American Dream » Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:35 pm wrote:I've got a lot of other work that I really need to focus on now, but I will say that I did already put up the link to Consortium News' postings on Putin after referencing the fact more than once that it is very easy it is for anyone who cares to see for themselves to check it out in that way.
Here though I have reproduced the first page of results filled with articles that are generally sympathetic to Putin and not very critical at all.
At long last, thank you for taking time out of your busy, busy schedule to post 10 links. However, I will not accept your "generally sympathetic" and "not very critical" goalpost shift. You originally stated Parry has been "posting a defense of Putin - and this is not the first time." Presumably within these 10 links, you believe Parry is posting a defense of Putin.
Very well then. Even though I have already literally read 9/10th of these links over a month ago when I
initially asked you for evidence of the scurrilous charge you made, I'll examine each of your links in depth to see if it in fact validates your charge, or if they are just more examples like the one I
debunked over a month ago as either a)
spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine, b)
pointing out that Putin was instrumental in preventing Obama from invading Syria, or c)
criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia, but not actually DEFENDING PUTIN HIMSELF. I'll do so with as much rigor as I can muster, starting by pasting Parry's actual words here for everyone to peruse or skim at their discretion. (Some edits have been made to stay within the maximum allowed characters for a post on RI.) Or they can skip directly to
My Synopsis and
My Analysis to see how your charge holds up.
Text from your first link:Was Putin Targeted for Mid-Air Assassination?
August 8, 2014
Exclusive: Official Washington’s conventional wisdom on the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down blames Russian President Putin, but some U.S. intelligence analysts think Putin, whose plane was flying nearby, may have been the target of Ukrainian hardliners who hit the wrong plane, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
U.S. intelligence analysts are weighing the possibility that the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a botched attempt by extremists in the Ukrainian government to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin whose aircraft was returning from South America the same day, according to a source briefed on the U.S. investigation.
If true, the direction of the investigation into the July 17 crash has veered dramatically from initial U.S. government allegations that eastern Ukrainian rebels, using a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft battery, were responsible for bringing down the plane killing 298 people onboard.
The Obama administration used those claims to whip up an anti-Russian hysteria that prompted European countries to ratchet up economic sanctions against Moscow, starting what now looks like an incipient trade war.
But the U.S. analysts dismissed those original suspicions because they could find no evidence that such a missile battery had been supplied by the Russians or was in the possession of the rebels, prompting a shift in thinking toward a scenario in which Ukrainian hardliners working with elements of the air force may have tried to ambush Putin’s plane but instead hit the Malaysian airliner, said the source speaking on condition of anonymity.
Putin flies in a plane with similar red, white and blue markings as the Malaysian airliner and was known to be on his way home after a six-day visit to South America. But his plane took a different route and landed safely in Moscow.
After the crash, as U.S. intelligence analysts pored over phone intercepts and other intelligence data, they began to suspect that the motive for the shoot-down was the desire among some Ukrainian extremists to eliminate Putin whom they had been privately vowing to kill – words initially viewed as empty bluster but which were looked at differently in hindsight – the source said.
If some Ukrainian authorities were hoping to ambush Putin’s plane, they also would have had only a matter of minutes to detect the aircraft’s presence and make a decision to fire, so it could be plausible that the attackers made a hasty decision to hit Putin’s plane before they realized that they had made a tragic mistake.
(snip)
A Worsening Crisis
As the crisis worsened, several eastern cities in the Donbass region also voted to secede and an armed resistance emerged against the Kiev regime, which responded by vowing to crush the rebellion with an “anti-terrorist operation” that has included artillery and aerial bombardments against towns and cities held by the rebels.
On Friday, a Ukrainian parliamentary group reported that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Kiev’s offensive since April, a number far higher than earlier estimates.
Angered by the mounting violence, the Russians lodged murder accusations against two Ukrainian officials, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire oligarch who was appointed by the coup regime to be governor of the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk Region.
Kolomoisky, known for his strong-arm business tactics including deploying paid thugs to intimidate rivals, is now using his fortune to finance paramilitary units, such as the Dnipro Battalion which is considered one of the most aggressive and brutal units in the “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine.
Since the February coup, Kolomoisky also has engaged in a bitter war of words with Putin whom he publicly mocked as a “schizophrenic shorty.” But Kolomoisky’s fury toward Putin has intensified in the face of the Russian murder charge and other threats to the billionaire’s PrivatBank holdings. In private conversations, Kolomoisky has made angry threats against Putin, the source said.
Other Ukrainian officials have vowed to kill Putin. Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a onetime Kolomoisky ally, said in an intercepted phone: “It’s about time we grab our guns and kill, go kill those damn Russians together with their leader.”
Though U.S. intelligence was aware of such threatening anti-Putin rhetoric via American intercepts, the rants were not taken seriously, at least not until after the shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner, the source said. Now, they are reportedly being studied as a possible motive for the July 17 attack.
Another curious development was the sudden resignation on Thursday of Andriy Parubiy as chief of Ukraine’s national security. A longtime neo-Nazi leader, Parubiy had organized and directed the paramilitary forces that spearheaded the putsch on Feb. 22 forcing Yanukovych and his government officials to flee for their lives.
Parubiy refused to explain his reason for quitting but some analysts believe it may have a connection to the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down, the source said. The U.S. intelligence analysts specifically said their evidence does not implicate Ukraine’s current President Petro Poroshenko or Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, but they did not extend that clearance to the more extreme elements of the government, the source said.
Russian Evidence
Based on technical evidence that Moscow has supplied to U.S. and other investigators, it appears that the Ukrainian military had several Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missiles along the path of the Malaysia Airlines flight as well as two jetfighters in the air in the vicinity of the doomed plane.
Eyewitnesses also reported seeing one or two Ukrainian jetfighters near the airliner right before it was blown out of the sky. Two theories are that the jetfighters were trying to identify the plane or were responsible for finishing it off if the missile failed to do the job.
An independent analysis by an expert on the Buk systems, who has reviewed the Russian evidence, says it shows that one of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries was in position to take down the Malaysian airliner by inflicting damage consistent with the wreckage that has so far been recovered from the plane.
As the pieces of this puzzle fill in, the image that emerges is of a possible Ukrainian ambush of a jetliner heading into Russian airspace that had markings very similar to President Putin’s official plane. As shocking as that picture may be, there is a grim logic to it, given the demonization of Putin who has been likened to Hitler and Stalin by pundits and politicians from Ukraine to the United States.
However, even if the U.S. intelligence analysts do assemble a strong case implicating an extremist faction within the Ukrainian government, there is still the political problem for the Obama administration of dealing with a conclusion so dramatically at odds with the original accusations aimed at the rebels and Russia.
Powerful people are notoriously unwilling to admit mistakes, especially when it could open them to charges that they rushed to judgment and behaved recklessly. There are similarities with the hasty U.S. conclusions a year ago when sarin gas killed hundreds outside Damascus on Aug. 21 – and the finger of blame was pointed immediately at the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
On Aug. 30, Secretary Kerry declared repeatedly that “we know” that the Assad regime was guilty, but some U.S. intelligence analysts were privately expressing their doubts and refused to endorse a “Government Assessment” which presented no verifiable evidence to support the accusations. The four-page white paper also suppressed the dissents of the analysts.
Over the ensuing months as much of Kerry’s case fell apart, some of these analysts came to believe that rebel extremists were likely responsible for the attack as a provocation to draw in the U.S. military into the civil war on their side. But the U.S. government has never retracted its allegations against the Syrian government. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]
Given how far senior U.S. officials have gone in heaping blame for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down on the rebels and the Russians, it is hard to envision a walk-back of those accusations regardless of the actual evidence. To compel that would require true courage from U.S. analysts or from international investigators looking into the crash.
It is never easy to contradict important people, especially when they have leveled such serious accusations so confidently. That is one reason why Kerry and the mainstream U.S. news media should have held back on their conclusions until a thorough investigation had been done.
My Synopsis:
Parry investigates the possibility that the July 17 shoot-down of MA Flight 17 which killed 298 people may have been an attempt to assassinate Putin. While the Obama administration used the incident to try to get European countries to employ economic sanctions against Russia, there was no evidence found that such a missile battery had been supplied by the Russians or was in possession of the rebels. Parry provides a side-by-side comparison of the similarity between the Russian presidential plane carrying Putin and the Malaysia Airlines plane carrying the 298 victims. U.S. intelligence analysts, after poring over phone intercepts and other data, suspect the motive for the shoot-down was the desire of Ukrainian extremists to kill Putin and that an attempt to ambush his plane would have been a hasty decision.
Parry then goes on to detail how the US, led by John Kerry, went on a PR campaign against Russia without a whole lot of evidence. He mentions how the alternative scenario of a Putin assassination as a motive does have a distinct drawback - full-scale Russian retaliation with a probable U.S. confrontation. But the possibility of an escalation to a full international crisis has always been present since the U.S.-backed overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, a putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias on February 22.
Parry continues detailing the unfolding of the crisis in the Ukraine that has resulted in 10,000 people being killed. There have been a number of threats made by leading Ukrainians, publicly and privately against Putin. With analysts studying that closer in light of the possibility that MA-17 was shot down in an attempt to assassinate Putin, Parry notes how interesting the resignation of Andriy Parubiy as chief of Ukraine’s national security seems in the wake of that development.
Parry concludes by listing the evidence of Ukrainian government responsibility for the shoot-down, including anti-aircraft missiles and two jetfighters in the vicinity. While there is a grim logic to a botched assassination attempt, it creates a political problem for the Obama administration to cope with as it is at odds with their original accusations. Parry compares this to the response last year against Syria by the Obama administration accusing Assad of chemical weapon attacks they couldn't prove. Patience would be a better response while waiting for a thorough investigation.
My Analysis:
Where's the beef? Reporting on the possibility Putin was the target of a botched assassination attempt does not equate with defending Putin. What Parry does in this article is a)spell out his research and speculation on what's happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizes US foreign policy in the context of Russia. There is no defense of Putin to be found.Text from your 2nd link:The ‘We-Hate-Putin’ Group Think
March 7, 2014
Exclusive: The only foreign policy show on the U.S. media dial this past week has been the bashing of Russian President Putin over the Ukraine crisis – with a slap or two at President Obama for having worked with Putin on Syria and Iran. Lost in this “group think” is the why behind this demonization, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The U.S. political-media elites, which twisted themselves into a dangerous “group think” over the Iraq War last decade, have spun out of control again in a wild overreaction to the Ukraine crisis. Across the ideological spectrum, there is rave support for the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected president – and endless ranting against Russian President Vladimir Putin for refusing to accept the new coup leadership in Kiev and intervening to protect Russian interests in Crimea.
