U.S. Brief on Syrian Guilt for Khan Sheikhoun Collapses

The U.S. case that Syria is responsible for the sarin attack last week in the Qaeda-held town of Khan Sheikhoun is rapidly disintegrating.

Read Robert Parry's latest, "Trump Withholds Syria-Sarin Evidence," along with Moon of Alabama's devastating "White House "Intelligence Assessment" Is No-Such-Thing - Shows Support for Al-Qaeda," and Theodore Postal's "Assessment of White House Intelligence Report of April 11, 2017" demolition of the four-page NSC white paper.

It's the same-old same-old: "Trust us. We have this amazing SIGINT and INTELSAT that prove Assad pulled the trigger. We can't produce it though. We have to protect our sources and methods."

To which Putin responded,

The same thing happened back in 2003, when a pretext was concocted to justify sending troops to Iraq. The country was destroyed as a result, and it was after this that we saw the rapid emergence of various terrorist organisations and groups, the emergence of ISIS and other organisations. Everyone knows this, but here they go, making the same mistakes again.

Putin could have also mentioned 2013 because signals intelligence, azimuth data and the like was trotted out to justify a bombing campaign against Damascus at that time too.Obama's trigger finger was not as quick as Trump's. The U.S. hocus pocus pointing to Assad's guilt back in 2013 was thoroughly discredited. But the NSC white paper released yesterday accepts it as established fact.

To take it in one gulp what we are dealing with here compare Maria Bartiromo's obsequious Trump interview with Putin's "Interview to Mir Broadcasting."

The U.S. is hurtling towards a catastrophic failure. The profoundly delusional nature of U.S.-led groupthink is close to a tipping point. Political power has become so concentrated, so untethered from the fact-based universe, that we are about to witness its return to reality.

The U.S. "Double Game" Formula for Never-Ending Terror: Allied with Wahhabism to Fight Wahhabism

One of the most trenchant, articulate and regular critics of the prestige press (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) is Robert Parry. He runs Consortiumnews.com. He features other writers, but his posts are the best.

Yesterday I got around to reading Parry's "NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine" from last week, which comments on the same Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer story ("Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted") that I wrote about last Monday. I was struck by the intense cognitive dissonance the editors of the mainstream news organs create in their audience. Contradictions abound and must be swallowed daily. As Parry explains in terms of the Ukraine:

Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president [Yanukovych]. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of “democracy.” The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”

The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

Any reference to a “coup” was dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became “Russian aggression.”

This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as the New York Times and the Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them “romantic” gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

Yet, despite the best efforts of the Times, the Post and other mainstream outlets to conceal this ugly reality from the American people, alternative news sources – presenting a more realistic account of what was happening in Ukraine – began to chip away at the preferred narrative.

Instead of buying the big media’s storyline, many Americans were coming to realize that the reality was much more complicated and that they were again being sold a bill of propaganda goods.

The glaring contradictions the Gray Lady expects her readers to cognitively digest were on full display this past Saturday. The paper was dominated by the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and its aftermath, by the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, who apparently received training from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. But that is not where I want to start. I want to start where I ended on Saturday, by reading the unsigned editorial on U.S. aid to Pakistan, "Is Pakistan Worth America’s Investment?"

It doesn’t take much to stir controversy over America’s relationship with Pakistan. The latest dust-up involves $532 million in economic assistance that the United States expects to provide later this year. Last week, Pakistani officials jumped the gun by suggesting the money is closer to being disbursed than it is; the news annoyed India, which doesn’t think the aid is merited.

That is a familiar complaint. Since 9/11, the United States has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars, mostly in military aid, to help fight extremists. There are many reasons to have doubts about the investment. Still, it is in America’s interest to maintain assistance — at a declining level — at least for the time being. But much depends on what the money will be used for. One condition for new aid should be that Pakistan do more for itself — by cutting back on spending for nuclear weapons and requiring its elites to pay taxes.

