Privacy

NSA increases spying on government aids

No spying on friends: NSA bugs Merkel aides instead of chancellor

RT: February 24, 2014

In the wake of President Obama’s promise to stop spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the US intelligence has switched its attention to her top government officials, a German newspaper reported.

Washington’s relations with Germany were strained last year after revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting mass surveillance in Germany and even tapped the mobile phone of Chancellor Merkel.

Facing the German outrage, President Barack Obama pledged that the US would stop spying on the leader of the European country, which is among the closest and most powerful allies of America.

After the promise was made, the NSA has stepped up surveillance of senior German officials, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag (BamS) reported on Sunday.

“We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor’s communication directly,” it quoted a top NSA employee in Germany as saying.

BamS said the NSA had 297 employees stationed in Germany and was surveying 320 key individuals, most of them German decision-makers involved in politics and business.

(Read more at RT)

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Health/Environment

Enbridge Line 9: W5 uncovers unreported spills, alarming communities along 830-km pipe

Investigation unveils 35 spills along Enbridge’s suddenly controversial 830-km pipeline, many not revealed to communities until now.

By Jessica McDiarmid (News reporter) & Annie Burns-Pieper (CTV W5): February 22, 2014

An aging Enbridge pipeline that runs across Ontario has had at least 35 spills — far more than reported to federal regulators — but many municipalities along its route have never been informed of the incidents, a CTV W5 investigation reveals.

The National Energy Board, which regulates pipelines in Canada, has records of seven spills, while Enbridge told the investigative program there had been 13.

But W5’s analysis of information from the energy board, the company and Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment showed 35 spills associated with the 830-kilometre Line 9. (The Quebec government refused to provide W5 with any information).

The company is seeking federal approval to increase and reverse flow on the 38-year-old pipeline and use it to transport, in part, diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands.

“It’s quite alarming,” said Brian McHattie, a city councillor in Hamilton, where seven leaks over the years have released nearly 3,000 litres of crude oil at company facilities northwest of the city. “This is new information for me.”

McHattie said the information raises concern about what is shared with municipalities. Hamilton staff met regularly with Enbridge officials since the company submitted its application, but none, to McHattie’s knowledge, were ever informed of the spills.

“They just haven’t been very forthcoming with us,” said McHattie. “It just makes you less confident in their integrity as a company and their willingness to share information and be above-board.”

Companies are required only to report hydrocarbon spills to the National Energy Board that are larger than 1,500 litres — equivalent to about 25 tanks of gas in an average car — or could have a “significant adverse effect” on the environment.

Enbridge spokesperson Graham White wrote in an email to the Star that the 13 leaks and ruptures noted in pipeline engineering assessments refer to mainline spills. The remainder were spills at facilities, he wrote.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment requires all spills to be reported, both those occurring on the main line and those within associated facilities. The ministry recorded 22 spills between 2003 and 2013. Just one occurred on the main line, spokesperson Kate Jordan told the Star.

Provincial law also requires that all spills be reported to municipalities in which they occur, but there are many exceptions. Spills such as those occurring at company facilities are usually exempt.

Cramahe Mayor Marc Coombs said he first learned of five spills that together leached 1,824 litres of oil when he was contacted by a W5 reporter.

“We were not notified of any of them,” said Coombs. “It does (raise concerns), from the point of view of transparency.”

The Calgary pipeline company raised the ire of Terrebonne, just outside Montreal, when municipal officials learned of a 2011 spill of 4,000 litres at Enbridge’s local facility — more than two years later. The revelation came in the midst of controversial public hearings in front of the National Energy Board.

“Terrebonne was surprised (by) the Enbridge attitude in this file, you know, because according to us Enbridge, as a good corporate citizen, has a moral responsibility to inform the city that a spill was occurring in that sector, a sector where there is a college, professional training centre, sports complex, daycare and several more businesses,” spokesperson Joël Goulet told W5.

Goulet said the company was willing to notify Terrebonne of similar incidents in the future.

Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley said the city isn’t usually notified when spills are contained within facilities and don’t require municipal staff to be involved in containment or cleanup. He said the city hadn’t heard about the nine spills linked with Line 9 facilities in the past decade — but it should.

“It’s just a good practice to notify, and then we can make our own judgment whether we need to do anything further,” said Bradley. “Just tell us. That’s all we want — to know.”

(read the rest at The Star)

Watch Pipeline War on CTV’s W5.

Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontopipeline/2014/02/22/enbridge_line_9_w5_uncovers_unreported_spills_alarming_communities_along_830km_pipe.html

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Health/Environment

Long-banned PCB found in clothing, paints, and paper with yellow pigment

Long-banned PCB found in clothing, paints, and paper with yellow pigment

Polychlorinated biphenyls, banned in Canada and the U.S. 35 years ago, can leach out of clothing and printed materials

By Brian Bienkowski
The Georgia Straight: February 21, 2014

New, unpublished research has found that traces of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—banned in the United States 35 years ago—are leaching out of clothing and printed materials from around the world.

PCB-11 was detected in nearly all samples of paper products sold in 26 countries and clothing sold in the United States. The findings shed some light on how the chemical, tied to yellow dyes, inks, and paints, is finding its way into people’s blood, the air, and waterways.

Because it is an unintentional byproduct of pigment manufacturing, the PCB-11 found in the consumer products is exempt from U.S. laws regulating the compounds.

[In Canada, the federal and provincial governments enacted legislation prohibiting or regulating the manufacture, use, handling, storage, and transportation of PCBs in 1977, 1980, and 1985.–GS]

Levels are “worrisome”

“It’s out there in levels that are worrisome,” said Lisa Rodenburg, an associate professor of environmental chemistry at Rutgers University and senior author of the study.

“Even at the parts-per-billion levels, if you find it in almost everything you test, that means people are in almost constant contact,” she said.

Health effects of exposure to traces of PCB-11 have not been studied. But unlike the old PCBs, it doesn’t accumulate in people or animals. The banned PCBs, which are so persistent they are still contaminating the environment, have been linked to reduced IQs, cancer, and suppressed immune systems.

In the new tests, all 28 samples of non-U.S., ink-treated paper products, including advertisements, maps, postcards, napkins, and brochures, contained PCB-11 in the parts-per-billion range. In the United States, 15 of the 18 paper products had it.

Kids’ pyjamas had high levels

In addition, all 16 pieces of U.S. clothing contained PCB-11. Most were children’s items bought at WalMart stores but manufactured overseas, Rodenburg said. In one kids’ pyjama top, the front, which had yellow printing on it, had 20 times more PCB-11 than the back, which was printed in red.

“PCB 11 is ubiquitously present as a by-product in commercial pigment applications, particularly in printed materials,” the authors from Rutgers University and Boston College wrote in a draft of the study, which has undergone initial peer review and is expected to be published this year.

All PCBs were banned in the United States in the late 1970s because they were building up in the environment and in the bodies of people and wildlife. But byproducts of manufacturing are allowed as “unintentional contaminants”.

(read the rest of the article at Straight.com)

Source: http://www.straight.com/news/592471/long-banned-pcb-found-clothing-paints-and-paper-yellow-pigment

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Health/Environment

Quebec train derailment spills 3,500 litres of diesel fuel

St-Henri train derailment spills 3,500 litres of diesel fuel

CBC: February 23, 2014

Emergency crews are cleaning up after the overnight derailment of a CN freight train near the intersection of Saint-Jacques and de Courcelle Streets in St-Henri spilled around 3,500 litres of diesel fuel.

No one was hurt in the incident but firefighters and Urgence-Environnement had a busy morning trying to recover the fuel, which spilled from one of the train’s two locomotives.

The train was transporting containers full of merchandise and tanks of grain from Halifax to Montreal. Two tankers of grain and both locomotives came off the rails but remained upright.