The “we-hate-Putin” hysteria has now reach the point that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has deployed the “Hitler analogy” against Putin, comparing Putin’s interests in protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine with Hitler citing ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe to justify aggression at the start of World War II.
“I just want people to have a little historic perspective,” the reputed 2016 Democratic presidential frontrunner told a question-and-answer session at UCLA on Wednesday, confirming reports of her using the Hitler analogy during an earlier private fundraiser.
Some Clinton backers suggested she made the provocative comparison to give herself protection from expected right-wing attacks on her for having participated in the “reset” of U.S. policy toward Russia in 2009. She also was putting space between herself and President Barack Obama’s quiet effort to cooperate with Putin to resolve crises with Iran and Syria.
But what is shocking about Clinton’s Hitler analogy – and why it should give Democrats pause as they rush to coronate her as their presidential nominee in 2016 – is that it suggests that she has joined the neoconservative camp, again. Since her days as a U.S. senator from New York — and as a supporter of the Iraq War — Clinton has often sided with the neocons and she’s doing so again in demonizing Putin.
Democrats might want to contemplate how a President Hillary Clinton would handle that proverbial “3 a.m. phone call,” perhaps one with conflicting information about a chemical weapons attack in Syria or muddled suspicions that Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb or reports that Russia is using its military to resist a right-wing coup in neighboring Ukraine.
Would she unthinkingly adopt the hawkish neocon position as she often did as U.S. senator and as Secretary of State? Would she wait for the “fog of war” to lift or simply plunge ahead with flame-throwing rhetoric that could make a delicate situation worse?
There’s also the question of Clinton’s honesty. Does she really believe that Putin protecting ethnic Russians from an illegitimate government that seized power in a right-wing coup on Russia’s border is comparable to Hitler invading Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland?
Media Endorsement
Normally, anyone who uses a Hitler analogy is immediately chastised for both absurd hyperbole and anti-Semitism. Besides the extreme exaggeration involved, the Hitler analogy trivializes the scope of Hitler’s crimes both in provoking World War II and carrying out the Holocaust against European Jews.
Usually neocons are among the first to protest this cheapening of the Holocaust’s memory, but apparently their determination to take down Putin for his interference in their “regime change” plans across the Middle East caused some neocons to endorse Clinton’s Hitler analogy. One of the Washington Post’s neocon editorial writers, Charles Lane, wrote on Thursday: “Superficially plausible though the Hitler-Putin comparison may be, just how precisely does it fit? In some respects, alarmingly so.”
Yet, outside of this mad “group think” that has settled over Official Washington, Clinton’s Hitler analogy is neither reasonable nor justified. If she wanted to note that protecting one’s national or ethnic group has been cited historically to justify interventions, she surely didn’t have to go to the Hitler extreme. There are plenty of other examples.
For instance, it was a factor in the Mexican-American War in the 1840s when President James Polk cited protecting Texans as a justification for the war with Mexico. The “protect Americans” argument also was used by President Ronald Reagan in justifying his invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983. Reagan said he was protecting American students at the St. George’s Medical School, even though they were not in any real physical danger.
In other conflicts, human rights advocates have asserted the right to defend any civilians from physical danger under the so-called “responsibility to protect” — or “R2P” — principle. For example, neocons and various U.S.-based “non-governmental organizations” have urged a U.S. military intervention in Syria supposedly to protect innocent human life.
However, if anyone dared compare Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, R2P advocates to Hitler, you could expect the likes of Charles Lane to howl with outrage. Yet, when Putin faces a complex dilemma like the violent right-wing coup in Ukraine – and worries about ethnic Russians facing potential persecution – he is casually compared to Hitler with almost no U.S. opinion leader protesting the hype.
(snip)
U.S. Hypocrisy
In the same news conference, Putin noted the U.S. government’s hypocrisy in decrying Russia’s intervention in Crimea. He said: “It’s necessary to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, where they acted either without any sanction from the U.N. Security Council or distorted the content of these resolutions, as it happened in Libya. There, as you know, only the right to create a no-fly zone for government aircraft was authorized, and it all ended in the bombing and participation of special forces in group operations.”
There is no denying the accuracy of Putin’s description of U.S. overreach in its interventions in the Twenty-first Century. Yet, Secretary of State John Kerry has ignored that history in denouncing Russia for using military force in the Crimea section of Ukraine. Kerry said on Tuesday: “It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior.”
Despite Kerry’s bizarre lack of self-awareness — as a senator he joined in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq — it is Putin who gets called “delusional.” While virtually all mainstream U.S. news outlets join in the demonization of Putin, there have been almost no words about the truly delusional hypocrisy of U.S. officials. Ignored is the inconvenient truth that the U.S. military invaded Iraq, still occupies Afghanistan, coordinated a “regime change” war in Libya in 2011, and has engaged in cross-border attacks in several countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Though we’ve seen other examples of the U.S. political/media elite losing its collective mind – particularly during the crazed run-up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and the near stampede into another war with Syria in 2013 – the frantic madness over Putin and Ukraine is arguably the most dangerous manifestation of this nutty Official Washington “group think.”
Not only does Putin lead a powerful nation with a nuclear arsenal but his cooperation with President Obama on Syria and Iran have been important contributions toward tamping down the fires of what could become a wider regional war across the Middle East.
Yet, it is perhaps Putin’s assistance in finding peaceful ways out of last year’s Syrian crisis as well as getting Iran to negotiate seriously over its nuclear program – rather than pressing for violent “regime change” in the two countries – that earned Putin the undying enmity of the neocons who still dominate Official Washington and influence its “group think.”
Maybe that enmity explains part of the mysterious why behind the Ukraine crisis and the endless demonization of Putin.
Elliott Abrams, a leading neocon who oversaw Middle East policy on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, was quick to pounce on the Ukraine crisis and the pummeling of Putin to urge a new push for legislation that would pile on more sanctions against Iran, a move that President Obama has warned could kill negotiations.
“This would be a very good time for Congress to pass the Menendez-Kirk legislation,” Abrams wrote. “One lesson of events in Ukraine is that relying on the good will of repressive, anti-American regimes is foolish and dangerous. Another is that American strength and strength of will are weakened at the peril of the United States and our friends everywhere.”
While at the NSC, Abrams was one of the neocon hardliners – along with Vice President Dick Cheney – who “”were all for letting Israel do whatever it wanted” regarding attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his memoir, Duty.
That attack-Iran argument nearly carried the day during the final months of the Bush-43 administration since, according to Gates, “Bush effectively came down on Cheney’s side. By not giving the Israelis a red light, he gave them a green one.”
But a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, concluded that Iran had stopped work on a nuclear weapon four years earlier. Bush has acknowledged that this NIE stopped him from going forward with military strikes on Iran.
The neocons, however, have never given up that dream. Now, with the “we-hate-Putin” group think gripping Official Washington, they may feel they have another shot. [For more, see Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
My Synopsis:
Parry starts the article by illustrating how the overreaction to the Ukraine crisis has culminated in Democratic Party presumed-Presidential frontrunner for 2016 Hillary Clinton going full-Godwin on Putin comparing him to Hitler. While some have suggested she did this to protect herself from right-wing attacks 
, another perspective is that where foreign policy is concerned, she has joined the neo-con camp, again. While the Hitler analogy normally provokes chastisement for absurdity or anti-Semitism, Parry shows neo-con Washington Post writer Charles Lane endorsing it.
Parry illustrates just how hyperbolic this "group think" is by citing other examples that could have been used besides Hitler, such as President Polk protecting Texans as a justification for war with Mexico in the 1840s, or President Reagan using the "protect Americans" argument to justify invading Grenada in 1983. If Clinton had, of course, there would be no neo-con support.
Parry then goes on to reveal evidence that shows the sniper fire that the US government/MSM cite as proof that Yanukovych deserved to be overthrown may have been the work of neo-Nazi provocateurs. He details a phone call between two government officials regarding a witness who observed sniper fire that killed the protestors as being the same sniper fire that killed the police. When both Yanukovych and Putin raised questions about who started the shooting, US MSM dismissed them as "delusional." Parry then quotes Putin at length so the reader can judge for themselves if he's delusional or not.
Parry concludes by showing how hypocritical the US has been in regard to this situation. He points out the Secretary of State criticizing Putin by saying, “It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior." Yet this is the same John Kerry who as Senator voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. political/media elite has forgotten that as well as the most recent near-war with Syria in 2013. That Putin cooperated with Obama on Syria and Iran and helped find peaceful ways to end the 2013 Syrian crisis has earned him the undying hatred of the neo-cons. Parry quotes Iran/contra felon Elliott Abrams on his zeal for Iran sanctions on a nuclear weapons program that we know from a 2007 NIE Iran had stopped working on four years earlier.
My Analysis:
Chalk this up under all three points: a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine, b)pointing out that Putin was instrumental in preventing Obama from invading Syria, or c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Seriously, AD, you think saying that Putin isn't Hitler is defending him?! Why else would you link to this if you don't? Again, this is the equivalent of your average neo-con saying that I'm defending Saddam Hussein for saying he wasn't Hitler when the Bush administration was propagandizing about infants being thrown out of incubators. Text from your 3rd link:Putin’s Subtle Message to Obama
May 8, 2014
Exclusive: Russian President Putin sought to cool the rhetoric over Ukraine with an appeal for a postponed referendum in the east and an order to pull back Russian troops, but another message was to President Obama – over the State Department’s head – that it’s time to talk, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Official Washington’s shock and disbelief at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calming words about Ukraine reveal more about the widening chasm between real-world nuances and the U.S. political/media elite’s hysteria than any dramatic shift in course by Putin.
I’m told that what Putin is doing – in urging ethnic Russians in east Ukraine to put off a referendum on possible secession and agreeing to pull Russian troops back from the border – is part of a behind-the-scenes initiative coordinated with President Barack Obama to prevent the Ukraine crisis from spinning further out of control.
