses at smaller groups (that haven’t done a fraction of what we’ve done) and say they’re worse and we’re better (though, conveniently, we’re also better than every other group, too, in our fantasy world).

He gives the examples of the “Jewish Intifadas against the Greeks and Romans”, documenting how Jews were driven deeper and deeper into religious fundamentalism and extremism as they tried to resist the disgusting onslaughts of the Greek and Roman empires.

Sanchez also invites us to “imagine how Americans would respond if another country ever did to America what the U.S. government does to Muslim countries on a routine basis.”

The obvious response from US citizens “would be an armed insurgency” that would be “deeply Christian in character, and the more desperate the struggle became, the more dominant would be its religious aspects, and especially its most radically religious aspects.”

This is because resisting the overwhelming numbers and force of an empire, like ours, requires “the trans-mundane motivations and existential consolations that only religion can offer”. Some of the resistance, he points out, “may come to match and even surpass the evils of [the] dominators, as ISIS and Al Qaeda may be said to have done”.

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Eric Zuesse

View here our bombing-victims. Impeach and prosecute Obama for his international war crimes!

On Wednesday, July 2nd, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko resumed unlimited war against the residents of southeastern Ukraine, whom he calls “terrorists” for their wanting not to be killed by his troops. European leaders (especially Merkel of Germany, Hollande of France, and Putin of Russia) urged him not to resume his bombing campaign against the southeast, but the U.S. (specifically President Obama) supports the bombings, and that’s enough for Poroshenko; so, he did it. As the U.S. State Department said, “he has a right to defend his country.” Reuters reports that Poroshenko gave as his reason for the resumption, “to rid Ukraine of ‘parasites’.” Adolf Hitler had given the same reason for ethnically cleansing his country.

Here are videos and photos of the Obama Administration’s sponsored ethnic cleansing to reduce the population in the areas of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly “the wrong way” in Ukraine’s final nationwide election, in 2010: the areas of Ukraine that overwhelmingly chose as Ukraine’s President the man whom Obama’s coup overthrew in February 2014. After this ethnic cleansing, maybe Ukraine can have another nationwide election, which will produce the type of outcome that the U.S. Government likes.

But on 25 May 2014, we held in Ukraine an election where people voted only in the pro-American portion of Ukraine, and only leaders who were acceptable to the U.S. White House were allowed onto the ballot.

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Eric Zuesse

The Western news media have not been showing the footage of this action by the U.S. Administration, but U.S. news media also covered up the Administration’s constant lies about “Saddam’s WMD” (which the U.N. had quietly verified were completely destroyed in 1998), and so Americans supported invading Iraq on the basis of outright lies, and we did so: the U.S. is no longer an authentic democracy, which requires an honest press.

America is now doing something that might be even more shocking than that — outright modeled upon the Hitler-movement. The present news report is being distributed to all U.S. news media, so that we’ll all get to see which U.S. media suppress this information, and which ones break the U.S. silence about it — the first-ever blatant ethnic-cleansing program carried out in any foreign country by U.S. Government agents or under U.S. control.

Here are photos of what we (our nation’s appointed agents in Ukraine) have been doing since 18 February 2014, and which is being backed up by U.S. tax-dollars under the fake rubric of “national security.” These still-photos are all taken from live videos many of which the present reporter has previously provided the links to, and all of which have been checked thoroughly and verified to be authentic by this reporter, and none of these photos has been found to be doctored.

The only organization that checks for doctored “evidence” regarding the situation in Ukraine is Stopfake.org, a website that was recently established by an independent group of journalism students in order to defeat propaganda that is being created and spread by both sides (almost entirely by “our” side) in the Ukrainian civil war; these students are doing this so that honest news reporting can be separated out from that which is based upon, and spreading to the public, lies.

They are performing a terrific service in this matter, and all honest journalists owe them a debt of gratitude.

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Carl Herman

As US “leaders” threaten more unlawful war on Iran, the following three points document that the ongoing “reasons” to war-murder Iranians are known lies as they are being told. In context, we know now from official US government reports that all “reasons” for war on Iraq were known to be lies as they were told:

(Clockwise from top left) French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius,
US Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

1. President Obama lied to Israeli media a week before his March 2013 visit: “We think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” This repeated claim is a lie because it opposes all 16 US intelligence agencies’ most current official National Intelligence Estimate (NIE – these are updated when intelligence suggests status change), all IAEA official reports from their full-time monitoring of all Iran’s nuclear material and plants, and several definitive official US reports, all while Mr. Obama and other war-mongering liars provide zero evidence to support this claim. This follows a long history of such lies. When a person makes a claim in defiance of all known objective evidence, and without any evidence of his own, any rational person conservatively concludes the claim is a known lie.

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Stephen Lendman

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as

"covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."

They're "big lies," defined by Merriam-Webster as

"deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic."

America's decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment.

Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.