André Ménard, a spokesman for the provincial environmental emergency agency Urgence-Environnement, told Radio-Canada that around 3,000 litres of fuel were recovered and the other 500 litres were absorbed by the soil without risk to the water supply and sewer system.

The Transportation Safety Board and CN are now investigating the derailment.

“It’s too early to suggest a cause,” said Louis-Antoine Paquin, a spokesman for CN.

(read the rest of the report on CBC)

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/st-henri-train-derailment-spills-3-500-litres-of-diesel-fuel-1.2548381

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Drugs

Canada’s new medical marijuana system will lead to widespread fraud

New medical marijuana system will lead to widespread fraud

By Dana Larsen
Sun Blog Network: February 22, 2014

There are many problems with the new medical marijuana program being initiated by the Conservative government. Activists and media reports have already highlighted some of the biggest ones: eliminating home cultivation, potentially high prices, issues around shipping, and a lack of access to non-smoked extracts and concentrates.

But there is another big problem which has not yet received any public comment: the likelihood of widespread fraud by people pretending to have a prescription to avoid possession charges.

Difficult to verify

Under the current system, Health Canada maintains a central database of all medical cannabis users in Canada. If a police officer comes across someone in possession of cannabis, that person can show the officer his Health Canada paperwork, and the officer can then call Health Canada to verify it.

Under the new system coming into force on April 1, there is no central database of medical cannabis users. Each Licensed Producer has a list of patients who they service, but there is no standardized form or card to verify that a patient is allowed to possess cannabis.

Under these new rules, a medical cannabis user is supposed to keep their cannabis in the packaging in which it was received. The label on their prescription bottle is their proof they have a prescription and are legally allowed to possess cannabis.

I have seen the prescription bottles from a few different companies, and each has different labeling and a different look. The containers vary widely in shape, size and format of their labels.

I recently had the chance to examine cannabis and packaging provided by Peace Naturals, one of the seven companies currently licensed to provide medicinal cannabis. The patient had only had the packages for a short time, but the ink on the labels were already faded and hard to read. With a few more weeks of handling and smudges, most of the key information would be illegible.

I expect all sorts of fake prescription containers and labels to be created once the program gets going. This will become an easy way for anyone to avoid being bothered or arrested by police.

Prescription bottle for everyone!

What’s a police officer to do? When they come across a person who claims to have a prescription for cannabis and shows them a labeled prescription bottle, how will officers verify it?

These companies all have phone numbers listed on the label which the cops can call to verify a patient’s membership, but they will only be answering the phone during business hours. A police officer trying to verify a prescription at night, or on a weekend, will be out of luck.

Some of these companies are issuing ID cards for their patients, but again, each one will look different. How will an officer know if the card is legitimate or a fake?

More importantly, what is to stop someone from printing their own prescription labels and ID cards, and putting down the phone number of a friend instead of the actual company number? Or a recorded message that asks police to leave relevant info so they will get a call back? Entrepreneurs with a label-maker and voice mail could run a service providing fake prescription bottles and phone verification service.

Impossible to enforce

With dozens of different companies providing medical cannabis, each with different labels and packaging, it will be impossible for an officer to tell at a glance if the cannabis in question is really from a Licensed Producer.

(read the rest of the article on Vancouver Sun Blog Network)

Source: http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/02/22/new-medical-marijuana-system-will-lead-to-widespread-fraud/

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Geopolitics/War

Can Washington overthrow three governments at the same time?

By Thierry Meyssan
Voltaire: February 23, 2014

The power of a state is measured by its ability to defend itself and to attack on one or more fronts. In this context, Washington is trying for the first time to show it can overthrow three governments simultaneously: Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. If it succeeds, no government would be henceforth able to resist it.

Washington, which failed in 2011 to bomb Libya and Syria simultaneously, is now engaged in a new demonstration of its strength: organizing regime change in three states at the same time, in different regions of the world: Syria (CentCom), Ukraine (EuCom) and Venezuela (SouthCom).

To do this, President Obama has mobilized almost the entire National Security Council team.