On the American side, this also appears to be the latest example of Obama’s extraordinary way of conducting foreign policy, often at odds with his own State Department bureaucracy and relying on White House insiders and CIA analysts to counter the belligerence often exhibited by Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
Obama’s unusual style arose from his fateful decision to appoint a “team of rivals” to top national security posts after winning the presidency in 2008. To close a rift in the Democratic Party, he gave the hawkish Clinton the job of Secretary of State; and to maintain some continuity during wartime, he left George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in place and kept Bush’s high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
But Obama soon learned that running the U.S. government wasn’t like managing a college seminar in which smart people sit around and debate various points of view. When actual policy decisions were at stake, such as whether to escalate the Afghan War by dispatching a “surge” of 30,000 troops and adopting a new “counterinsurgency” strategy, Obama found that powerful adversaries could manipulate the process by limiting his options and leaking to their friends in the news media.
In summer 2009, Obama was mouse-trapped into the neocon-favored “surge” in Afghanistan. The policy was devised by neocon theorist Frederick Kagan, pushed by Defense Secretary Gates and supported by Clinton and Petraeus, according to Gates’s memoir, Duty .
Obama was thoroughly outmaneuvered and ended up acquiescing to the plan although he reportedly regretted the decision almost immediately. (Kagan’s “surge” accomplished little beyond getting about 1,000 more Americans and many Afghans killed, without changing the trajectory of the failed war.)
But the Afghan “surge” experience apparently convinced Obama that he needed to beef up his own team, which he assembled in part from the ranks of CIA analysts who were working in the early days for one Obama loyalist, CIA Director Leon Panetta. Obama shied away from the other alternative of firing the “team of rivals” fearing political repercussions.
As Gates wrote in Duty, ”Clinton and I represented the only independent ‘power center’ [in the Obama administration’s national security decision-making], not least because, for very different reasons, we were both seen as ‘un-fireable.’” What was remarkable about Gates’s observation is that traditionally the President of the United States is considered the only “power center” that matters on foreign policy.
(snip)
Stymied by Putin
So, on both Syria and Iran, Kerry found himself not only stymied by Obama and the President’s ad hoc foreign policy team, but by the influence of the Russian president who had developed a surprisingly close odd-couple relationship with Obama. One outside analyst even compared the Obama-Putin relationship to the close collaboration between President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, albeit without the warm public appearances.
In other words, the fury toward Putin has been building inside the State Department, which is still dominated by neoconservative leftovers from the Bush years along with liberal “humanitarian” hawks who are also eager to unleash U.S. firepower against unsavory enemies. The pent-up frustration over Obama’s failure to bomb Syria and possibly Iran was let loose over Ukraine, with Putin the primary target of the anger.
The Ukraine crisis started in 2013 with a reckless dangle from the European Union of a possible future membership for Ukraine, an association offer that was then followed by draconian austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund. But the easy villains in the U.S. narrative were Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected the IMF’s demands, and Russia’s President Putin, who trumped the EU’s offer with a $15 billion loan without the austerity.
As anger among western Ukrainians led to mass demonstrations at the Maidan in Kiev, the State Department’s neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (who happens to be Frederick Kagan’s sister-in-law), cheered on and encouraged the increasingly violent protests. The U.S. press corps shed any pretense of objectivity and took the side of the Maidan protesters.
So, when neo-Nazi militias, allied with the Maidan protests, launched a putsch on Feb. 22, the State Department and the U.S. press fully embraced the ouster of the democratically elected president in what was deemed a “pro-democracy” uprising.
The events that followed, including the appointment of Nuland’s hand-picked politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and his prompt enactment of the IMF austerity plan, were viewed through the U.S. narrative’s lens of “white hat” good guys — the coup regime in Kiev — versus “black hat” bad guys, i.e., anyone who objected to the putsch.
Reactions from Ukrainians who felt disenfranchised by the overthrow of their elected president or worried about the IMF’s austerity plan were dismissed as confused locals deceived by Moscow’s “disinformation,” which continued to cite the role of neo-Nazis and question the legitimacy of the post-coup regime.
In March, when the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. media portrayed the vote as “rigged” or forced on the population by a Russian invasion.
To this day, the New York Times and other major publications insist that Putin had denied that Russian troops were in Crimea at the time of the secession and only later admitted that they were present, all the better to dispute his denials that Russian troops are now operating in eastern Ukraine. It doesn’t seem to matter to the U.S. press that Putin and other Russian officials always said there were thousands of Russian troops in Crimea, operating under a longstanding agreement with Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Twisting Putin’s Words on Ukraine.”]
The Putin Conspiracy Theory
The demonization of Putin in the U.S. news media was so total that virtually anything could be said or written about him and anyone who objected to the “group think” was immediately dismissed as a “Putin apologist” or a conveyor of “Russian propaganda.”
Because of this endless vilification, Official Washington couldn’t see straight when it came to what Putin actually wanted. Amid the waves of U.S. propaganda, the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media promoted wild speculation about Putin planning to seize large sections of Ukraine and even reach into Moldova, if not the Baltic states.
Yet, Putin faced challenges enough in accepting Crimea’s request for annexation, including the expenditure of billions of dollars to upgrade the peninsula’s decaying infrastructure and building a bridge or tunnel from the Russian mainland. Putin wasn’t eager to take on the care and feeding of tens of millions of Ukrainians.
Putin’s military threats appeared mostly designed to stay the hand of the coup regime in Kiev which kept announcing plans to crush the “terrorists” in eastern Ukrainians who had taken up arms against what they considered an illegitimate government.
If Ukraine adopted some federalist system to give the sections of the deeply divided country more self-rule, Putin and his diplomats indicated that the interests of the eastern Ukrainians would be served. I’m told that idea became the basis for private discussions between the Kremlin and the White House, including apparently direct one-on-one talks between Obama and Putin.
So, Putin’s initiative on Wednesday, urging the eastern Ukrainians to forego a May 11 referendum on possible secession and his announced pullback of troops from the border, fits with his interests. Whichever way the referendum were to go it would have meant trouble for Putin, since a strong vote for joining Russia would have raised expectations to a dangerous level and a strong vote for staying in Ukraine would be a potential embarrassment.
The interests of the eastern Ukrainian protesters, however, appear to be different, since they rejected Putin’s request to postpone the referendum scheduled for Sunday. To them, a strong vote for autonomy or for joining Russia might be seen as a blessing because it could force Putin’s hand on a possible military intervention.
But Putin’s conciliatory words appear to have another audience, as a signal to Obama that – despite all the acrimony over Ukraine – Russia is willing again to play its helpful role in reducing tensions in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere.
If so, it is now up to Obama to decide what to do about his fractured foreign policy apparatus, now that he has seen additional evidence about the risk of having a State Department operating outside presidential control.
My Synopsis:
Parry begins with an analysis that Putin's declaration at that time to postpone a referendum and pull back troops, contrary to the US MSM view, really was more about coordinating a behind-the-scenes initiative with Obama than any dramatic shift by Putin. It's yet another example of Obama conducting foreign policy around the State Department with his own insiders rather than through it. Parry then recounts Obama's history of being stymied by Clinton and Gates through neo-con theorist Frederick Kagan's "surge" in Afghanistan and how in response, Obama had to beef up his own team of loyalists.
Parry continues with more examples of neo-con intransigence, including defiance of Obama regarding a Brazil-Turkey arrangement he sanctioned to ship low-grade uranium out of Iran. After Clinton publicly attacked it and was joined heavily by US MSM, Obama scuttled the deal, which heightened tensions. The tension continued after Clinton's departure with the bellicosity of Kerry, who practically gave a declaration of war speech against Syria on August 30, 2013, only to have Obama pull the rug out from under him with a compromise brokered with the Syrian government by Putin.
Parry describes how the Putin-Obama "odd-couple" relationship has infuriated State Department neo-cons and neo-lib "humanitarian" hawks eager for war who were frustrated over Syria are now livid over the Ukraine. He recounts the details of the recent crisis, from the initial IMF austerity rejection by Yanukovych to the Maidan protestors to the neo-Nazi fueled putsch that ousted a democratically elected president which the US MSM characterized as a "pro-democracy" uprising. Once Victoria Nuland's puppet Yatsenyuk enacted IMF austerity and disenfranchised Crimeans reacted by voting for secession, US MSM responded by misrepresenting the referendum and twisting Putin's words on the subject of Russian troops, which had been there under a prior longstanding agreement with the Ukraine.
Finally, Parry clarifies how anyone not falling in lockstep with US MSM "group think" on Putin is branded as a "Putin apologist", yet anyone on board the Demonize Putin team gets away with ridiculous claims about Putin planning to seize the Ukraine, Moldava and Baltic states. The challenge Putin faces in the Crimea alone may be more than he can handle. It may be that a federalist system which Putin has indicated may serve eastern Ukrainian interests best may be the basis for one-on-one talks with Obama and Putin. So Putin's request to postpone the referendum, though eastern Ukrainian protestors rejected it, along with his pullback of troops and conciliatory words, really is signalling to Obama that he's willing to reach out to help reduce tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere. Whether Obama can do so outside of a near-rogue State Department remains to be seen.
My Analysis:
Once again, this missive is a combination of a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine, b)pointing out that Putin was instrumental in preventing Obama from invading Syria, or c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Not only is Parry not defending Putin, but when he specifies "Putin wasn’t eager to take on the care and feeding of tens of millions of Ukrainians", it's almost as if, no - Parry couldn't possibly do that, he's criticizing Putin, saying that on some level Putin really did bite off more than he could chew. Fancy that!Text from your 4th link:The Powerful ‘Group Think’ on Ukraine
August 18, 2014
Exclusive: Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine – blaming everything on Russian President Putin – is so dominant that even independent thinkers like Paul Krugman get sucked into the collective misinformation, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
When even smart people like economist Paul Krugman buy into the false narrative about the Ukraine crisis, it’s hard to decide whether to despair over the impossibility of America ever understanding the world’s problems or to marvel at the power of the U.S. political/media propaganda machine to manufacture its own reality.
On Monday, Krugman’s New York Times column accepts the storyline that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis and extrapolates from that “fact” the conclusion that perhaps the nefarious Putin did so to engineer a cheap land grab or to distract Russians from their economic problems.