Doubts about the aid center on Pakistan’s army, which has long played a double game, accepting America’s money while enabling some militant groups, including members of the Afghan Taliban who have been battling American and Afghan troops in Afghanistan. The relationship hit bottom in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan and was killed by a Navy SEAL team. But it has since improved. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to visit Islamabad soon.

After militants massacred 148 students and teachers at an army-run school in Peshawar last month, Pakistan’s government promised that it would no longer distinguish between “bad” militant groups, which are seeking to bring down the Pakistani state, and “good” militant groups that have been supported and exploited by the army to attack India and wield influence in Afghanistan. But there is little evidence that the army has gone after the “good” groups in a serious way.

This double game is a big reason that the administration has been unable to fulfill Congress’s mandate to certify that Pakistan has met certain requirements, including preventing its territory from being used for terror attacks, as a condition of assistance. Instead, officials have had to rely on a national security waiver to keep aid flowing.

Pakistan's "double game" is merely a smaller copy of the U.S. global "double game." To wit, jump from the editorial page to the middle of the paper where Ben Hubbard's "Saudis Begin Public Caning to Punish a Blogger":

The authorities in Saudi Arabia on Friday began the public flogging of a blogger who was sentenced to 1,000 blows, 10 years in prison and a large fine for starting a website that featured content critical of the country’s religious establishment, the rights group Amnesty International reported.

The floggings are to be administered with a cane over a period of months.

The blogger, Raif Badawi, was arrested after starting a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” and he was later convicted of charges that included cybercrime and parental disobedience.

The case has drawn attention to the strict limits on freedom of expression inSaudi Arabia, a close Arab ally of the United States, and prompted unusually direct criticism from the American government.

Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States was concerned that Mr. Badawi would face “the inhumane punishment of a thousand lashes in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion.”

The United States government called on Saudi Arabia to cancel the flogging and “review Badawi’s case and sentence,” Ms. Psaki said.

Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, has used its courts in the past to punish dissidents or those who question the country’s strict interpretation of Islam. Often, these actions face no public rebuke from the United States, which considers Saudi Arabia an important ally in the fight against terrorism and other areas.

Besides being the world’s largest oil exporter, the kingdom is one of five Arab countries that have joined an American-led air campaign against the jihadists of the Islamic State.

Mr. Badawi was arrested in 2012 and prosecuted in a criminal court for offenses that included cybercrime and disobeying his father, who has denounced his son in the news media.

Prosecutors tried and failed to charge him with apostasy and then pressed for a resentencing because they considered his first sentence of seven years in prison and 600 blows too lenient.

Last year, Mr. Badawi received his final sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of more than a quarter-million dollars and 1,000 blows with the cane.

An unidentified witness cited by Amnesty said that Mr. Badawi was taken from a bus and flogged 50 times in a public square outside of a mosque in the port city of Jidda after Friday Prayer. About 15 minutes later, he was put back on the bus and taken away. Amnesty said it would not identify the witness because of security concerns.

Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Badawi was clearly being punished for starting a liberal website and insulting the religious authorities. He said that floggers in Saudi Arabia are supposed to distribute the blows from the top of the back to the back of the legs without breaking the skin. It is not a bloody affair, but it is public and painful.

Imagine if we caned bloggers in the United States for disobeying one's father or starting a website. Every public square in every major city would be filled to overflowing. Better yet, we would have to go Pinochet "dirty wars" style and use our lavishly tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums to facilitate the floggings.

Rather than more pro forma mendacious meek mewling from The Stepford Wives-like Jen Psaki why not economic sanctions from the ballyhooed Treasury Department official, David S. Cohen, who was just promoted to the number two slot at the CIA? That story -- "Reaching Outside C.I.A., Obama Picks Treasury Official to Become Agency’s No. 2" by Mark Mazzetti -- which appeared a few pages after the "Saudis Cane Blogger" article illuminates the nature of the U.S. "double game":

WASHINGTON — President Obama has chosen the Treasury Department official who has directed the effort to cut off funding of the Islamic State and impose economic sanctions on Syria, Russia and Iran to become the C.I.A.’s deputy director, the agency announced on Friday. 