First, Advisor Susan Rice and Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. These two women are champions of “democratic” talk. They have for many years specialized in advocating interference in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of preventing genocide. But behind this generous rhetoric, they couldn’t care less about non-US lives as shown by Ms. Power during the chemical weapons crisis in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The ambassador, who was aware of the innocence of the Syrian authorities, had gone to Europe with her husband to attend a film festival dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, while her government denounced a crime against humanity, the responsibility for which was placed upon President al Assad.

Then, the three regional co-ordinators: Philip Gordon ( Middle East and North Africa ), Karen Donfried (Europe and Eurasia ) and Ricardo Zuñiga ( Latin America).
• Phil Gordon (personal friend and translator of Nicolas Sarkozy) organized the sabotage of the Geneva 2 Peace Conference as long as the Palestinian issue is not settled to the U.S. liking. During the second session of the conference, while John Kerry spoke of peace, Gordon met with the heads of Jordanian, Qatari , Saudi and Turkish intelligence services in Washington to prepare for yet another attack. The plotters have gathered an army of 13,000 men, of whom only 1,000 were given brief military training, to drive tanks and take Damascus. The problem is that the column may be destroyed by the Syrian Army before arriving in the capital. But they fail to agree on how to defend it without distributing anti-aircraft weapons that could later be used against Israel.
• Karen Donfried is the former national intelligence officer for Europe. She has long led the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. Today, she manipulates the European Union to hide Washington interventionism in Ukraine. Despite the leak of a phone conversation involving Ambassador Victoria Nuland, she succeeded in convincing Europeans that the opposition in Kiev wanted to join them and was fighting for democracy. Nonetheless, more than half of the Maidan rioters are members of the Nazi party and brandish portraits of collaborator Stepan Bandera.
• Finally, Ricardo Zuñiga is the grandson of the namesake President of the National Party of Honduras who organized the coups of 1963 and 1972 in favor of General López Arellano. He directed the CIA station in Havana where he recruited and financed agents to form opposition to Fidel Castro. He mobilized the extreme Trotskyist Venezuelan left to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, accused of being a Stalinist.

The whole process is hyped under the leadership of one Dan Rhodes. This propaganda specialist has already written the official version of September 11, 2001, drafting the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry. He managed to remove all traces of the military coup (power was removed from the hands of George W. Bush at about 10am and it was returned that evening; all the members of his cabinet and those of Congress were placed in secure bunkers “to ensure their safety”) so that we remember only the attacks.

In all three cases, the U.S. narrative is based on the same principles: accuse governments of killing their own citizens, qualify opponents as ’democratic’; impose sanctions against the “murderers” and ultimately operate coups.

Each time, the movement begins with a demonstration during which peaceful opponents are killed, and where both sides accuse each other of violence. In fact U.S. or NATO special forces placed on rooftops shoot at both the crowd and the police. This was the case in Daraa (Syria) in 2011, Kiev (Ukraine) and Caracas (Venezuela) this week. Alas for bad luck: autopsies in Venezuela show that two victims, one opponent and one pro-government, were killed by the same weapon.

Qualifying opponents as democratic activists is a simple game of rhetoric. In Syria, they are Takfirists supported by the worst dictatorship in the world, Saudi Arabia. In Ukraine, a few sincere pro-Europeans surrounded by many Nazis. In Venezuela, young Trotskyists from good families surrounded by goon squads. Everywhere the false U.S. opponent, John McCain, brings his support to true and false on site opponents.

Support for opponents rests with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This agency of the U.S. government falsely presents itself as an NGO funded by Congress. But it was created by President Ronald Reagan, in association with Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is headed by the neoconservative Carl Gershman and the daughter of General Alexander Haig (former Supreme Commander of NATO, then Secretary of State ), Barbara Haig. This is the NED (actually the State Department), which employs the “opposition” senator John McCain.

To this operating group, you must add the Albert Einstein Institute, an “NGO” funded by NATO. Created by Gene Sharp, it trained professional agitators from two bases: Serbia (Canvas) and Qatar (Academy of currency).