“Delusions of easy winnings still happen,” Krugman wrote. “It’s only a guess, but it seems likely that Vladimir Putin thought that he could overthrow Ukraine’s government, or at least seize a large chunk of its territory, on the cheap — a bit of deniable aid to the rebels, and it would fall into his lap. …
“Recently Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review suggested that the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy. As he noted, Mr. Putin’s hold on power partly reflects a long run of rapid economic growth. But Russian growth has been sputtering — and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction.”
Or you could look at the actual facts of how the Ukraine crisis began and realize that it was the West, not Russia, that instigated this crisis. Putin’s response has been reactive to what he perceives as threats posed by the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and the imposition of a new Western-oriented regime hostile to Moscow and Ukraine’s ethnic Russians.
Last year, it was the European Union that was pushing an economic association agreement with Ukraine, which included the International Monetary Fund’s demands for imposing harsh austerity on Ukraine’s already suffering population. Political and propaganda support for the EU plan was financed, in part, by the U.S. government through such agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy.
When Yanukovych recoiled at the IMF’s terms and opted for a more generous $15 billion aid package from Putin, the U.S. government ratcheted up its support for mass demonstrations aimed at overthrowing Yanukovych and replacing him with a new regime that would sign the EU agreement and accept the IMF’s demands.
As the crisis deepened early this year, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics, particularly the threat of terrorist attacks on the games. No evidence has been presented that Putin was secretly trying to foment the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, all the evidence is that Putin was trying to protect the status quo, support the elected president and avert a worse crisis.
Moscow supported Yanukovych’s efforts to reach a political compromise, including a European-brokered agreement for early elections and reduced presidential powers. Yet, despite those concessions, neo-Nazi militias surged to the front of the protests on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. The U.S. State Department quickly recognized the coup regime as “legitimate.”
Since the new regime also took provocative steps against the ethnic Russians (such as the parliament voting to ban Russian as an official language), resistance arose to the coup regime in the east and south. In Crimea, voters opted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a process supported by Russian troops stationed in Crimea under a prior agreement with Ukraine’s government.
There was no Russian “invasion,” as the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets claimed. The Russian troops were already in Crimea assigned to Russia’s historic naval base at Sebastopol. Putin agreed to Crimea’s annexation partly out of fear that the naval base would otherwise fall into NATO’s hands and pose a strategic threat to Russia.
But the key point regarding Krugman’s speculation about Putin provoking the crisis so he could seize territory or distract Russians from economic troubles is that Putin only annexed Crimea because of the ouster of Yanukovych. If Yanukovych had not been overthrown, there is no reason to think that Putin would have done anything regarding Crimea or Ukraine.
It’s also true that the Feb. 22 coup was partly engineered by the U.S. government led by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and who is married to arch-neocon Robert Kagan, one of the intellectual authors of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Before the Ukraine coup, Nuland, was caught in a phone conversation plotting with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine about who should replace Yanukovych. After the coup, her choice “Yats” – or Arseniy Yatsenyuk – emerged as the new prime minister and then shepherded through the IMF austerity plan.
But resistance to Kiev’s new rulers soon emerged in eastern Ukraine, which had been Yanukovych’s political base and stood to lose the most from Ukraine’s economic orientation toward Europe and reduced economic ties to Russia. Yet, instead of recognizing these understandable concerns of the eastern Ukrainians, the Western media portrayed the ethnic Russians as simply Putin’s pawns with no minds of their own.
I’m told that Moscow has provided some covert support for the eastern Ukrainian rebels (mostly light weapons), but that Putin has favored a political settlement (similar to what has been proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel). The deal would grant eastern Ukraine more autonomy and accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in exchange for peace in the east and some financial support from Russia for the Kiev government.
Yet, whatever anyone thinks of Putin or the proposed peace deal, it is simply inaccurate to assert a narrative claiming that Putin provoked the current crisis in Ukraine. The opposite is much closer to the truth. It is thus misguided for Krugman or anyone else to extrapolate from this false premise to deduce Putin’s “motives.”
Krugman, who has been one of the few rational voices on issues of global economics in recent years, should know better than anyone how a mistaken “group think” can create assumptions that will lead inevitably to wrongheaded conclusions.
My Synopsis:
Parry uses this article to take Paul Krugman to task for falling into the "group think" mentality detailed in the previous link. Because Krugman accepts as "fact" that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis, he believes the motive must have been to distract Russians from their economic problems at home. Parry counters by running through the chronology of the crisis, starting with the IMF austerity demands on the Ukraine, Putin's $15 billion aid offer to Yanukovych, and the subsequent neo-Nazi fueled putsch on February 22. The new regime, led by neo-con Nuland's choice Yatsenyuk, not only ushered in IMF austerity, but took provocative steps against ethnic Russians, including banning Russian as an official language. In response, MSM has continually portrayed ethnic Russians as Putin's pawns with no minds of their own. This is part and parcel of the entire "group think" which Krugman, normally quite rational on issues of global economics, has fallen into.
My Analysis:
Yet again, we have an example of Parry a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. No defense of Putin to be found.Text from your 5th link:Twisting Putin’s Words on Ukraine
May 2, 2014
Exclusive: Anti-Russian bias pervades the mainstream U.S. media in the Ukraine crisis, reflected in word choices – “pro-democracy” for U.S.-favored protesters in Kiev, “terrorists” for disfavored eastern Ukrainians – but also in how the narrative is shaped by false summaries, as Robert Parry explains.
By Robert Parry
Sometimes dealing with the waves of U.S. media propaganda on the Ukraine crisis feels like the proverbial Dutch boy putting his fingers in the dike. The flood of deeply prejudiced anti-Russian “group think” extends across the entire media waterfront – from left to right – and it often seems hopeless correcting each individual falsehood.
The problem is made worse by the fact that the New York Times, the traditional newspaper of record, has stood out as one of the most egregious offenders of the principles of journalism. Repeatedly, the Times has run anti-Russian stories that lack evidence or are just flat wrong.
Among the flat-wrong stories was the Times’ big front-page scoop on photos that purportedly showed Russian troops inside eastern Ukraine, but the story had to be retracted two days later when it turned out that a key photo – allegedly of several men “clearly” in Russia before they later turned up in Ukraine – was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the story’s premise.
The other type of Times’ propaganda – making assertions without evidence – appeared in another front-page story about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s phantom wealth ($40 billion to $70 billion, the Times speculated) without presenting a shred of hard evidence beyond what looked like a pricy watch on his wrist.
However, in some ways, the worst of the New York Times reporting has been its slanted and erroneous summations of the Ukraine narrative. For instance, immediately after the violent coup overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych (from Feb. 20-22), it was reported that among the 80 people killed were more than a dozen police officers.
But, as the pro-coup sympathies hardened inside the Times, the storyline changed to: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.” [NYT, March 5]
Both the dead police and the murky circumstances surrounding the sniper fire that inflicted many of the casualties simply disappeared from the Times’ narrative. It became flat fact: evil “pro-Yanukovych” police gunned down innocent “pro-democracy” demonstrators. Also consigned to the memory hole was the key role played by well-organized neo-Nazi militias that led the final assaults on the police.
More recently, the Times’ Ukraine summary has challenged Putin’s denials that Russian special forces are operating in eastern Ukraine (the point that the bogus photo scoop was supposed to prove). So, now whenever Putin’s denial is noted, the Times contradicts him by claiming that he made the same denial about Crimea, that Russian troops weren’t involved, and then reversed himself later.
For instance, in Friday’s editions, the Times wrote: “Mr. Putin has said there are no Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. He made similar claims during the annexation of Crimea, however, and then later acknowledged the existence of a Russian operation.”
But that simply isn’t true. The Russians never denied having troops in Crimea, since that’s where they maintain a major Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol and had a contractual agreement with Ukraine allowing the presence of up to 25,000 troops. At the time of the Feb. 22 coup, Russia had about 16,000 troops in Crimea and that was well known as Crimea began to break away from the post-coup regime in Kiev.
On March 4, the Associated Press reported that “the new Ukrainian leadership that deposed the pro-Russian Yanukovych … has accused Moscow of a military invasion in Crimea. The Kremlin, which does not recognize the new Ukrainian leadership, insists it made the move in order to protect Russian installations in Ukraine and its citizens living there.
“On Tuesday, Russian troops who had taken control of the Belbek air base in the hotly contest[ed] Crimea region fired warning shots into the air as around 300 Ukrainian soldiers, who previously manned the airfield, demanded their jobs back. …
“The shots reflected tensions running high in the Black Sea peninsula since Russian troops – estimated by Ukrainian authorities to be 16,000 strong -tightened their grip over the weekend on the Crimean peninsula, where Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet is based.
“Ukraine has accused Russia of violating a bilateral agreement on conditions of a Russian lease of a naval base in Crimea that restricts troop movements, but Russia has argued that it was acting within the limits set by the deal.
“Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said Monday [March 3] at the U.N. Security Council that Russia was entitled to deploy up to 25,000 troops in Crimea under the agreement. Churkin didn’t specify how many Russian troops are now stationed in Crimea, but said that ‘they are acting in a way they consider necessary to protect their facilities and prevent extremist actions.’”
(snip)
A Formal Speech
Two days after a hastily called referendum, which recorded a 96 percent vote in favor of seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia, Putin returned to the issue of Russian involvement in Crimea, a territory that first became part of Russia in the 1700s.
On March 18 in a formal speech to the Russian Federation, Putin justified Crimea’s desire to escape the control of the coup regime in Kiev, saying: “Those who opposed the [Feb. 22] coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities.
“Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.”
Again, Putin was not claiming that the Russian government had no involvement in Crimea. He was, in contrast, confirming that it was involved. He continued:
“First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law. Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never.
“Secondly, and most importantly – what exactly are we violating? True, the President of the Russian Federation [Putin] received permission from the Upper House of Parliament to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine. However, strictly speaking, nobody has acted on this permission yet. Russia’s Armed Forces never entered Crimea; they were there already in line with an international agreement.
“True, we did enhance our forces there; however – this is something I would like everyone to hear and know – we did not exceed the personnel limit of our Armed Forces in Crimea, which is set at 25,000, because there was no need to do so.”
However, several weeks later, when Putin reiterated these same points, saying that Russian troops were in Crimea in support of the Crimean people’s right to have a referendum on secession from Ukraine, the New York Times and other U.S. publications began claiming that he had reversed himself and had previously hidden the Russian troop involvement in Crimea.