The official, David S. Cohen, who as under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence has spent more than three years in charge of the Obama administration’s attempts to punish foreign governments and cripple terrorist groups, will help lead an agency that remains at the center of armed drone campaigns and covert efforts to arm and train Syrian rebels. 

John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that Mr. Cohen brings a “wealth of experience on many of the issues that we focus on as an agency” — such as money laundering, financial support for terrorism and narcotics trafficking. 

In the past, the C.I.A.’s No. 2 job, which does not require Senate confirmation, has often been filled by agency veterans or senior military officers. Mr. Cohen, a lawyer who has no previous C.I.A. experience, will replace Avril D. Haines, who left the C.I.A. to become Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser. 

The selection could be an indication that the White House is wary of elevating a C.I.A. insider who might have played a role in the detention and interrogation program that used torture on Qaeda detainees in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 

Over the past year, Mr. Cohen has been consumed with trying to cut off the spigot of money flowing into the Islamic State’s coffers — primarily from black-market oil sales. The militant group controls oil-rich territory in Iraq and Syria, and has been able to use smuggling routes to sell oil in Turkey. This month, the group announced that it would have a 2015 budget of more than $2 billion that it would use to pay its fighters and govern the territory it has taken. 

American officials believe that figure wildly overstates the Islamic State’s resources, but they concede that drying up the group’s finances will take time. 

“This is not going to be a case of, we flip a light switch and all of a sudden all of their financial resources have disappeared,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview last year.

Economic sanctions on Russia and Iran are trumpeted by the Obama administration as being enormously effective, but somehow when it comes to Islamic State, not so much. Why the disconnect?

Note that three out of the four key targets of Cohen's efforts -- Russia, Iran and Syria (one could also add Hezbollah) -- are official enemies of the United States and its monarchical allies in the Gulf; the fourth, Islamic State, we are told not to expect much. The reason, as briefly reported last August in the mainstream press when people were asking how Islamic State got so big and powerful so quickly, is that funding for Islamic State tracks back to the U.S.-allied monarchies in the Gulf.

And just as flogging bloggers receives only a canned criticism from a State Department spokeswoman, the effect of economic sanctions on Islamic State is downplayed because the U.S. will never officially go after the corrupt absolutist monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is the U.S. "double game," identical to the one that the Gray Lady criticizes Pakistan for in her unsigned editorial: taking money to fight jihadis at the same time funding and working with jihadis.

Our allies in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism should be Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah (see Anne Barnard's "Extremists Harming Islam, Leader of Hezbollah Says" for Hassan Nasrallah's cogent reaction to the Paris attacks and her snarky "Hezbollah is the enemy" reply) rather than the very nations that are exporting the extreme militant version of Islam, Wahhabism, that leads to jihad. As Andre Vltchek wrote this weekend in "Who Should be Blamed for Muslim Terrorism? The West is Manufacturing Muslim Monsters":

Almost all radical movements in today’s Islam, anywhere in the world, are tied to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative, reactionary sect of Islam, which is in control of the political life of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other staunch allies of the West in the Gulf.

To quote Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi:

“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…”

The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.

The Mujahedeen, who were fighting the Soviets as well as the left-leaning government in Kabul, were encouraged and financed by the West and its allies. They came from all corners of the Muslim world, to fight a ‘Holy War’ against Communist infidels.

According to the US Department of State archives:

“Contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs and foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.”

Muslim radical groups created and injected into various Muslim countries by the West included al-Qaeda, but also, more recently, ISIS (also known as ISIL). ISIS is an extremist army that was born in the ‘refugee camps’ on the Syrian/Turkish and Syrian/Jordanian borders, and which was financed by NATO and the West to fight the Syrian (secular) government of Bashar al-Assad.

