RT: May 4, 2012

Self-defense forces in the anti-Kiev stronghold of Slavyansk are Ukrainians, not Russians, who distrust the new regime and the Western powers that support it, New York Times reporters have discovered. The forces also said they are not being paid to fight.

Two New York Times reporters have spent a week in the city of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine, talking to members of the self-defense forces. The journalists visited self-defense checkpoints and observed the forces as they battled Ukrainian troops amid a military assault on the city on Friday.

The resistance fighters of the 12th Company, part of the People’s Self-Defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, deny claims made by Kiev and its Western sponsors that Russia or private tycoons are paying them to fight.

“This is not a job,” one of the activists, Dmitry told the NYT reporters. “It is a service.”

Armed with dated weapons, the self-defense activists said they would have bought new weapons if they had financial support. The NYT journalists reported seeing weapons from the 1980s and 1990s in checkpoints and warehouses.

The activists explained that they purchased some of their weaponry from corrupt Ukrainian soldiers, while taking others from seized police buildings or confiscating them from captured Ukrainian armored vehicles.

“Much of their stock was identical to the weapons seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers and Interior Ministry Special Forces troops at government positions outside the city,” the NYT reporters said in an article published on Saturday.

“These included 9-millimeter Makarov pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles, and a few Dragunov sniper rifles, RPK light machine guns and portable antitank rockets, including some with production stamps from the 1980s and early 1990s.”

The head of Slavyansk self-defense, Yury, also chuckled at claims made by Kiev authorities and the West that Russians are fighting side by side with them.

“We have no Muscovites here,” Yury told the journalists. “I have experience enough.”

Many of the Company’s 119 members, who range in age from their 20s to their 50s, have served in the Soviet or Ukrainian infantry, airborne, special forces, or air-defense units, the reporters said. Yury, in his mid 50s, noted that his experience includes four years as a Soviet small-unit commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“There was no clear Russian link in the 12th Company’s arsenal,” the reporters said.

While visiting checkpoints for more than a week, the NYT reporters said they saw much support for the self-defense forces from local residents, who primary provided the activists with food.

“To the guys in Kiev, we are separatists and terrorists,” Yury said. “But to the people here, we are defenders and protectors.”
[…]

“All spoke of disgust with the interim authorities in Kiev,” the NYT reporters noted in their article.

The eastern Ukrainians have made up their minds, Yury told the journalists, adding that they are demanding a referendum and will go to war in the case of a refusal. He added that people in the region are puzzled by the West’s support of the coup in Kiev and blatant disregard for eastern Ukrainians’ opinions and rights.

“Why did America support those acts, but is in opposition to ours?” Maksim, a young former paratrooper asked. “These are the contradictions of the West.”

(read the full article at RT)

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Antony Loewenstein
The Guardian : April 29, 2014

The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was announced in mid-April. Christopher Havard and “Muslim bin John”, who also held New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year.

Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed that both men were foot soldiers for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, though they may also have been collateral damage (the real target being other terror heads).

The Australian government claimed ignorance of the entire operation. “There was no Australian involvement in, or prior awareness of, the operation”, a spokesman said. New Zealand prime minister John Key released some more details, saying that the country’s GCSB spies had been authorised to spy on him. “I knew that he had gone there [to Yemen] and gone to a terrorist training camp”, he stated.

Since publication of these bare facts, little new information has emerged from the government or other sources – except for some reporting in The Australian about Havard’s apparent transformation after he converted to Islam in his early 20s and went to Yemen to teach English. The paper editorialised in support of the strike: “to be killed in this way is regrettable”, it wrote, but obliterating civilians without a trial was acceptable because “such attacks have done much to stop the terrorists committing even more atrocities.” There was no condemnation of the scores of civilians killed by drones since 9/11.