That was simply bad reporting, which now gets repeated whenever the Times mentions Putin’s denial of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Clearly, there is nothing “similar” between Putin’s previous statements about Crimea and his current ones about eastern Ukraine.
Beyond sloppy reporting, however, something arguably worse is playing out here, since this distortion fits with the pattern of anti-Russian bias and anti-Putin prejudice that has pervaded the “news” coverage at the Times and other major U.S. media outlets.
Rather than show some independence and professionalism, the Times and the rest of the MSM have marched in lock-step with the propaganda pronouncements emanating from the U.S. State Department.
My Synopsis:
Parry gets to the heart of the matter referenced in the 3rd link, MSM's misrepresentation of Putin's position on Russian troops in Crimea. He starts by showing other examples where the New York Times went wrong, such as a front-page scoop purporting to show Russian troops moving inside eastern Ukraine which was retracted two days later, as well as a story about Putin's wealth that contained no hard evidence. The worst reporting was the coup summary, which changed from the initial reporting of 12 police officers dead among 80 people to 80 protestors shot dead by “pro-Yanukovych” police, with neo-Nazi militias disappearing down the memory hole.
But the NY Times keeps trying to sell us on Putin supposedly claiming Russian troops were not in Crimea, then reversing himself. Parry specifies the false charge: the Russians never denied having troops in Crimea, they have a base in Sevastopol where they are allowed up to 25,000 troops. In a March 4 AP article, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, reiterated this arrangement but wasn't sure how many troops were in Crimea at that time. That same day, Putin held a press conference where he specified that troops were there at the time of the tension in Crimea, though Parry does point out that "Putin did dissemble on one point" when a reporter asked of some people wearing uniforms resembling the Russian Army uniform and Putin replied, “those were local self-defense units.”
After the referendum, Putin spoke formally on March 18 about the repression Russian-speaking people faced in Crimea and Sevastopol in the wake of the February 22 putsch and confirmed the involvement of the Russian government. After chiding the US for being "better late than never" in acknowledging the existence of international law, Putin spelled out that the agreement for Armed Forces in Crimea set at 25,000 troops was never exceeded. But several weeks later, the New York Times and the rest of MSM in lock-step with State Department propaganda began saying Putin reversed himself when he reiterated those same points.
My Analysis:
Yet again, Parry a)spells out what's really happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizes US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Yet again, no defense. We even have a moment where Parry chides Putin for concealing the truth. Must be a lovers' spat.Text from your 6th link:WPost’s Anti-Putin ‘Group Think’
March 20, 2014
Exclusive: In a stunning display of “group think,” virtually the entire Washington Post editorial section was devoted to denunciations of Russian President Putin, especially his “crazy” belief that the U.S. government often ignores international law and applies “the rule of the gun,” reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Not since Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Secretary of State Colin Powell wowed the world with his slam-dunk speech “proving” that Iraq was hiding WMD, has the Washington Post’s editorial section shown this unity of “group think.” On Thursday, the Post presented a solid phalanx of denunciations directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Across the two editorial pages, Post writers and columnists stood, shoulder to shoulder, beating their chests about Putin as evil, mad or both. “A dangerous Russian doctrine,” screamed the lead editorial. “An elemental fear” was the headline of a George F. Will column. “Making Russia pay” was the goal of Sen. Marco Rubio’s opinion article. “Putin’s fantasy world” was explored by editorialist Charles Lane.
The one slightly out-of-step pundit was E.J. Dionne Jr. whose column – ”Can Crimea bring us together?” – agreed on Putin’s dastardly behavior but added the discordant note that most Americans weren’t onboard and didn’t want their government to “get too involved” in the dispute over Ukraine and Crimea.
All the other opinion articles marched in lockstep to the theme that Putin was crazy and delusional. The Post’s lead editorial favorably quoted Secretary of State John Kerry as saying that Putin’s speech about the Ukraine crisis “just didn’t jibe with reality.”
This was the same John Kerry, who earlier in the Ukraine crisis, denounced Putin’s intervention in Crimea by declaring that “you just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.” Kerry, of course, voted in 2002 to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq in pursuit of hidden WMD stockpiles that didn’t exist.
However, what now should be painfully clear is that since almost no one in Official Washington paid any serious price for following neocon propaganda into the Iraq War a decade ago, the same patterns continue to assert and reassert themselves in other crises a decade or more later, often executed by the same people.
The Washington Post’s editorial page is run by literally the same people who ran it when all those Post’s opinion leaders were standing with the estimable Colin Powell on Feb. 6, 2003, and asserting the existence of Iraq’s WMD as “flat fact.” Fred Hiatt is still the editorial-page editor and Jackson Diehl is still his deputy.
(snip)
Offending the Neocons
Putin also has helped President Barack Obama extricate the United States from dangerous situations in Syria and Iran – while the neocons and Washington Post’s editorialists were pounding the drums for more confrontation and war.
And, therein may lie the problem for Putin. He has become a major impediment to the grand neocon vision of “regime change” across the Middle East in any country considered hostile to Israel. That vision was disrupted by the disaster that the American people confronted in the Iraq War, but the vision remains.
Putin also is an obstacle to the even grander vision of global “full-spectrum dominance,” a concept developed by neocons in the two Bush administrations, the theory that the United States should prevent any geopolitical rival from ever emerging again. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Grim Vision.”]
Thus, Putin must be portrayed as unstable and dangerous even though much of his account of the Ukraine crisis fits with what many on-the-ground reporters observed in real time. Indeed, many of the key facts are not in serious dispute despite the distortions and omissions that have permeated the U.S. mainstream press.
For instance, there’s no factual dispute that Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s democratically elected president. Nor is there an argument about him having agreed to a European-negotiated deal on Feb. 21, which included him surrendering much of his power and moving up elections so he could be voted out of office.
After that agreement – and Yanukovych’s order to pull back the police in the face of violent street demonstrations – it was widely reported that neo-Nazi militias spearheaded the Feb. 22 coup d’etat which forced Yanukovych to flee. And no one is credibly saying Ukraine’s constitutional rules were followed when a rump parliament stripped him of the presidency.
Nor is there any serious doubt that the people of Crimea, which has historically been part of Russia, voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to separate from the coup regime now governing Ukraine. The difference between exit polls and the official results was 93 percent in the exit polls and 96 percent in the final tally.
Only in the neocon-dominated and propaganda-soaked U.S. news media is this factual narrative in dispute – and mostly by ignoring or ridiculing it.
American Hypocrisy
However, when Putin politely takes note of these realities, he is deemed by the Washington Post’s editorialists to be a madman. To hammer that point, the Post turned to one of its longtime neocon writers, Charles Lane, known for his skills at bending reality into whatever shape is needed.
In his column, Lane not only denied the reality of modern American interventionism but cleverly accused Putin of doing what Lane was actually doing, twisting the truth.
“Putin presented a legal and historical argument so tendentious and so logically tangled – so unappealing to anyone but Russian nationalists such as those who packed the Kremlin to applaud him – that it seemed intended less to refute contrary arguments than to bury them under a rhetorical avalanche,” Lane wrote.
Lane then suggested that Putin must be delusional. “The biggest problem with this cover story is that Putin may actually believe it,” Lane wrote.
Lane also was offended that – when Putin later spoke to a crowd in Red Square – he concluded his remarks by saying “Long live Russia!” But why that is so objectionable coming from a Russian politician is hard to fathom. President Obama – and other U.S. politicians – routinely close their remarks with the words, “God bless the United States of America!”
But double standards have always been part of Charles Lane’s repertoire, at least since I knew him as a fellow correspondent for Newsweek in the late 1980s. Before Lane arrived at the magazine, Newsweek had distinguished itself with some quality reporting that belied the Reagan administration’s propaganda themes in Central America.
That, however, upset Newsweek’s executive editor Maynard Parker, who was a strong supporter of U.S. interventionism and sympathized with President Ronald Reagan’s aggressive policies in Central America. So, a shake-up was ordered of Newsweek’s Central America staff.
To give Parker the more supportive coverage he wanted, Lane was brought onboard and dispatched to replace experienced reporters in Central America. Lane soon began getting Newsweek’s field coverage in line with Reagan’s propaganda themes.
But I kept messing up the desired harmony by debunking these stories from Washington. This dynamic was unusual since it’s more typical for reporters in the field to challenge the U.S. government’s propaganda while journalists tied to the insular world of Washington tend to be seduced by access and to endorse the official line.
But the situation at Newsweek was reversed. Lane pushed the propaganda themes that he was fed from the U.S. embassies in Central America and I challenged them with my reporting in Washington. The situation led Lane to seek me out during one of his visits to Washington.
We had lunch at Scholl’s cafeteria near Newsweek’s Washington office on Pennsylvania Avenue. As we sat down, Lane turned to me and, rather defensively, accused me of viewing him as “an embassy boy,” i.e. someone who carried propaganda water for the U.S. embassies.
I was a bit nonplussed since I had never exactly put it that way, but it wasn’t far from what I actually thought. I responded by trying to avoid any pejorative phrasing but stressing my concern that we shouldn’t let the Reagan administration get away with misleading the American people – and Newsweek’s readers.
As it turned out, however, I was on the losing side of that debate. Lane had the support of executive editor Parker, who favored an aggressive application of U.S. power abroad and didn’t like his reporters undermining those efforts. Like some other young journalists of that era, Lane either shared that world view or knew what was needed to build his career.
Lane did succeed in making a profitable career for himself. He scored high-profile gigs as the editor of the neocon New Republic (though his tenure was tarnished by the Stephen Glass fabrication scandal) and as a regular guest on Fox News. He’s also found steady employment as an editorialist for the Washington Post.
Now, Lane and other Post columnists have made it clear who Official Washington’s new villain is and who must be loudly hissed: Vladimir Putin
My Synopsis:
Parry writes another piece about "group think" gone wild, with US politicians and pundits reacting to a recent Putin speech as if he were evil, mad, or both. He singles out the Washington Post as being especially hyperbolic in a way they hadn't since Colin Powell "proved" Iraq had WMD, when in fact they did not. No surprise, the same editorial crew that was in charge then, on February 6, 2003, editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt and deputy Jackson Diehl, are still manning the same posts.
Is Putin crazy? Parry quotes a key passage from Putin's speech showing that to the contrary, he is quite insightful regarding the "exceptionalism" of the United States and that US aggression toward non-compliant states has undermined international institutions. That's been an historical reality both during and after the Cold War.