Such radical implants have been serving several purposes. The West uses them as proxies in the wars it is fighting against its enemies – the countries that are still standing in the way to the Empire’s complete domination of the world. Then, somewhere down the road, after these extremist armies ‘get totally out of control’ (and they always will), they could serve as scarecrows and as justification for the ‘The War On Terror’, or, like after ISIS took Mosul, as an excuse for the re-engagement of Western troops in Iraq.

Stories about the radical Muslim groups have constantly been paraded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, or shown on television monitors, reminding readers ‘how dangerous the world really is’, ‘how important Western engagement in it is’, and consequently, how important surveillance is, how indispensable security measures are, as well as tremendous ‘defense’ budgets and wars against countless rogue states.

The Kouachi brothers had a connection to Yemen and the Qaeda branch there, AQAP. Read Kareem Fahim's latest from Yemen, "Violence Grows in Yemen as Al Qaeda Tries to Fight Its Way Back," to get caught up on the U.S. "double game" there. The U.S. faced with the rise of the pro-Iranian Shiite Houthi movement, which is consolidating power in Sana, is working with its Gulf allies and their AQAP proxies to claw back territory from the Houthis.

This is what the U.S. "double game" does; it foments instability, terror and war. And more is on the way because there is no indication that the people at the top see any reason to change.

Robert Parry's Bombshell: CIA Has Proof Junta Brought Down MH17

The place to begin this morning, if you missed it yesterday as did I, is Robert Parry's "What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?" The story contains the following bombshell:

What I’ve been told by one source, who has provided accurate information on similar matters in the past, is that U.S. intelligence agencies do have detailed satellite images of the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile, but the battery appears to have been under the control of Ukrainian government troops dressed in what look like Ukrainian uniforms. 

The source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. 

Instead of pressing for these kinds of details, the U.S. mainstream press has simply passed on the propaganda coming from the Ukrainian government and the U.S. State Department, including hyping the fact that the Buk system is “Russian-made,” a rather meaningless fact that gets endlessly repeated. 

However, to use the “Russian-made” point to suggest that the Russians must have been involved in the shoot-down is misleading at best and clearly designed to influence ill-informed Americans. As the Post and other news outlets surely know, the Ukrainian military also operates Russian-made military systems, including Buk anti-aircraft batteries, so the manufacturing origin has no probative value here.

What we know is that as soon as the Malaysia Airlines Boeing went down last Thursday the junta began shrieking that it was the "terrorists" who did it. These assertions were backed up by unnamed USG officials. Since then we have been treated to a steady stream of junta supplied telephone intercepts of gloating militiamen and photographs of missile batteries purportedly being moved across the border into Russia. All this material is passed through to the front pages of the U.S. prestige press without any caveats.

So what we have here is full-blown propaganda campaign, the kind of which we are by now very familiar with. The Ghouta sarin attack of last August comes to mind.

Novorossiyan militia control of the crash site has been one of the main pillars of the Kiev/U.S. propaganda onslaught. From Friday onward the refrain has been that the militia is destroying evidence, desecrating the bodies of passengers, refusing access to OSCE monitors, refusing to release the bodies, etc. Basically, a word picture has been painted depicting the Novorossiyan militia as pirates.

But when you actually move beyond the scare headlines and read these stories in their entirety -- say, for instance, the one by Sabrine Tavernise and Noah Sneider filed yesterday -- a different image emerges. The crash site is in the middle of territory where a war is going on. The Novorossiyans are not refusing to release the bodies; they are waiting for the Dutch to arrive to claim them (which apparently they have just done). There is not a professional crime scene investigation complete with yellow caution tape because there are no police. There is civil war. Instead, you have volunteers doing the work. Where is the evidence, besides the shrill allegations of the junta, that something malign is happening at the crash site? Poroshenko even went as far to blame the Novorossiyans for looting. According to Tavernise and Sneider:

President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine has claimed that rebels stole credit cards from the wreckage. One villager, Elena, who declined to give her last name, strongly disputed that. 

“That is a sin, a big sin in our faith,” she said. “This is a cemetery. Who would take from it?”