In his exhaustive research and writings, David Ray Griffin provided convincing evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and that bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December 2001.

The former spawned a decade of overt and covert "war on terror" lawlessness at home and abroad. Policies and events following the second have yet to unfold, but expect little at best to be positive.

Past US false flags provided pretexts for militarism, wars, occupations, domestic repression, and national security state extremism, antithetical to democratically free and open societies. Allegedly removing America's "Enemy Number One," in fact, may intensify, not diminish, Washington's scheme for unchallengeable global dominance. More on him below.

With or without bin Laden, bogymen threats are plentiful. Since WW II alone, America's had numerous ones, including communists, Al Qaeda, WMDs, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and a host others yet unnamed, as well as numerous "foiled" domestic ones.

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Washington's Blog
Washington's Blog

As I noted last year:

Our savings is ... dramatically lower than Japan's when that country entered into its Lost Decade. So the Japanese were much better prepared than we are.

(I also noted that we're in worse shape than America was going into the Great Depression ... but that's another story).

Now, BIS - the central banks' central bank - agrees that Americans are in worse shape than the Japanese.

Specifically, a new BIS paper written by Shinobu Nakagawa (Director, Head of Investment and Market Research, International Department, Bank of Japan) and Yosuke Yasui (International Department, Bank of Japan) concludes that Japan was better able to weather the Lost Decade than the U.S. is able to weather our current economic woes, given three differences between the two cultures:

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Washington's Blog

Another World Is Possible: As regards the Twin Towers, they may may be a case apart from the rest of the World Trade Center complex. They collapsed and came down because of explosions obviously, but the mid-air pulverization, the "ground-hugging" pyroclastic flows so evident in all the footage and, finally, the samples of the fallen dust confirming that widespread molecular dissociation had occurred at Ground Zero in New York City - all this would strongly suggest that thermonuclear detonations had been carried out. In other words, the Twin Towers would seem to have been nuked. They may have been nuked because of the unfavorable height/footprint ratio. They may have been too tall to be demolished in the same controlled manner as WTC7. Non-conventional methods would have had to be used on the Twin Towers. If this is the case, we would expect that radiation would emanate from the debris. This needs to be confirmed.

ou see in this photo (left), from September 11, 2001, is a box girder that has been cut by an explosive charge at an angle of approx. 45 degrees. Thermite, (nano-thermite) a highly explosive material, was in fact found on the crime scene. Thermite is commonly being used in the demolition business and shaped charges are standard practice. These demolitions have to be prepared weeks in advance. It can take months to set the charges, and set them correctly. - This implies an inside job.

WTC7, in addition to housing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which kept all the records from the Enron and WorldCom scandals (the largest bankruptcies in history), also "housed high-level government offices including the FBI, CIA and the Secret Service. WTC 7 was also the storage facility for millions of files pertaining to active cases involving international drug dealing, organized crime, terrorism and money laundering" (Serendipity).

Does it then seem reasonable to assume that Osama bin Laden, allegedly operating out of a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, could have been preparing the demolition of the WTC buildings for, weeks on end, right under the noses of FBI, FEMA, Secret Service and the CIA? -We don't think so. And considering the millions of secret files, referring to cases where the Government itself was actively involved in criminal activity, doesn't it also seem likely that these government agencies at some point would have wanted to get rid of all these files?

Anyway, the WTC buildings were demolished. This is a fact. We now believe highly placed elements in the FBI, the CIA and FEMA must have been among the perpetrators of terror on 9/11. This horrendous crime could not have taken place unless these agencies had actively participated in committing it. But who wanted this mega crime to be committed? Essentially, who did 9/11? Everything points in the direction of Israel.

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Maidhc Ó Cathail

President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski visiting 'his boy', Osama Bin Laden, in training with
the Pakistan Army, 1981. Photo originally scanned from the New
York Village Voice. Credited to the Sygma/Corbis Agency, Paris.

Maidhc Ó Cathail argues that, “with the hunt for the elusive bin Laden having already cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, perhaps Americans should demand conclusive proof that Israel hasn’t conned them into fighting a phoney ‘war on terror’”.

Who’s keeping the terror myth alive?

In the trigger-happy post-9/11 world, the favoured way to instigate a war is to demand that the designated “evildoer” prove a negative.

Iraq was invaded because it couldn’t prove that it didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Iran is under constant threat of attack unless it can demonstrate that it’s not seeking nuclear weapons. And now Pakistan is being chastised for allegedly harbouring Osama bin Laden – who in all probability has been dead and buried for eight years.

Questioning Pakistan’s willingness to pursue bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year told a group of Pakistani editors: “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” And in a recent interview with Fox News, Clinton charged that “elements” of the Pakistani government know where bin Laden is hiding.

But what if bin Laden is not hiding in Pakistan? What if he’s been dead since December 2001? How then does Islamabad prove that some of its government officials are not concealing his whereabouts?

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