C.J. Chivers Plumbs New Propaganda Low

With bluster, propaganda and probably a number of covert operations we don't know anything about yet, the United States continues to play out its weak hand in the Ukraine. On the propaganda front, a new low in is on frontpage display in the Gray Lady today. Written by C.J. Chivers, the author last September of the now debunked "smoking gun" article arguing that azimuth data taken from impact craters "proved" that Syrian government forces launched the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb, "A Kiev Question: What Became of the Missing?" takes an issue, post-putsch missing protesters, that even the Maidan group, Euromaidan S O S, tasked with finding the "disappeared" dismisses as much ado about nothing and blows it up into a sort of killing fields whodunnit:

In all, 661 people have been reported missing since protests began last December, according to Euromaidan S O S, a volunteer group leading efforts to find the disappeared. The fates of 272 of them remained unknown late last week. 

Many people were found in prison cells or hospitals, or resurfaced on their own, said Vitaliy Selyk, a Euromaidan S O S coordinator. Some cases were caused by breakdowns in communications, including people who lost cellphones or ran out of credit on SIM cards, he said. 

A few of the missing were people estranged from families and whose recent silence was by choice. Mr. Selyk said he expected that most of the remaining cases would be solved and that the missing would turn up. 

But beneath that hope lies the grim concern that many Ukrainians may have disappeared after being seized by the Berkut riot police unit, by pro-Russian provocateurs or by unofficial forces that worked to keep Mr. Yanukovych in power.

From there C.J. Chivers repeats every dark rumor and every bit of fantastical bloody innuendo he can muster, not to mention re-reporting all the tales of pre-putsch savagery alleged to have been committed by shadowy Russian-speaking allies of the Yanukovych security forces. It is a sorry, sloppy attempt to occlude the story gaining attention in the European press, that, as The Guardian reported last week in a leaked phone conversation between  Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the EU's Catherine Ashton, "[S]nipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych."

Once this story hits the U.S. market, any hope of the Obama administration salvaging even a shred of credibility would seem to be a distant one. The Crimea secession vote is this Sunday. I would imagine that neither the Paet-Ashton conversation nor Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's request for an OSCE investigation into the Maidan snipers will get any play in the U.S. media until the results of the vote are tallied.

And speaking of a vote count, Jonathan Weisman has a story, "House Republicans Balk at Wording in Obama Emergency Aid Package for Ukraine," about difficulties the Obama administration is having getting the money to the putschists. It has to do with a reorganization of the International Monetary Fund that conservative Republicans are unwilling to go along with because of a perception that it would weaken U.S. control of the IMF; there is language in the Ukraine aid bill "that would extend a separate billion-dollar package of loans from the fund to $1.6 billion by expanding loan limits for countries like Ukraine." As with the effort to bomb Syria last summer, Obama is having problems getting a green light from Congress.

How long will Obama maintain his bluff when it is obvious that the hand he holds is a losing one?