In all cases, Susan Rice and Samantha Power take on airs of outrage before imposing penalties, soon echoed by the European Union, while they are in fact the sponsors of the violence.

It remains to be seen whether the coups will be successful. Which is far from being certain.

Washington is thus attempting to show the world it is still the master. To be more sure of itself, it launched the Ukrainian and Venezuelan operations during the Olympic Games in Sochi. It was certain that Russia would not move for fear of having its party upset by Islamist attacks. But Sochi ended this weekend. Now it’s Moscow’s turn to play.

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Source: http://www.voltairenet.org/article182295.html
Translation : Roger Lagassé

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Health/Environment

Study confirms oilsands tailings seeping into Athabasca River

Study confirms oilsands tailings seeping into Athabasca River

Environment Canada research has confirmed that water from vast oilsands tailings ponds is leaching into groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.

By The Canadian Press: February 20, 2014

New federal research has confirmed that water from vast oilsands tailings ponds is leaching into groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.

Previous studies using models have estimated the leakage at 6.5 million litres a day from a single pond.

But the Environment Canada study used new technology to actually fingerprint the mix of groundwater chemicals in the area.

It found the mix of chemicals from tailings is different from that in naturally occurring bitumen deposits.

That tailings mix, which contains toxic chemicals, is found in groundwater around mining operations, but not in areas away from development.

It’s also found in groundwater just underneath the Athabasca River.

(read the full article at The Star)

Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/02/20/study_confirms_oilsands_tailings_seeping_into_athabasca_river.html

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Tyranny

The Canadian Government is Using Temporary Foreign Workers to Keep Wages Low

By Alan Jones
Vice: January 9, 2014

In 2012, the Conservative government introduced legislation that allowed employers to pay foreign workers 15% less than their Canadian counterparts. These rules applied explicitly to workers who came to Canada as a part of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), here to work on a short term basis with no path to permanent residency or citizenship.This legislation was remarkable in that it skipped the usual left-wing arguments for immigration and multiculturalism as a humane form of nation-building and jumped immediately into the right-wing scenario of immigrants arriving in Canada to work for less money than their domestic counterparts. Only in Canada, where it’s commonly believed that immigration is necessary for economic sustainability, could a right-wing government implement an immigration policy that plays directly into the fears of reactionary conservative paranoia.

Even a cursory glance at statistics on the predatory employment policies migrant workers face are alarming: According to a Citizen and Immigration study conducted by the government in 2011, 22 percent of temporary foreign workers were paid less than minimum wage, 25 percent did not receive pay information that showed a record of deductions or hours worked, and 39 percent of workers who worked overtime hours never received overtime pay. Another 32 percent received overtime pay “rarely” or “sometimes.”

Officially, the TFWP is meant to fill holes in Canada’s labour market, providing workers for industries in which Canadians themselves were unwilling to work. In every case, the employer of a foreign worker must provide evidence that there were no Canadian workers available for a given position by requesting a Labour Market Opinion from the government. For a brief time the government actually gave employers a monetary incentive to bypass Canadians and hire cheaply from the international labour market, so it’s hard to believe that any business involved in the program was actually encouraged to try to find Canadian job candidates. In order to further understand this policy and the reasons behind it, I talked to Jeffrey Reitz, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto who has written extensively on Canadian Immigration policy: “There’s been a lot of criticism about it and it’s difficult to understand how the government is not undercutting Canadian workers when the plan is exclusively allowing them to pay less.”

Cut to April 2013: The CBC reports that the Royal Bank of Canada laid off dozens of workers and replaced them with temporary workers from India. In British Columbia, a Chinese mining company advertised for jobs that required the knowledge of Mandarin. When they couldn’t find enough Mandarin speakers in Western Canada (big surprise), they brought in 201 temporary workers from China. “What’s been done has been to use the extensiveness of advertising as the evidence and so the employers put forward that they’ve advertised here and there and all the normal places and haven’t had any applicants,” said Reitz. “But even that, it’s very difficult to know whether they’ve actually done that or what’s the credibility of the information submitted, so it’s a very murky area.”

