Nick Wright / United States Peace Council & Robert Parry / The Real News Network – 2014-04-26 21:02:36
http://www.wpc-in.org/statements/statement-us-peace-council-preventing-war-ukraine
It Was a US-instigated Ukrainian Coup
Nick Wright / United States Peace Council
(April 25, 2014) — Once again, the US establishment is promoting another violent coup d’etat as a democratic uprising. Troops are moving, planes are flying, ships are advancing, war threats are being thrown. The governments of NATO and their media point fingers at Russia, but the provocation is fully hidden. Peace activists who should know better are buying this propaganda and spreading it.
Peace activists must urgently act to illuminate the travesty of justice that is taking place. We spoke together to support negotiations with Iran. We must raise our voices now.
Ukraine’s democratically elected president has been violently and forcibly removed with the financial and political support of the United States and European Union. The State Department did not just hand out cookies to a few protesters. It did not just select the replacement government. The US spent $5 billion to instill Koch brothers democracy in Ukraine. The House has approved an additional $1 billion. What else? There are now two governments in Ukraine and the US/EU supported one is filled with neo-Nazis.
We must not forget how anti-government protests in foreign countries have historically been instigated and/or used by the CIA for nefarious purposes.
The CIA playbook has been repeated so many times — from Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1973 to Haiti 1991 and 2004, Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, Honduras in 2009, Libya, Egypt and Syria, Venezuela, among many others. Government overthrows result.
How can we forget the devastation these coups bring? Sometimes the government being deposed is democratically elected, sometimes not, but in either case a government is targeted because it shows independence from US foreign policy demands.
The CIA instigates “democratic” uprisings, pays thugs to carry out violence. The State Department assisted by the corporate media demonizes a government, its leaders and anyone who supports them. US-controlled financial institutions decimate the country’s economy to encourage even more disruption and violence. Then thugs attack government entities, private property, and threaten, intimidate and attack at will.
False flag snipers, video and news distortions weaken any sense of honesty. Six corporations own 90% of our US media. They flood news communications with propaganda here and abroad that the “democratic” opponents just want to get rid of corrupt government, install democracy and save their economy.
They claim the issue is sovereignty of the country, that it is the right of the people of that country to determine their own destiny without imperialist intervention. They pretend not to be advocating for any government. How can we accept such lies?
What the US and Europe are doing to Ukraine is only very slowly being exposed. The peace movement must not be silent!
We know that neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt were caught in a phone conversation plotting the coup.
Despite denials by US representatives of the Fascist character of the protesters, Ukrainian Chabad Chief Rabbi Reuven Azman has recommended that Jews leave the city and perhaps the country. In addition, Israel has been asked to protect Ukraine’s Jewish population.
An atomized Ukraine is more susceptible to corporate exploitation, austerity and impoverishment of the population imposed from outside. NATO continues to move further east, rapidly enveloping Russia with bases and “anti-missile” batteries, another step on the way to confronting Russia. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has called for breaking up Russia, even as Ukraine is being divided
Capitalist Russia’s main export commodity is natural gas. Halliburton is leading the effort to frack natural gas in Ukraine. In addition, the US has now become the largest producer of natural gas, which the State Department is arranging to sell abroad. When the US Government engineers a friendly government in Ukraine, the US fossil fuel industry is being subsidized to undercut Russia’s export market.
The Dulles brothers, John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen heading the CIA, began using extensive government resources starting in the 1950’s to destroy democracies such as Iran, Guatemala and Congo and generated the attacks on Cuba and assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Furthermore, disasters, natural and human-made, are exploited to benefit the 1% at the expense of the majority and of democracy, from Chile to Moscow to New Orleans.
We should by now recognize the goal of the corporate monopolies. First to steal Ukraine’s sovereignty, then its resources and industry, then privatization and destruction of unions and civil society. Then on to Russia’s vast resources. Divide and conquer. A long-term policy of the US, Britain and other imperial states.
These events exacerbate the danger of an explosive war, a conflagration that could envelope the planet. The Peace Movement is commemorating the tragedy of WWI. Today’s events are reminiscent of the capitalist and imperialist competitions that led to it.
What can we do? Generate local demonstrations. Confront our government and media. Let our elected officials know that we see through the fog. Expose the hypocrisy, lies and war mongering.
Then we must demand that Congress investigate another US-instigated coup to determine which laws, national or international, were violated.
The people of the US stopped Obama’s bombing of Syria. We must demand that the US back away from more war, violent regime change and the imposition of austerity.
We must mobilize!
Evidence for Russian Involvement in East Ukraine Based on Shoddy Journalism
BALTIMORE (April 24, 2014) — The Obama administration and Kiev government claimed that Russian soldiers were present at the building occupations, yet it turns out that this was assertion based on photos the US government provided to New York Times and that the newspaper has had to retract.
Transcript
ANTON WORONCZUK, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Anton Woronczuk in Baltimore.
In recent weeks, as armed protesters took over government buildings in the eastern regions of Ukraine, we were repeatedly told by US officials that Russia has been behind all this. But there has been little offered behind their repeated assertions.
Our next guest says the recent evidence trying to prove that Russian soldiers were among the armed protesters is bogus and is part of a propaganda stampede by media outlets who are concerned with promoting an anti-Russian bias.