It’s of course morally convenient to believe that the death of these men will make the world a safer place by removing “threats” without the need to place western soldiers in harm’s way – this is, after all, the apparently compelling logic of drone warfare. But it’s a myth challenged by the former drone pilots featured in the recently released documentary Drone, in which ex-Air Force pilot Michael Haas explains that:

You never know who you’re killing, because you never actually see a face. You just have a silhouette. They don’t have to take a shot. They don’t have to bear that burden. I’m the one that has to bear that burden.

Yet, uncertainty be damned, the Australian government seems to keep on supporting the CIA killings with most of the media following without question.

(Read the full article at The Guardian)

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RT: May 3, 2014

Dozens of people died in flames in Odessa, when radicals set ablaze the local House of Trade Unions with anti-government protesters blocked inside. The city is now in mourning for those who died, suffocated in smoke or had to jump out of windows.

What triggered the tragedy were violent clashes, which erupted on Friday afternoon between two rival rallies in Ukraine’s port-city of Odessa.

Around 1,500 supporters of the Kiev authorities, accompanied by aggressive fans of the local football club, Chernomorets, tried to march through the center of the city chanting “Glory to Ukraine,” “Death to enemies,” “Knife the Moskals [derogatory for Russians].” Some of the people in the group were wearing ultra-nationalist Right Sector movement insignia, were armed with chains and bats and carried shields.

Several hundred anti-government activists eventually confronted the procession. Fighting broke out as a result, with members of the rival groups throwing stones, Molotov cocktails and smoke grenades at each other and at police. The pavements were spattered with blood.

The police failed to draw the rival groups apart. As a result, 4 people were killed and 37 wounded in the violence. Police were among the injured.

Street clashes appeared to be only the beginning of the Odessa Friday nightmare, as radicals started to drive anti-government activists back to their tent camp in front of the local House of Trade Unions. Many anti-Kiev protesters eventually hid inside the building.

“Women and children were hiding in the Trade Union’s building,” an eye-witness told RT. “First the armed men set fire to tents, then they started throwing Molotov cocktails and grenades at the building. We heard shots fired and saw smoke,” she added.

The first floor of the Trade Unions building was soon engulfed in flames. The people inside appeared to be trapped.

Dozens eventually burnt alive or suffocated to death. To escape the fire and smoke, people were hanging out of windows and sitting on windowsills. In sheer desperation, some of them eventually jumped to the ground.

Many of those who managed to escape the fire were then brutally beaten by armed men, believed to be from the ultra-nationalist Right Sector group, who had the building under siege.

(read the full article including pictures and video at RT)

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Afghan Panel Claims to Find Secret Prisons

By Azam Ahmed and Taimoor Shah
New York Times : April 26, 2014

KABUL, Afghanistan — A commission appointed by President Hamid Karzai to investigate detention facilities run by American and British forces in southern Afghanistan claimed Saturday to have uncovered secret prisons on two coalition bases, an allegation that could not be immediately confirmed but that was likely to further complicate relations between the Afghan government and its allies.

“We have conducted a thorough investigation and search of Kandahar Airfield and Camp Bastion and found several illegal and unlawful detention facilities run and operated by foreign military forces,” said Abdul Shakur Dadras, the panel’s chairman.

Mr. Dadras offered no evidence to support his assertion, though he promised to release more details after presenting his report to Mr. Karzai.

Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for the Defense Department, wrote in an email, “Every facility that we use for detention is well known not only by the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, but also by the I.C.R.C.,” a reference to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a nonpartisan organization that provides humanitarian care for victims of conflict.

The International Security Assistance Force, or I.S.A.F., as the coalition is known, said in a statement on Saturday that it was “aware of their investigative team looking into the detention facilities in Kandahar and Helmand and we are cooperating fully with the investigation on this matter.”

The accusations are the latest salvo in a dispute over the detention of Afghans by foreign forces. The issue reached a climax early this year, when the Afghan government released from the former American prison at Bagram dozens of prisoners the coalition claimed had killed American soldiers.

Before that, the transfer of the prison itself called attention to the deteriorating relationship between the Afghans and their American allies in a public way.

The Americans have accused the Afghan government of using the issue to score political points. The Afghans say the foreigners have unfairly imprisoned people without credible evidence and insist that they run all detention facilities in the country.