But it is Putin's collaboration with Obama in defusing crises in the Middle East that has neo-cons really pissed at Putin. He is an obstacle to the "full-spectrum dominance" neo-cons advocate to establish geopolitical primacy. So Putin must be portrayed as unstable and dangerous and any inconvenient facts that suggest otherwise must be ignored and ridiculed.
Parry then goes into his personal history with neo-con Washington Post editorialist Charles Lane. After pointing out how Lane projects his own twisting of the truth onto Putin and how hypocritical Lane is for being offended by Putin for doing what US politicians do all the time ("Long live Russia!"-"God Bless America!"), Parry believes this is par for the course ever since he knew Lane at Newsweek. At that time, the late 1980s, executive editor Maynard Parker, a huge supporter of US interventionism and Reagan's Central American policies, brought Lane in to bring Newsweek's coverage more in line with Reagan's propaganda. When Parry continued to write stories debunking the propaganda, Lane called Parry out as an "embassy boy." Unfortunately, Parry ended up on the losing side of the debate as Lane had Parker's support.
My Analysis:
Once more, Parry a)spells out what's really happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizes US foreign policy in the context of Russia. No defense of Putin, unless of course, you really believe that saying Putin isn't crazy is somehow a defense, though I would equate that to your average neo-con saying that I was defending Saddam Hussein when I said he wasn't crazy. Plus, in the context of US post-Cold War exploitation of Russia, he described Putin as having "autocratic faults". Baby, baby, where did our love go?Text from your 7th link:Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine?
September 2, 2014
Exclusive: Official Washington draws the Ukraine crisis in black-and-white colors with Russian President Putin the bad guy and the U.S.-backed leaders in Kiev the good guys. But the reality is much more nuanced, with the American people consistently misled on key facts, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War III – much as it did into World War I a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire U.S. political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats vs. black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.
The original lie behind Official Washington’s latest “group think” was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis in Ukraine as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim the territory of the defunct Soviet Union, including Estonia and other Baltic states. Though not a shred of U.S. intelligence supported this scenario, all the “smart people” of Washington just “knew” it to be true.
Yet, the once-acknowledged – though soon forgotten – reality was that the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons and other hawkish politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine Putin inside Russia.
The plan was even announced by U.S. neocons such as National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman who took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post nearly a year ago to call Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, wrote: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. But even if you choose to ignore Gershman’s clear intent, you would have to concoct a bizarre conspiracy theory to support the conventional wisdom about Putin’s grand plan.
To believe that Putin was indeed the mastermind of the crisis, you would have to think that he somehow arranged to have the EU offer the association agreement last year, then got the International Monetary Fund to attach such draconian “reforms” that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the deal.
Then, Putin had to organize mass demonstrations at Kiev’s Maidan square against Yanukovych while readying neo-Nazi militias to act as the muscle to finally overthrow the elected president and replace him with a regime dominated by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and U.S.-favored technocrats. Next, Putin had to get the new government to take provocative actions against ethnic Russians in the east, including threatening to outlaw Russian as an official language.
And throw into this storyline that Putin – all the while – was acting like he was trying to help Yanukovych defuse the crisis and even acquiesced to Yanukovych agreeing on Feb. 21 to accept an agreement brokered by three European countries calling for early Ukrainian elections that could vote him out of office. Instead, Putin was supposedly ordering neo-Nazi militias to oust Yanukovych in a Feb. 22 putsch, all the better to create the current crisis.
While such a fanciful scenario would make the most extreme conspiracy theorist blush, this narrative was embraced by prominent U.S. politicians, including ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and “journalists” from the New York Times to CNN. They all agreed that Putin was a madman on a mission of unchecked aggression against his neighbors with the goal of reconstituting the Russian Empire. Clinton even compared him to Adolf Hitler.
This founding false narrative was then embroidered by a consistent pattern of distorted U.S. reporting as the crisis unfolded. Indeed, for the past eight months, we have seen arguably the most one-sided coverage of a major international crisis in memory, although there were other crazed MSM stampedes, such as Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb project for most of the past decade, Libya’s “humanitarian crisis” of 2011, and Syria’s sarin gas attack in 2013.
But the hysteria over Ukraine – with U.S. officials and editorialists now trying to rally a NATO military response to Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine – raises the prospect of a nuclear confrontation that could end all life on the planet.
(snip)
Blinded to Neo-Nazis
In another example, the Post and other mainstream U.S. outlets have ridiculed the idea that neo-Nazis played any significant role in the putsch that ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 or in the Kiev regime’s brutal offensive against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.
However, occasionally, the inconvenient truth has slipped through. For instance, shortly after the February coup, the BBC described how the neo-Nazis spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive Yanukovych from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the regime that was cobbled together in the coup’s aftermath.
When ethnic Russians in the south and east resisted the edicts from the new powers in Kiev, some neo-Nazi militias were incorporated into the National Guard and dispatched to the front lines as storm troopers eager to fight and kill people whom some considered “Untermenschen” or sub-human.
Even the New York Times, which has been among the most egregious violators of journalistic ethics in covering the Ukraine crisis, took note of Kiev’s neo-Nazi militias carrying Nazi banners while leading attacks on eastern cities – albeit with this embarrassing reality consigned to the last three paragraphs of a long Times story on a different topic. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War.”]
Later, the conservative London Telegraph wrote a much more detailed story about how the Kiev regime had consciously recruited these dedicated storm troopers, who carried the Wolfsangel symbol favored by Hitler’s SS, to lead street fighting in eastern cities that were first softened up by army artillery. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
You might think that unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II would be a big story – given how much coverage is given to far less significant eruptions of neo-Nazi sentiment in Europe – but this ugly reality in Ukraine disappeared quickly into the U.S. media’s memory hole. It didn’t fit the preferred good guy/bad guy narrative, with the Kiev regime the good guys and Putin the bad guy.
Now, the Washington Post has gone a step further dismissing Putin’s reference to the nasty violence inflicted by Kiev’s neo-Nazi battalions as part of Putin’s “Big Lie.” The Post is telling its readers that any reference to these neo-Nazis is just a “fantasy.”
Even more disturbing, the mainstream U.S. news media and Washington’s entire political class continue to ignore the Kiev government’s killing of thousands of ethnic Russians, including children and other non-combatants. The “responsibility to protect” crowd has suddenly lost its voice. Or, all the deaths are somehow blamed on Putin for supposedly having provoked the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
A Mysterious ‘Invasion’
And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by NATO hardliners and the MSM.
While I’m told that Russia did provide some light weapons to the rebels early in the struggle so they could defend themselves and their territory – and a number of Russian nationalists have crossed the border to join the fight – the claims of an overt “invasion” with tanks, artillery and truck convoys have been backed up by scant intelligence.
One former U.S. intelligence official who has examined the evidence said the intelligence to support the claims of a significant Russian invasion amounted to “virtually nothing.” Instead, it appears that the ethnic Russian rebels may have evolved into a more effective fighting force than many in the West thought. They are, after all, fighting on their home turf for their futures.
Concerned about the latest rush to judgment about the “invasion,” the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts, took the unusual step of sending a memo to German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of a possible replay of the false claims that led to the Iraq War.
“You need to know,” the group wrote, “that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”
But these doubts and concerns are not reflected in the Post’s editorial or other MSM accounts of the dangerous Ukraine crisis. Indeed, Americans who rely on these powerful news outlets for their information are as sheltered from reality as anyone living in a totalitarian society.
My Synopsis:
Parry debunks the false narrative of white hats vs. black hats in the US political/media structure over the Ukraine by pointing out the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons such as NED President Carl Gershman called the Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important step toward toppling Putin. Since Putin was the target of this initiative, Parry elaborates on how ludicrous it would be for Putin to be the mastermind of the crisis: he'd have to have arrange the EU offer and the subsequent IMF austerity, then organize the demonstrations against Yanukovych while readying neo-Nazi militias to act as the muscle to overthrow him, then get the new government to bully ethnic Russians, culminating in the referendum. Yet this narrative has seemingly been embraced by US MSM and politicians painting Putin as a madman, a consistent false narrative among this gang going back to Iraq circa 2002-2003.
This madness hit a new high in a September 1 Washington Post editorial which told the "Big Lie" through accusing Putin of telling the "Big Lie." What was the "Big Lie" WaPo says Putin is fabricating? That the forces backing Ukraine's government are neo-Nazis. Is that a lie? Parry cites the BBC describing how the neo-Nazis spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive Yanukovych from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the new regime. Even the NY Times slipped in a story about Kiev’s neo-Nazi militias carrying Nazi banners while leading attacks on eastern cities. Finally, Parry cites the conservative London Telegraph's detailed story on how the new regime consciously recruited these dedicated storm troopers, who carried the Wolfsangel symbol favored by Hitler’s SS, to lead street fighting in eastern cities. But because these inconvenient facts don't fit into MSM's white hat/black hat narrative, they get flushed down the memory hole.
Finally, Parry addresses the alleged "invasion" of Ukraine by Russia. While Russia did provide weapons to rebels and there were Russian nationalists crossing the border to join the fight, the claims of an overt invasion did not have the intelligence to back it up. In fact, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity sent a memo to German Chancellor Angela Merkel comparing it to the false claims 12 years ago that lead to war in Iraq.
My Analysis:
The entire opening paragraph, where Parry slams the binary logic of "black-and-white colors with Russian President Putin the bad guy and the U.S.-backed leaders in Kiev the good guys. But the reality is much more nuanced" should close the case for anyone still on the fence wondering if Parry really is defending Putin. If he's spelling out the nuance, then by definition he is not putting a white hat on Putin and calling him a good guy. What Parry is doing, once again, is a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Defense my ass.Text from your 8th link: Putin or Kerry: Who’s Delusional?
March 5, 2014
Exclusive: Official Washington and its compliant mainstream news media operate with a convenient situational ethics when it comes to the principles of international law and non-intervention in sovereign states. The rules apply only when they’re convenient, explains Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
When Secretary of State John Kerry denounces Russia’s intervention in Crimea by declaring “It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior,” you might expect that the next line in a serious newspaper would note Kerry’s breathtaking hypocrisy.
But not if you were reading the New York Times on Wednesday, or for that matter the Washington Post or virtually any mainstream U.S. newspaper or watching a broadcast outlet.