Now with us to discuss this is Robert Parry. Robert is a renowned investigative journalist and founder and editor of ConsortiumNews.com. And his recent piece is titled “NYT Retracts Russian-Photo Scoop.”
Thanks for joining us, Robert.
WORONCZUK: So, Robert, The New York Times reported that the Ukrainian government had proof that Russian soldiers were behind the takeover of government buildings in Eastern Ukraine. They released these photos to prove that Russia was behind these takeovers despite Russia’s denial of involvement. Now The Times is backpedaling and saying that the photographs they printed were coming under scrutiny. What do you think is the significance of their retraction?
PARRY: Well, it’s always interesting when The New York Times goes with a front page story, a lead piece on Monday citing these photographs as evidence, the sort of slam dunk evidence that Russian troops had gone into Ukraine and were essentially instigating this uprising in these ten cities in Eastern Ukraine. The New York Times presented these photographs but apparently never really checked them out.
The photographs themselves really didn’t prove much. They basically — even if you were to accept them at face value, there are other explanations for why people might be in one place or another beyond the fact that they were sent there by the Kremlin.
But as it turned out, a key photograph that The Times used, one a group photograph which The Times claimed had been taken in Russia, and then these same — some of the same fighters show up in Eastern Ukraine, that was presented as a key piece of evidence that these folks were from Russia and were participating in the Eastern Ukrainian uprising.
But it turned out that the photograph was actually taken by a freelance photographer in Eastern Ukraine. So the whole basis of The Times‘ story collapses, because these folks were not photographed in Russia, they were photographed in Eastern Ukraine. And that’s what The Times was forced to retract today.
WORONCZUK: Well, you’ve worked at newspapers before, and you’ve see that often they have to run corrections because they don’t always get the story right. Couldn’t some argue that this is just one of those instances?
PARRY: Well, it’s certainly an instance of getting something screwed up. But it’s — here we’re talking about a possible confrontation involving the United States and Russia. This is not a joke. This is not some minor story where a journalist can be sloppy — not that a journalist should ever be sloppy, but this is one where real lives are at stake. And The Times should have taken much more care in checking this material out. They were simply handed the material, apparently by the US government, although the interim of government in Kiev was also peddling the same photographs, and The Times ran with them.
They should have shown much more care and scrutiny before this, because this story, once it runs on the front page of The New York Times, is picked up by American news organizations across the media spectrum. Everyone runs with it as if it’s true.
And that creates an opinion amongst the American people that is not based on fact but is based on this serious error. Now, it may be that there are Russians operating in the Eastern Ukraine. We don’t really know. But this evidence doesn’t support that, and in fact it turned out in a key place to be wrong.
WORONCZUK: Now, it seems that if the US really didn’t want to go after Russia, that what they could do is point out some of the problems that maybe had — the problems of the Crimea referendum.
And I just read a McClatchy piece from a couple of weeks ago that said that we haven’t seen any sort of sophisticated or detailed voting analysis of the referendum and that the amount of support that had been given to the referendum couldn’t really have come with the boycotts of the Tatars and Ukrainians within the region. So why would they go after the Russians this way, with this kind of flimsy evidence, instead of [crosstalk]
PARRY: Well, the US is going after the Russians in a whole variety of ways. This is not the only one. And, frankly, the way the US government has behaved has been somewhat reckless, in that it has been presenting a very one-sided narrative, ignoring some of the wrongdoing on the side of the coup makers who overthrew the elected government in Ukraine, the Yanukovych government. That’s what set off a series of events which Putin has been largely reacting to.
There’s been this other myth that’s been going around official Washington that Putin somehow masterminded did this whole thing. But that’s crazy, because he didn’t have anything to do with the Maidan demonstrations. He had nothing to do with the overthrow of Yanukovych. He was supporting Yanukovych.
After that, there was a strong popular movement in Crimea, which has been historically part of Russia, to escape what was increasingly a failed state in Ukraine. Now, the vote — the referendum was done rather hastily, and there’s legitimate criticism that it wasn’t done with all the safeguards you’d like to see in an election, but I don’t know anybody involved in this that doesn’t believe that a majority of Crimeans favored getting out of Ukraine and joining Russia.
There may not have been the high percentages that the vote showed, but most people I’ve talked to — pretty much everybody I’ve talked to agrees that that represented a popular feeling in Crimea, just because they had been always part of Russia, going back to the 1700s, and that they had real reason to be concerned about the chaos that was enveloping Ukraine. And there are practical things that — like, their pensions went up by joining Russia.
So I don’t think — I think the US has been trying to create a case to make the Russians look as bad as possible, but it’s not been an objective or honest one. And I think what happened with The New York Times going with this very sloppy story about these photographs is just another example of how that’s worked.
WORONCZUK: Okay. Robert Parry, Thank you so much for joining us.
PARRY: Thank you.
WORONCZUK: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
See also –
New York Times tries to whitewash publication of faked Ukraine photos
The New York Times responded yesterday to the exposure of its fabricated report alleging that Russian Special Forces are stirring up protests in east Ukraine against the pro-Western regime in Kiev.
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