Mr. Dadras said that his team was sent to the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand to review the prisons on two coalition bases, Kandahar Airfield, run by the Americans, and Camp Bastion, run by the British.

He said his team reviewed the number of prisoners as well as the details of their detention. The issue at Camp Bastion has been aired before. The British military must abide by rules that prohibit the transfer of prisoners to facilities where torture is believed to occur. For now, that concern is unresolved, and the sites where these detainees are held by the British forces could be the locations Mr. Dadras is referring to.

In Kandahar, the details are less clear. American forces are allowed to detain combatants seized on the battlefield for up to 96 hours before turning them over to the Afghan government. It was unclear whether Mr. Dadras was referring to such detainees or whether his commission had uncovered evidence of prisons that were illegally holding Afghans.

Early on Saturday, a coalition helicopter crashed after it malfunctioned in Kandahar Province, killing five service members. The coalition did not release the nationalities of the soldiers. Britain’s Defense Ministry said that the helicopter was British and confirmed that all of the dead were as well, according to The Associated Press.

(read the full article at New York Times)

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F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad

By Mark Mazzetti
New York Times: APRIL 23, 2014

WASHINGTON — An informant working for the F.B.I. coordinated a 2012 campaign of hundreds of cyberattacks on foreign websites, including some operated by the governments of Iran, Syria, Brazil and Pakistan, according to documents and interviews with people involved in the attacks.

Exploiting a vulnerability in a popular web hosting software, the informant directed at least one hacker to extract vast amounts of data — from bank records to login information — from the government servers of a number of countries and upload it to a server monitored by the F.B.I., according to court statements.

The details of the 2012 episode have, until now, been kept largely a secret in closed sessions of a federal court in New York and heavily redacted documents. While the documents do not indicate whether the F.B.I. directly ordered the attacks, they suggest that the government may have used hackers to gather intelligence overseas even as investigators were trying to dismantle hacking groups like Anonymous and send computer activists away for lengthy prison terms.

The attacks were coordinated by Hector Xavier Monsegur, who used the Internet alias Sabu and became a prominent hacker within Anonymous for a string of attacks on high-profile targets, including PayPal and MasterCard. By early 2012, Mr. Monsegur of New York had been arrested by the F.B.I. and had already spent months working to help the bureau identify other members of Anonymous, according to previously disclosed court papers.

(Read the full article at New York Times)

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Malaysia Airlines MH370: Reports Speculate that Missing Plane May Have Landed and Not Crashed

By Divya Avasthy
IB Times : April 23, 2014

The mystery of the vanished Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has taken a new twist with the international team probing the incident now considering the possibility that the plane may have landed rather than ended up in the Indian Ocean, according to various media reports.

International Investigation Team (IIT), it seems, have not gathered conclusive clues on what precisely may have happened to the flight, and are rethinking on how best to explain the disappearance of the jet.

This is because no debris has been found yet, and the underwater mission is 80% complete in the 10-km area around the locus of the 5 April pings, which according to the ocean search team had been the most promising lead.

Maritime experts have already warned that the pings detected in the ocean may not necessarily have originated from the airplane’s black boxes.

Peter Herzig, Executive Director at Feomar Helmholt Centre for Oceanographic Research pointed out that the search area in the Indian Ocean is a noisy place where scores of planes and ships make rounds. Also, there is the possibility that the sounds may have come from other vessels passing in the vicinity at the time the pings were picked up.

Investigators are now considering other explanations to determine the fate of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370, and have not dismissed the possibility of the plane having landed at an unknown location.

“The thought of it landing somewhere else is not impossible, as we have not found a single debris that could be linked to MH370… [but] the possibility of a specific country hiding the plane when more than 20 nations are searching for it, seems absurd,” a source from IIT told the New Strait Times.
[…]

The possibility of the aircraft having crashed on some remote island in the ocean is also being explored.

However, the missing plane was carrying four emergency locater transmitters (ELTs) which transmit the aircraft’s location to an emergency satellite in case of a crash or contact with water, the CNN reported.