Yet, look what happens when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin does what the U.S. news media should do, i.e. point out that “It’s necessary to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, where they acted either without any sanction from the U.N. Security Council or distorted the content of these resolutions, as it happened in Libya. There, as you know, only the right to create a no-fly zone for government aircraft was authorized, and it all ended in the bombing and participation of special forces in group operations.”
Despite the undeniable accuracy of Putin’s observation, he was promptly deemed to have “lost touch with reality,” according to a Washington Post’s editorial, which called his press conference “rambling” and a “bizarre performance” in which his words have “become indistinguishable from the propaganda of his state television network.”
You get the point. If someone notes the disturbing U.S. history of military interventions or describes the troubling narrative behind the “democratic” coup in Ukraine – spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias who overthrew a duly elected president – you are dismissed as crazy.
Revised Narrative
Yet, it has been the Post, Times and other U.S. news outlets which have led the way in developing a propaganda narrative at odds with the known reality. For instance, the violent February clashes in Kiev are now typically described as the Ukrainian police having killed some 80 protesters, though the original reporting had that death toll including 13 policemen and the fact that neo-Nazi militias were responsible for much of the violence, from hurling firebombs to shooting firearms.
That history is already fast disappearing as we saw in a typical New York Times report on Wednesday, which reported: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”
Those revised “facts” better fit the preferred narrative of innocent and peaceful demonstrators being set upon by thuggish police without provocation. But that isn’t what the original reporting revealed. Either the New York Times should explain how the earlier reporting was wrong or it should respect the more nuanced reality.
To do so, however, would undercut the desired narrative. So, it’s better to simply accuse anyone with a functioning memory of being “delusional.” The same with anyone who mentions the stunning hypocrisy of the U.S. government suddenly finding international law inviolable.
The history of the United States crossing borders to overthrow governments or to seize resources is a long and sordid one. Even after World War II and the establishment of the Nuremberg principles against “aggressive war,” the U.S. government has routinely violated those rules, sometimes unilaterally and sometimes by distorting the clear meaning of U.N. resolutions, as Putin noted.
(snip)
More Recent Violations
Secretary Kerry might argue that Grenada was so Twentieth Century, along with such events as the Vietnam War, the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91, which involved the slaughter of Iraqi soldiers and civilians even after the Iraqi government agreed to withdraw from Kuwait in a deal negotiated by then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
However, if one were to take up Secretary Kerry’s challenge and just look at the Twenty-first Century and “G-8, major-nation behavior,” which would include the United States and its major European allies, you’d still have a substantial list of U.S. violations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and others. France and Great Britain, two other G-8 countries, have engaged in military interventions as well, including France in Mali and other African conflicts.
On Aug. 30, 2013, Secretary Kerry himself gave a belligerent speech justifying U.S. military action against Syria over murky accounts of a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, a war that was only averted by Putin’s diplomatic efforts in convincing President Bashar al-Assad to agree to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons.
Plus, throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has declared, over and over, that “all options are on the table” regarding Iran’s nuclear program, a clear threat of another U.S. bombing campaign, another crisis that Putin has helped tamp down by assisting in getting Iran to the bargaining table.
Indeed, it appears that one reason why Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover, has been so aggressive in trying to exacerbate the Ukraine crisis was as a form of neocon payback for Putin’s defusing the confrontations with Syria and Iran, when Official Washington’s still-influential neocons were eager for more violence and “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
In virtually all these threatened or actual U.S. military assaults on sovereign nations, the major U.S. news media has been enthusiastically onboard. Indeed, the Washington Post and the New York Times played key roles in manufacturing public consent for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the false pretext of eliminating its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
By promoting dubious and false allegations, the Post and Times also have helped lay the groundwork for potential U.S. wars against Iran and Syria, including the Times making the bogus claim that the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack east of Damascus was launched by Syrian government forces northwest of the city. Months later, the Times grudgingly admitted that its reporting, which helped bring the U.S. to the brink of another war, was contradicted by the fact that the Sarin-laden missile had a much more limited range. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mistaken Guns of Last August.”]
However, when Russia has a much more understandable case for intervention – an incipient civil war on its border that involves clear U.S. interference, the overthrow of an elected president and the participation of neo-Nazi militias – the U.S. government and its compliant mainstream media lock arms in outrage.
My Synopsis:
In this piece, Parry calls out John Kerry's hypocrisy, noting how Kerry calls out Russia's intervention in Crimea as being "not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve." Yet when Putin details American hypocrisy extending back to the invasion of Iraq without sanction from the UN Security Council, US MSM reacts by saying he has "lost touch with reality."
Parry then recounts how the New York Times revised the narrative of the February clashes in Kiev. Where the original reporting had 13 policemen among the 80 dead with neo-Nazi militias responsible for much of the violence, now we only hear that 80 protestors were killed by policemen. Anyone who tries to correct them on this point, or how hypocritical the US government has been on international law, is labeled delusional.
On the subject of violating international law and what propaganda goes into making it look good, Parry goes back to the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Using the flimsy pretext that the leftist government was endangering American students, Reagan launched an invasion that killed 70 people. Parry was reporting on the invasion for AP and co-wrote an article about abuses committed by American troops, which was spiked by his editors. Later he discovered that Walter Raymond Jr., a top CIA expert in propaganda and psychological operations who was overseeing a global psy-op structure as part of Reagan's NSC, put his “Happy Grenada theme” stamp of approval on a P.R. campaign by David Gergen and Michael Deaver to impress Americans on how wonderful the invasion was.
Parry returns to the subject of Kerry's hypocrisy, both in regard to US international law flouting during the 21st century, and personally with his bellicose speech on August 30, 2013 that justified a war with Syria that fortunately did not happen. The US MSM was more than willing to false allegations he was promoting to lay the groundwork for potential wars with Syria and Iran. Grudgingly they admitted that their "evidence" was contradicted by facts, but have yet to do so where an elected president was overthrown with the participation of neo-Nazi militias.
My Analysis:
This time, Parry hits the trifecta by a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine, b)pointing out that Putin was instrumental in preventing Obama from invading Syria, and c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Once more, gotta give Parry points for consistency, no defense of Putin to be found. My Synopsis and Analysis from your 9th link: (The 1/10th of the links I hadn't read over a month ago.)
Oh my fucking god. This is not even a real goddamn link! Did you even bother to fucking read this or any of the links you posted?! It's just a tag archive of Consortium News for multiple stories on Vladimir Putin, including three of the links you already linked to on the first goddamn page! How fucking slothful can you get?! Text from your 10th link: (Your link was broken and reverted to the fucking Putin tag archive. I fixed it for the sake of a thorough examination. To quote Frank White, "You're welcome!")
Blaming Russia as ‘Flat Fact’
July 27, 2014
Exclusive: The American rush to judgment blaming ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Putin for the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 continues unabated despite other possible explanations, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
As nuclear-armed America hurtles into a completely avoidable crash with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine, you can now see the dangers of “information warfare” when facts give way to propaganda and the press fails to act as an impartial arbiter.
In this sorry affair, one of the worst offenders of journalistic principles has been the New York Times, generally regarded as America’s premier newspaper. During the Ukraine crisis, the Times has been little more than a propaganda conveyor belt delivering what the U.S. government wants out via shoddy and biased reporting from the likes of Michael R. Gordon and David Herszenhorn.
The Times reached what was arguably a new low on Sunday when it accepted as flat fact the still unproven point of how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down. The Times dropped all attribution despite what appear to be growing – rather than diminishing – doubts about Official Washington’s narrative that Ukrainian rebels shot down the plane by using a powerful Russian-supplied Buk missile battery.
U.S. and Ukrainian government officials began pushing this narrative immediately after the plane went down on July 17 killing 298 people onboard. But the only evidence has been citations of “social media” and the snippet of an intercepted phone call containing possibly confused comments by Ukrainian rebels after the crash, suggesting that some rebels initially believed they had shot the plane down but later reversed that judgment.
A major problem with this evidence is that it assumes the rebels – or for that matter the Ukrainian armed forces – operate with precise command and control when the reality is that the soldiers on both sides are not very professional and function in even a deeper fog of war than might exist in other circumstances.
Missing Images
But an even bigger core problem for the U.S. narrative is that it is virtually inconceivable that American intelligence did not have satellite and other surveillance on eastern Ukraine at the time of the shoot-down. Yet the U.S. government has been unable (or unwilling) to supply a single piece of imagery showing the Russians supplying a Buk anti-aircraft missile battery to the rebels; the rebels transporting the missiles around eastern Ukraine; the rebels firing the fateful missile that allegedly brought down the Malaysian airliner; or the rebels then returning the missiles to Russia.
To accept Official Washington’s certainty about what it “knows” happened, you would have to believe that American spy satellites – considered the best in the world – could not detect 16-feet-tall missiles during their odyssey around Russia and eastern Ukraine. If that is indeed the case, the U.S. taxpayers should demand their billions upon billions of dollars back.
However, the failure of U.S. intelligence to release its satellite images of Buk missile batteries in eastern Ukraine is the “dog-not-barking” evidence that this crucial evidence to support the U.S. government’s allegations doesn’t exist. Can anyone believe that if U.S. satellite images showed the missiles crossing the border, being deployed by the rebels and then returning to Russia, that those images would not have been immediately declassified and shown to the world? In this case, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence – absence of U.S. evidence.
The U.S. government’s case also must overcome public remarks by senior U.S. military personnel at variance with the Obama administration’s claims of certainty. For instance, the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported last Saturday that Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, U.S. commander of NATO forces in Europe, said last month that “We have not seen any of the [Russian] air-defense vehicles across the border yet.”
Whitlock also reported that “Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said defense officials could not point to specific evidence that an SA-11 [Buk] surface-to-air missile system had been transported from Russia into eastern Ukraine.”
There’s also the possibility that a Ukrainian government missile – either from its own Buk missile batteries fired from the ground or from a warplane in the sky – brought down the Malaysian plane. I was told by one source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts that some satellite images suggest that the missile battery was under the control of Ukrainian government troops but that the conclusion was not definitive.
Plus, there were reports from eyewitnesses in the area of the crash that at least one Ukrainian jet fighter closed on the civilian plane shortly before it went down. The Russian government also has cited radar data supposedly showing Ukrainian fighters in the vicinity.