So be wary of the headlines, like the latest about Putin being forced under pressure of new sanctions to allow for an international investigation. Putin has never been opposed to an international investigation. He has been the one saying let's not rush to judgment as the U.S. and Kiev are doing; let's wait to see what a proper investigation reveals.

And the whole time Kiev's assault on Donetsk and Luhanks continues.

In Donetsk, a thick plume of dark smoke could be seen rising into the bright blue afternoon sky. One man, a passenger in a blue car that was stopped at a red light, said two people in his building were killed in the fighting. He said he ran out of his house in nothing but his slippers. 

The fighting in Donetsk killed a woman in the Kuibysheva neighborhood, which was hit in the morning, as she walked through a wooded courtyard near a small child’s playground, and two men were found dead nearby. A piece of clothing had been placed over her body, and pools of blood were drying in the sun. A grocery discount card was on the ground near the bloody outline where her body had been.

“They are trying to push the D.N.R. back but they end up hitting us,” said Yevgeny Zhitnikov, a 17-year old resident of the city. “Victory is more important to them than than human life.” 

Said his father, who was arranging bags on the ground for the family to leave to a nearby bomb shelter: “Animals.” 

A series of booms thumped through the courtyard consistent with the sound of a grad rocket. The rockets hit near dentist office complex and a library. 

“Why are people suffering, for what?” said Galina Afrina, a 60-year old retired financial worker who was holding some compote she had made. “We are being told to evacuate.” 

By 2:30 p.m., residents were leaving the nighborood. A woman carrying a large gray cat rushed by. A man carrying a kitten walked a bicycle. 

The rocket that killed the woman had punched a deep hole into the courtyard. Its shape indicated it had been come from the northwest, the area that the Ukrainian government controls. 

There will be a price for the U.S. backing this murderous campaign. Putin's relative silence is not a sign of guilt but of strength. Like Parry's bombshell, the truth is starting to emerge about MH17. And when it does, the fallout will be immense, hopefully great enough to topple Kiev and hopefully to permanently tarnish a warmongering Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS.

The Coming Collapse of U.S. Hegemony

Events seem to be moving in the direction of a big battle for control of Slovyansk city center. The junta military has established checkpoints surrounding the city, according to putschist interior minister Arsen Avakov. Since Avakov does a great job impersonating Joseph Goebbels, it is difficult to assess how strong these roadblocks are and how likely it is that junta troops will storm Slovyansk. But if they do, there is no doubt that the conflict in Ukraine will graduate to another level of violence.

Based on a reading of the blogs -- Moon of Alabama, The Vineyard of the Saker -- over the weekend, the sense out there is that Russia is being provoked by the United States to intervene militarily in Ukraine in order to block European integration east with the Russia and China. A Russian invasion would force Europe to side with its North Atlantic partner in building up NATO military forces on Russia's border as well as severing trade ties with the Russian Federation. At this point, barring mass slaughter of civilians by the putsch government, it doesn't look like Russia is going to take the bait.

Energy supply is the obvious vulnerability in any plan to sever Europe from Russia. Andrew Higgins explores the current U.S.-generated fantasy of how Ukraine can achieve independence from Gazprom in "Kiev Struggles to Break Russia’s Grip on Gas Flow." The idea is that Slovakia has the pipeline capacity to reverse flow natural gas to Ukraine. But for some reason -- Higgins sees the baleful, corrupting influence of Vlad Putin at work -- the Slovak government has been slow to embrace the scheme. It is a long story. One has to read to the end to get to the obvious. Reverse flows depend on the agreement of all parties, meaning that Gazprom would have to sign off in it. Why would they do that?

Alexander Medvedev, the head of Gazprom’s export arm, said he had no problem in principle with reverse-flow supplies to Ukraine but said such arrangements “require the agreement of all parties involved,” including Gazprom. 

“Normally, you can’t arrange a physical reverse flow without a new pipeline,” he added, indicating Gazprom’s opposition to the use of existing Slovak pipelines.