Experts are puzzled over why the ELTs did not activate, and if they did, why the satellite had failed to pick up their signals.
[…]

The investigative team have also admitted that the earlier calculations derived from information provided by Inmarsat were not entirely reliable, because communication satellites cannot detect crucial details such as a plane’s direction, altitude and speed.

“A communications satellite is meant for communication… the name is self-explanatory. The reason investigators were forced to adopt a new algorithm to calculate the last known location of MH370 was because there was no global positioning system following the aircraft as the transponder went off 45 minutes into the flight,” one source noted.

(Read the full article at IB Times / Yahoo)

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By Alex Lantier
WSWS: April 23, 2014

A day after the New York Times published a front-page report purporting to show the involvement of Russian Special Forces in protests in east Ukraine, its report, titled “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia,” has been exposed as a blatant fabrication.

The Times printed low-resolution pictures of fighters—allegedly wearing Russian insignia while in Georgia, and then later as protesters in east Ukraine—asserting they were the same men, thus proving the existence of an armed Russian intervention in Ukraine. It was based on a crude trick first noted by a commenter on a link posted on Reddit. The photos in the Times were down-sampled versions of higher-resolution images circulating online, which show that the men in the different pictures are in fact not the same.

Images from the New York Times with text and captions:

Original images posted on reddit:

It very rapidly became clear that the Times ’ claims to have proven that Russian soldiers were driving the east Ukraine protests against the pro-Western regime in Kiev were complete rubbish.

The BBC compared the high-resolution pictures of two bearded men theTimes falsely asserted were the same fighter. It concluded, “In the 2014 photos, the man’s greying beard appears to be black, while in Georgia six years ago, the slimmer-looking man shown has a reddish beard.”

It also noted that Russian Special Forces patches on the men’s uniforms, highlighted by the Times as proof that they are Russian troops, “can be bought on the Internet for less than $5.”

Asking whether the pictures “prove anything,” the BBC concluded: “It cannot be said for sure that they are actual Russian Special Forces, as the Ukrainians argue.”

In publishing the false allegations, the Times worked closely with the US government, which received the photos from the unelected pro-US regime in Kiev and “endorsed” them before passing them on. At a press briefing, however, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, whom the New York Times quoted in its article, indicated that the administration was well aware that the photos did not constitute proof of what was being claimed.

Pressed about whether she was certain the pictures showed individuals linked to Russia, Psaki replied: “What we see in these photos that have been, again, in international media, on Twitter, and publicly available, is that there are individuals who visibly appear to be tied to Russia. We’ve said that publicly a countless number of times. I will let you draw all the conclusions yourself as to whether these are individuals who look similar or not to other events.”

A journalist at the briefing objected to calling this “evidence,” and asked, “Do you think this is evidence that would stand up in a court of law?”

Psaki replied, “I don’t think it’s a legal—we’re not making a court-of-law case here. We’re just showing that this is photographic evidence that indicates the connection we’ve been talking about for weeks now.”

The journalist asked, “You think it is proof of connection, or it’s just—or you’re just alleging that it’s another sign of this?”

Psaki replied, “It’s another sign.”

In fact, the Times has worked to mislead its readers, uncritically presenting concocted photos delivered by its contacts in the State Department.

Washington, as it passed the pictures on to the Times, knew very well that they did not constitute evidence of anything, but were simply a new propaganda point supporting its as-yet unsubstantiated accusations of Russian involvement in Ukraine. The Obama administration relied on theTimes to publish the pictures, fanning the flames of the media campaign to denounce Russia, without doing any due diligence to check that its materials were accurate or that proved anything at all.

A decade ago, Times journalist Judith Miller was the conduit for broadcasting lies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), touching off a huge media campaign that set the stage for the US invasion of Iraq.