Need for a Real Inquiry
What all this means is that a serious and impartial investigation is needed to determine who was at fault and to apportion accountability. But that inquiry is still underway with no formal conclusions.
So, in terms of journalistic professionalism, a news organization should treat the mystery of who shot down Flight 17 with doubt. Surely, no serious journalist would jump to the conclusion based on the dubious claims made by one side in a dispute while the other side is adamant in its denials, especially with the stakes so high in a tense confrontation between two nuclear powers.
But that is exactly what the Times did in describing new U.S. plans to escalate the confrontation by possibly supplying tactical intelligence to the Ukrainian army so it can more effectively wage war against eastern Ukrainian rebels.
On Sunday, the Times wrote: “At the core of the debate, said several [U.S.] officials — who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy deliberations are still in progress — is whether the American goal should be simply to shore up a Ukrainian government reeling from the separatist attacks, or to send a stern message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin by aggressively helping Ukraine target the missiles Russia has provided. Those missiles have taken down at least five aircraft in the past 10 days, including Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.” [Emphasis added.]
The link provided by the Times’ online version of the story connects to an earlier Times’ story that attributed the accusations blaming Russia to U.S. “officials.” But this new story drops that attribution and simply accepts the claims as flat fact.
The danger of American “information warfare” that treats every development in the Ukraine crisis as an opportunity to blame Putin and ratchet up tensions with Russia has been apparent since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis – as has been the clear anti-Russian bias of the Times and virtually every other outlet of the mainstream U.S. news media. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Will Ukraine Be NYT’s Waterloo?”]
Since the start of the crisis last year, U.S. officials and American-funded non-governmental organizations have not only pushed a one-sided story but have been pushing a dangerous agenda, seeking to create a collision between the United States and Russia and, more personally, between President Barack Obama and President Putin.
The vehicle for this head-on collision between Russia and the United States was the internal political disagreement in Ukraine over whether elected President Viktor Yanukovych should have accepted harsh International Monetary Fund austerity demands as the price for associating with the European Union or agree to a more generous offer from Russia.
Angered last September when Putin helped Obama avert a planned U.S. bombing campaign against Syria, American neocons were at the forefront of this strategy. Their principal need was to destroy the Putin-Obama collaboration, which also was instrumental in achieving a breakthrough on the Iran nuclear dispute (while the neocons were hoping that the U.S. military might bomb Iran, too).
So, on Sept. 26, 2013, Carl Gershman, a leading neocon and longtime president of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed page of the neocon-flagship Washington Post to urge the U.S. government to push European “free trade” agreements on Ukraine and other former Soviet states and thus counter Moscow’s efforts to maintain close relations with those countries.
The ultimate goal, according to Gershman, was isolating and possibly toppling Putin in Russia with Ukraine the key piece on this global chessboard. “Ukraine is the biggest prize,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
To give the United States more leverage inside Ukraine, Gershman’s NED paid for scores of projects, including training “activists” and supporting “journalists.” Rather than let the Ukrainian political process sort out this disagreement, U.S. officials, such as neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, also intervened to encourage increasingly disruptive demonstrations seeking to overthrow Yanukovych when he opted for the Russian deal over the EU-IMF offer.
Though much of the ensuing violence was instigated by neo-Nazi militias that had moved to the front of the anti-Yanukovych protests, the U.S. government and its complicit news media blamed every act of violence on Yanukovych and the police, including a still mysterious sniper attack that left both protesters and police dead.
On Feb. 21, Yanukovych denied ordering any shootings and tried to stem the violence by signing an agreement brokered by three European nations to reduce his powers and hold early elections so he could be voted out of office. He also complied with a demand from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back Ukrainian police. Then, the trap sprang shut.
Neo-Nazi militias overran government buildings and forced Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives. The State Department quickly endorsed the coup regime – hastily formed by the remnants of the parliament – as “legitimate.” Besides passing bills offensive to ethnic Russians in the east, one of the parliament’s top priorities was to enact the IMF austerity plan.
White Hats/Black Hats
Though the major U.S. news media was aware of these facts – and indeed you could sometimes detect the reality by reading between the lines of dispatches from the field – the overriding U.S. narrative was that the coup-makers were the “white hats” and Yanukovych along with Putin were the “black hats.” Across the U.S. media, Putin was mocked for riding on a horse shirtless and other indiscretions. For the U.S. media, it was all lots of fun, as was the idea of reprising the Cold War with Moscow.
When the people of Crimea – many of whom were ethnic Russians – voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. media declared the move a Russian “invasion” although the Russian troops were already in Ukraine as part of an agreement with previous Ukrainian governments.
Every development that could be hyped was hyped. There was virtually no nuance in the news reporting, a lack of professionalism led by the New York Times. Yet, the solution to the crisis was always relatively obvious: a federalized system that would allow the ethnic Russians in the east a measure of self-governance and permit Ukraine to have cordial economic relations with both the EU and Russia.
But replacement President Petro Poroshenko – elected when a secession fight was already underway in the east – refused to negotiate with the ethnic Russian rebels who had rejected the ouster of Yanukovych. Sensing enough political support inside the U.S. government, Poroshenko opted for a military solution.
It was in that context of a massive Ukrainian government assault on the east that Russia stepped up its military assistance to the beleaguered rebels, including the apparent provision of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to fend off Kiev’s air superiority. The rebels did succeed in shooting down some Ukrainian warplanes flying at altitudes far below the 33,000 feet of the Malaysia Airlines plane.
For a plane at that height to be shot down required a more powerful system, like the Buk anti-aircraft batteries or an air-to-air missile fired by a fighter jet. Which brings us to the mystery of what happened on the afternoon of July 17 and why it is so important to let a serious investigation evaluate all the available evidence and not to have a rush to judgment.
But the idea of doing an investigation first and drawing conclusions second is a concept that, apparently, neither the U.S. government nor the New York Times accepts. They would prefer to start with the conclusion and then make a serious investigation irrelevant, one more casualty of information warfare.
My Synopsis:
Parry wrote this piece at the outset of the MA-17 shoot-down tragedy 10 days earlier. He bemoans the propaganda of the New York Times, who have already rendered their guilty verdict before all the evidence has arrived. With only "social media" citations and a snippet of a phone call between confused Ukrainian rebels after the crash, the NY Times argues a closed case against them.
The most glaring inconsistency Parry points out is that while it is inconceivable that US intelligence did not have satellite and other surveillance on eastern Ukraine at the time of the shoot-down, the US government refuses to release any image that might incriminate the Russians or rebels. Why?! If they really had the evidence to prove their case (Adlai Stevenson at the UN in October 1962 comes to my mind) it would be immediately declassified and shown to the world. Yet even senior US military personnel have admitted they have no evidence of a surface-to-air missile system transported from Russia to eastern Ukraine. Parry also reports the possibility a Ukrainian government missile may have brought the plane down, though that conclusion is not definitive, as well as reporting eyewitness accounts at least one Ukrainian jetfighter closed in on the Malaysian plane shortly before it went down.
Ultimately, Parry believes there should be a real inquiry to determine the full truth. But rather than treat the mystery of who shot Flight 17 down with doubt, the New York Times stated the shootdown of MA-17 was done by Ukrainian rebels with Russian missiles as a flat fact. Parry details the chronology of the crisis, going back to neo-con NED president Carl Gershman's urging the US government to push European "free trade" agreements on Ukraine to isolate and possibly topple Putin. To gain leverage inside Ukraine, Gershman's NED paid for scores of projects, including training “activists” and supporting “journalists.” US officials like John McCain and Victoria Nuland intervened to encourage demonstrations when Yanukovych opted for the Russian deal over the EU-IMF offer. Then came the neo-Nazi fueled killings, the State Department approved coup, and the enactment of IMF austerity.
In spite of these facts, US MSM steadfastly maintained a white hat/black hat dichotomy. When Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, US MSM declared it a Russian "invasion." Though a federalized system would have been the best solution to the crisis, replacement President Petro Poroshenko opted for a military solution. In this context, Russia supplied the rebels with arms, including shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that shot down some Ukrainian warplanes flying at altitudes far below the 33,000 feet of the Malaysia Airlines plane. So who really shot MA-17 down? We need the kind of investigation the US government and the New York Times just aren't ready for.
My Analysis:
One last time, Parry is a)spelling out what's really happening in the Ukraine and c)criticizing US foreign policy in the context of Russia. Any evidence of a defense of Putin? You're 0 for 10, AD.My Conclusion:Guess what, American Dream? Those new clothes you think you're wearing? It's your fucking birthday suit! You've got
nothing. Every single link that you purport to be Parry posting a defense of Putin either falls into what Project Willow describes as "Parry making a case that the US propaganda machine has put Putin in its target range, centering him and Russia as a major enemy for the US, which is a different matter altogether", or falls into the other categories I have repeated over and over. I think it's obvious to everyone, save your faithful solace, that if you actually had the evidence to back up your claim, you'd not only provide the exact link, you'd copy and paste the very quote in which Parry defends Putin. You don't because he didn't.
Please resist the urge to post the next 10 links in your google snatch for me to dissect. I've said before, there's no there there. A simple retraction will suffice. Nobody here is trying to deny you the right to your opinion. It's perfectly alright for you to
believe Parry is having an affair with Putin, just admit you have no evidence to prove your point. Is that so difficult? Are you constitutionally incapable of admitting that on the point of Parry defending Putin, you might be
wrong? C'mon, eat a slice of humble pie, it's won't kill you! You might even
gain some respect around here for a change.
One more thing that I tried to address which you've ignored: your belief that Parry has been "co-opted" by this "pro-Russian conspiracy/propaganda network" for which you created this thread. It seems to me you tried to double-down on this statement by insinuating that because Parry is "surely
always in need of money", he must be in their pockets. No wonder your sidekick solace thought it was a matter of fact that Parry is indirectly on Putin's payroll. That you corrected this fallacy by tripling down with the bullshit statement that Parry is "caught up in advocacy for the Russian State" does nothing to sterilize the stigma you've created by, as Wombaticus Rex put it, "stirring shit up."
Shame on you. RI is no place for witch-hunting, certainly not against someone with Parry's multi-decade cred. Your guilt-by-association character assassination is unbecoming of anyone purporting to have an ounce of rigor.
So what's it going to be, American Dream? Retraction? Retreat? Or just more reshuffling?
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
