Falsifying invasion claims, trumped up murder charges
and manipulating media narratives among tactics used by the State
Department to wage a new Cold War
In my last dispatch I brought you the latest
adventure of US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki trying to defend the
indefensible. She said then: “As a matter of longstanding policy, the United
States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means,”
which prompted me to inform my readers: “If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki,
tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United
States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War.”
On March 13 her regular attack on all things Russian
included this exchange with Associated Press writer Matthew
Lee:
Lee: On this issue, did you get any more about this
request to the Vietnamese on Cam Ranh Bay and not allowing the Russians to –
and not wanting them to allow – you not wanting them to refuel Russian planes
there?
Psaki: Well, just to be clear – and maybe I wasn’t as
clear yesterday, so let me try to do this again – it’s – our concern is about
activities they might conduct in the region, and the question is: Why are they
in the region? It’s not about specifically refueling or telling the Vietnamese
not to allow them to refuel. [emphasis added]
Lee: So there hasn’t been a request to stop refueling
them, or there has?
Psaki: It’s more about concerns. It’s not as much about
Vietnam as much as it – as it is about concerns about what activities they
would be in the region for.
Lee: Okay. Well, you – I mean, there are U.S. planes
flying over there all the time.
Psaki: Sure, there are.
Lee: So you don’t want Russian planes flying there, but
it’s okay for U.S. planes to fly there? I mean, I just – it gets to the point
where you – the suggestion is that everything the Russians are doing all the
time everywhere is somehow nefarious and designed to provoke. But you can’t –
but you don’t seem to be able to understand or accept that American planes
flying all over the place, including in that area, is annoying to the Chinese,
for one, but also for the Russians. But the suggestion is always that the
American flights are good and beneficial and don’t cause tension, and that
other people’s flights do cause tension. So can you explain what the basis is
for your concern that the Russian flights there in the Southeast Asia area are
– raise tensions?
Psaki: There just aren’t more details I can go into.
Cold War 2.0, part II
On Saturday, the Obama administration released a series
of satellite images that it said showed the Russian army had joined the rebels
in a full-scale assault to surround troops in the area around the city. Russia
has denied that it is a party to the conflict, and it was impossible to verify
the three grainy black-and-white satellite images posted to Twitter by the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.
According to the United States, the images, commissioned
from the private Digital Globe satellite company, showed artillery systems and
multiple-rocket launchers Thursday in the area near Debaltseve.
“We are confident these are Russian military, not
separatist, systems,” Pyatt tweeted. (Washington Post, February 15,
2015)
When the time comes to list the ways in which the United
States gradually sunk into the quicksand, slowly metamorphosing into a
Third-World state, Washington’s campaign of 2014-15 to convince the world that
Russia had repeatedly invaded Ukraine will deserve to be near the top of the
list. Numerous examples like the above can be given. If I were still the
jingoistic nationalist I was raised to be I think I would feel somewhat
embarrassed now by the blatant obviousness of it all.
For a short visual history of the decline and fall of
the American Empire, see the video “Imperial Decay” by Class
War Films (8:50 minutes).
During Cold War 1.0 the American media loved to poke fun
at the Soviet media for failing to match the glorious standards of the Western
press. One of the most common putdowns was about the two main Russian
newspapers – Pravda (meaning “truth” in Russian) and Izvestia(meaning
“news”). We were told, endlessly, that there was “no truth inPravda and
no news in Izvestia.”
As cynical as I’ve been for years about the American
mainstream media’s treatment of ODE (Officially Designated Enemies), current
news coverage of Russia exceeds my worst expectations. I’m astonished every day
at the obvious disregard of any kind of objectivity or fairness concerning Russia.
Perhaps the most important example of this bias is the failure to remind their
audience that the US and NATO have surrounded Russia – with Washington’s coup
in Ukraine as the latest example – and that Moscow, for some odd reason, feels
threatened by this. (Look for the map online of NATO bases and Russia, with a
caption like: “Why did you place your country in the middle of our bases?”)
Cold War 2.0, part III
Following the murder of Russian opposition leader, and
former Deputy Prime Minister, Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on February 27, the West
had a field day. Ranging from strong innuendo to outright accusation of murder,
the Western media and politicians did not miss an opportunity to treat Vladimir
Putin as a football practice dummy.
The European Parliament adopted a resolution urging an international investigation into Nemtsov’s death and suggested that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Council, and the United Nations could play a role in the probe.
US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham introduced a
Senate Resolution condemning the Nemtsov murder. The Resolution also called on
President Obama and the international community to pursue an independent
investigation into the murder and redouble efforts to advance free speech,
human rights, and the rule of law in Russia. In addition, it urged Obama to
continue to sanction human rights violators in the Russian Federation and to
increase US support to human rights activists in Russia.
So it went … all over the West.
Meanwhile, in the same time period in Ukraine, outside
of the pro-Russian area in the southeast, the following was reported:
* January 29: Former Chairman of the local government of the Kharkov region,
Alexey Kolesnik, hanged himself.
* February 24: Stanislav Melnik, a member of the opposition party (Partia
Regionov), shot himself.
* February 25: The Mayor of Melitopol, Sergey Valter, hanged himself a few hours
before his trial.
* February 26: Alexander Bordiuga, deputy director of the Melitopol police, was
found dead in his garage.
* February 26: Alexander Peklushenko, former member of the Ukrainian parliament,
and former mayor of Zaporizhi, was found shot to death.
* February 28: Mikhail Chechetov, former member of parliament, member of the
opposition party (Partia Regionov), “fell” from the window of his 17th floor
apartment in Kiev.
* March 14: The 32-year-old prosecutor in Odessa, Sergey Melnichuk, “fell” to
his death from the 9th floor.
The Partia Regionov directly accused the Ukrainian
government in the deaths of their party members and appealed to the West to
react to these events. “We appeal to the European Union, PACE [Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe], and European and international human rights
organizations to immediately react to the situation in Ukraine, and give a
legal assessment of the criminal actions of the Ukrainian government, which
cynically murders its political opponents.”
We cannot conclude from the above that the Ukrainian
government was responsible for all, or even any, of these deaths. But neither
can we conclude that the Russian government was responsible for the death of
Boris Nemtsov, the American media and politicians notwithstanding. A search of
the mammoth Nexus news database found no mention of any of the Ukrainian deceased
except for the last one above, Sergey Melnichuk, but this clearly is not the
same person. It thus appears that none of the deaths on the above list was
ascribed to the Western-allied Ukrainian government.
Where are the demands for international investigations
of any of the deaths? In the United States or in Europe? Where is Senator
McCain?
Source: Russia Insider 06-04-2015