Today, the lies the Times is palming off as news could provoke a war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. By fabricating evidence of Russian involvement in east Ukraine, the Times was providing political ammunition for calls in Ukraine and in the Western imperialist powers for a military crackdown against protests in east Ukraine, a region with a large Russian population. This could lead to a military intervention by Moscow in eastern Ukraine to break up the crackdown, and a clash between Russia and Ukraine drawing in the Western powers.

The Times ’ fabrications also served to obscure the fact that this conflict arose out of the decision of Washington and its European allies to topple Ukraine’s previous, Russian-aligned regime in a fascist-led putsch in February. The unelected pro-Western regime in Kiev has now encountered significant popular opposition in pro-Russian regions of eastern Ukraine. It is this aggressive policy of the Western powers that is driving the explosive standoff in eastern Ukraine.

The employees of the Times who were involved in producing this article, like Judith Miller before them, reflect the growing integration of the media and the state.

(read the full article at WSWS or Global Research)

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-Citizens Committee on Benghazi claims the US government allowed arms to flow to al-Qaeda-linked militants who opposed Muammar Gaddafi
-Their rise to power, the group says, led to the Benghazi attack in 2012
-The group claims the strongman Gaddafi offered to abdicate his presidency, but the US refused to broker his peaceful exit
-The commission, part of the center-right Accuracy In Media group, concluded that the Benghazi attack was a failed kidnapping plot
-US Ambassador Chris Stevens was to be captured and traded for ‘blind sheikh’ Omar Abdel-Rahman, who hatched the 1993 WTC bombing plot

Benghazi attack could have been prevented if US hadn’t ‘switched sides in the War on Terror’ and allowed $500 MILLION of weapons to reach al-Qaeda militants, reveals damning report

By David Martosko
Daily Mail: April 23, 2014

The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn’t been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.

‘The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,’ Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.

She blamed the Obama administration for failing to stop half of a $1 billion United Arab Emirates arms shipment from reaching al-Qaeda-linked militants.

‘Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces who were blockading the approaches from air and sea,’ Lopez claimed. ‘They were permitted to come in. … [They] knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed..

‘The intelligence community was part of that, the Department of State was part of that, and certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress – if they were briefed on this – also knew about this.’

The weapons were intended for Gaddafi but allowed by the U.S. to flow to his Islamist opposition.

‘The White House and senior Congressional members,’ the group wrote in an interim report released Tuesday, ‘deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler [Muammar Gaddafi] who had been working closely with the West actively to suppress al-Qaeda.’

‘Some look at it as treason,’ said Wayne Simmons, a former CIA officer who participated in the commission’s research.

Retired Rear Admiral Chuck Kubic, another commission member, told reporters Tuesday that those weapons are now ‘all in Syria.’

‘Gaddafi wasn’t a good guy, but he was being marginalized,’ Kubic recalled. ‘Gaddafi actually offered to abdicate’ shortly after the beginning of a 2011 rebellion.

‘But the U.S. ignored his calls for a truce,’ the commission wrote, ultimately backing the horse that would later help kill a U.S. ambassador.

Kubic said that the effort at truce talks fell apart when the White House declined to let the Pentagon pursue it seriously.

‘We had a leader who had won the Nobel Peace Prize,’ Kubic said, ‘but who was unwilling to give peace a chance for 72 hours.’

(Rad the full article with video at Daily Mail)

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Most ‘Suspects’ But Some Confirmed Civilian Deaths

At Least 55 Killed in Two Days of US Drone Strikes in Yemen

By Jason Ditz
Antiwar: April 20, 2014

Yesterday’s deadly US drone strike against a highway in Yemen’s Bayda Province was followed up by a similar round of separate strikes in the Shabwa Province today, sending the death tolls over the past 48 hours spiraling.

After yesterday’s attack, which killed 21, reports of today’s strikes are still murky, but at least 34 more were killed, sending the figure to 55, and likely to rise even further as the figures continue to come in from remote areas.

[…]

While today’s victims remain a mystery, a number of civilian bystanders were confirmed killed in yesterday’s attack, which targeted a truckload of “suspects” and destroyed some nearby cars.

(read the full article at Antiwar)

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