After a series of controversies, the Conservatives were forced to create new rules for the program which came into effect this year, including a $275 employer fee for a permit, the right for government officials to conduct workplace inspections, and the cancellation of both the two-tier wage system and the accelerated labour market opinion, which allowed for a sped up process to bring in workers. But at this point, Conservative reforms are like poorly applied band-aids on self-inflicted wounds. Since taking office, the TFWP has tripled in size, even growing during the recession. In 2011, nearly half a million temporary foreign workers came to Canada while the Conservative government cut down on family reunification visas and made it harder for refugees to get healthcare.

There are now more temporary workers coming to Canada every year than permanent workers. Many of them come to Canada with little understanding of their rights, leaving them vulnerable to workplace abuse. Even though government officials can now legally inspect workplaces to prevent abuse, the new regulations that went into effect at the beginning this year have also dropped the ban on providing temporary foreign workers to employers with criminal convictions in human trafficking, sexually assaulting an employee, or causing the death of an employee. A shift in policy like that can only raise questions the safety of these low paid workers and whether or not the government is encouraging work environments that are up to Canadian standards.

“When the government puts out the figures on the number of temporary foreign workers being brought into the country, what are the skill levels of those workers?” said Reitz. “In many cases, they’ll emphasize that many of them are high skill. But exactly what the skill breakdown is, is not something for which, as far as I’m aware, reliable statistics are available.” While government officials might emphasize the presence of high skilled workers, many can be found in low skill environments, including the oil, agriculture, and construction industries. The CBC even interviewed a McDonald’s franchise owner in Fernie, BC who used the program to staff his fast food restaurant.

This is the dark side of Canadian immigration policy. Workers from the developing world are brought to Canada to work for low wages on a temporary basis while immigrants that could set up roots in this country are discouraged. With the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, the Conservative government is facilitating the worst practises of economic globalization. We’re used to the idea of outsourcing work to another country, but the Conservatives have allowed international outsourcing to occur within our own borders, forcing Canadian workers to compete with an international labour pool that has a far lower standard of living, causing “downward pressure” on wages and discouraging employers from providing training or incentives to hire.

(read the full article at Vice)

Source: http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-canadian-government-is-using-temporary-foreign-workers-to-keep-wages-low

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Health/Environment

Exxon CEO Joins Suit Citing Fracking Concerns

By Daniel Gilbert
WSJ: February 20, 2014

One evening last November, a tall, white-haired man turned up at a Town Council meeting to protest construction of a water tower near his home in this wealthy community outside Dallas.

The man was Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp.

He and his neighbors had filed suit to block the tower, saying it is illegal and would create “a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,” in part because it would provide water for use in hydraulic fracturing. Fracking, which requires heavy trucks to haul and pump massive amounts of water, unlocks oil and gas from dense rock and has helped touch off a surge in U.S. energy output.

It also is a core part of Exxon’s business.

While the lawsuit Mr. Tillerson joined cites the side effects of fracking, a lawyer representing the Exxon CEO said he hadn’t complained about such disturbances. “I have other clients who were concerned about the potential for noise and traffic problems, but he’s never expressed that to me or anyone else,” said Michael Whitten, who runs a small law practice in Denton, Texas. Mr. Whitten said Mr. Tillerson’s primary concern is that his property value would be harmed.

An Exxon spokesman said Mr. Tillerson declined to comment. The company “has no involvement in the legal matter” and its directors weren’t told of Mr. Tillerson’s participation, the spokesman said.

(read the report at WSJ if subscriber)

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304899704579391181466603804?mg=reno64-wsj

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Geopolitics/War

Exposed: Ukrainian ‘Protesters’ Backed by Kony 2012-Style Scam

Exposed: Ukrainian ‘Protesters’ Backed by Kony 2012-Style Scam

Viral video produced by company linked to ‘regime change’ NGO

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars: February 20, 2014

As they seize weapons, take over government buildings and fire on media outlets, the US-backed Ukrainian protesters are being afforded legitimacy with the aid of a Kony 2012-style viral video which triumphs the grass roots nature of the demonstrations yet is linked to shadowy NGOs that have been directly involved in staging phony ‘color revolutions’ in the past.