The main event over the weekend was the Friday massacre in Odessa. Federalist, pro-Russian protesters were attacked by Ukrainian nationalist soccer hooligans, chased into a building and the building was set on fire. Forty people died. Putsch prime minister Yatsenyuk in a gross perversion of common decency immediately blamed Russian provocation and police ineptitude. The Gray Lady dutifully echoed his words, even though video evidence and crime-scene reporting established that the slaughter was caused by Ukrainian nationalist mobs. Robert Parry, whose Consortium News web site does an excellent job keeping the February Ukrainian coup in proper perspective, asks, "Will Ukraine Be NYT's Waterloo?"

Andrew Kramer brings the Gray Lady back closer to what really happened in Odessa over the weekend with his "Ukraine’s Reins Weaken as Chaos Spreads":

Yanus Milteynus, a 42-year-old construction worker and pro-Russian activist, said he watched from the roof as the pro-Ukrainian crowd threw firebombs into the building’s lower windows, while those inside feared being beaten to death by the crowd if they tried to flee. 

“Some people jumped or tried to run away, but they chased them and beat them,” he said. Videos of the inferno, however, also show pro-Ukrainian activists trying to move scaffolding from a stage to the building, to rescue those inside. 

Only when the police managed to form a cordon to escort out those rescued by firefighters was he able to leave. If the roof caught fire before then, he said, “I would have stayed and sizzled like a sausage in a frying pan.” 

The conflict is hardening hearts on both sides. As the building burned, Ukrainian activists sang the Ukrainian national anthem, witnesses on both sides said. They also hurled a new taunt: “Colorado” for the Colorado potato beetle, striped red and black like the pro-Russian ribbons. Those outside chanted “burn Colorado, burn,” witnesses said. Swastikalike symbols were spray painted on the building, along with graffiti reading “Galician SS,” though it was unclear when it had appeared, or who had painted it. 

“The biggest thing they ever did to make me hate this country was sing the anthem,” Mr. Milteynus said. “I was going to die, and they sang the anthem. I hate them deeply.”

The United States will pay a large price for fomenting this coup in Ukraine. This is no Kosovo. In what increasingly looks like a desperate, reckless attempt to maintain its global hegemony, the USG is paving the way for its collapse. Democrats cannot win as a pro-war party. This means that Republicans will reap the reward. GOP national leadership will further fracture and discredit the country. Get ready. This is what is in store.

Putschists Announce Another Military Campaign To Retake Eastern Ukraine

Moon of Alabama has a timely, on-the-mark post this morning, "Ukraine: 'Anti-Terrorism' Campaigns Follow Visits From U.S.," where it is noted that, first, following a weekend visit by CIA Director John Brennan and, then, yesterday's cheerleading bagman appearance in Kiev by vice president Joe Biden, the putsch government has launched military assaults against pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine. The first one fell apart last week spectacularly due to a combination of peaceful protest, lack of motivation among the putschist armed forces and a sprinkling of Russian special forces, a.k.a., "green men." What has a changed in a week to make the putschists think that the outcome will be any different is hard to divine. It could be that as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the USG the gang in Kiev is just robotically following orders heedless of the disaster which awaits their completion.

The danger here is that with each military debacle the coherence of the Ukrainian state and the viability of its putschists erode to the point of no return. Then the May 25 presidential elections -- even with U.S. financing and management -- become pointless. This is an outcome the Obama White House wants to avoid at all costs. So it is likely that there will be a new wrinkle in the current putschist "anti-terrorism" campaign. Could it be that a CIA-managed mercenary army of ex-Navy SEALS and ex-Army Rangers will lead the attack? Who knows. Robert Parry over at Consortium News thinks a massacre of eastern Ukrainians is coming. I don't think Russia allows this to happen. I do think there are Russian special forces on the ground in the ten eastern cities under the control of protesters. The question then becomes, How does conflict between special forces, West vs. East, play out? Does it mushroom into a trade war that engulfs Europe?