The video, entitled I am a Ukrainian, already has over 3 million views. It features an attractive woman insistently claiming that the Ukrainian uprising is solely about freedom and democracy.

The video is typically glib and simplified emotional propaganda which purports to explain that “there is only one reason” behind the protests in Ukraine, a bald faced lie which ignores the multi-faceted geopolitical factors behind the uprising, which center on the tug of war between the United States, the EU and Russia.

The woman encourages viewers to “help us only by telling this story….only by sharing this video,” thereby framing the debate around the naive narrative that the crisis is solely about Ukrainians wanting “freedom,” and in essence blacklisting the real reasons behind the western-instigated revolt, which focus on the geopolitical isolation of Russia.

The origins of the video are not quite as ‘grass roots’ as is portrayed. The clip was produced by the team behind A Whisper to a Roar, a documentary about the “fight for democracy” all over the world, which was funded by Prince Moulay Hicham of Morocco. The “inspiration” behind the documentary was none other than Larry Diamond, a Council on Foreign Relations member. The Council on Foreign Relations is considered to be America’s “most influential foreign-policy think tank” and has deep connections with the U.S. State Department.

Diamond has also worked closely with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The National Endowment for Democracy is considered to be the CIA’s “civilian arm” and has been deeply embroiled in innumerable instigated uprisings, attempted coups and acts of neo-colonial regime change since its creation in 1983, including the contrived 2004 “Orange Revolution” that brought US puppet Viktor Yushchenko to power in Ukraine.

Larry Diamond also played an instrumental role in the Arab Spring under the auspices of the NED, a series of supposedly grass roots revolts that were in fact organized and managed by some of the most powerful western institutions on the planet.

Diamond’s connection to the viral “I am a Ukrainian” video clearly suggests that the clip is a crude effort to convince an unthinking public that the Ukrainian uprising is completely organic and is not being instigated by western powers, when the opposite is in fact the case. The clip is reminiscent of the Kony 2012 scam, where a viral video utilized simplified propaganda and emotional manipulation to convince millions of people of the necessity of U.S. military involvement in Africa.

In a Huffington Post interview, the creator of the video admits that he was in Ukraine “preparing a film on democracy” before the protests even started.

Providing absolute confirmation that the video is a carefully thought out public relations stunt, the woman in the video was immediately invited to appear on CNN with Anderson Cooper in a segment that will be broadcast tonight. Cooper and CNN aggressively pushed the Kony 2012 hoax until it fell apart when one of the directors had a public breakdown. Cooper was also heavily involved in promoting the fake “Syria Danny” hoax that relied on staged footage to push for U.S. military intervention in Syria.

With clear evidence of protesters being paid amidst accusations that they were armed by the United States, the narrative behind the Ukraine crisis is clearly more complex than a mere grass roots revolt against corruption. The pro-EU protesters are bizarrely seeking closer ties with a European Union infamous for its institutionalized corruption, malfeasance which costs almost the same each year as Ukraine’s entire GDP.

Many of the activists taking over government buildings in Kiev are also from the Spilna Sprava group, which is an organization funded and supported by billionaire globalist George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The stage was set for the Ukraine revolt to become violent in December when US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland announced that the U.S. would invest $5 billion in order to help Ukrainians achieve “a good form of government.” The true nature of that government was revealed earlier this month when leaked phone conversations emerged of Nuland conspiring with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt to pick Ukraine’s future puppet leaders, making good on John McCain’s vow to neutralize Russian influence.

(read the rest of the report including links to sources on Infowars)

Source: http://www.infowars.com/exposed-ukrainian-protesters-backed-by-kony-2012-style-scam/


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